Webinar | Brand change done right: Two companies share the secrets behind their successful rebranding

Webinar transcript:

Philip Guiliano: Today, the webinar is Brand change done right: Two companies share the secrets behind their successful rebranding implementations. I’m Philip Guiliano. I’m a partner at the brand implementation consultancy BrandActive, and I’ll be the moderator today. Before we get started, there’s just a few housekeeping items. At the bottom of your screen, there are multiple application widgets there that you can use, and all these widgets are resizable and moveable, so feel free to move them around and get the most out of your desktop space as you need to. Note that the slides are going to advance automatically as we move through the presentation. You can enlarge them at any point in time. Click the enlarge slides button there located at the top right of your presentation window.

We definitely encourage you to submit questions and answers in this session. We’d love for it to be interactive. We’ll have some time at the end for that. There’s a Q&A widget off to the right hand side. We’ll try to answer these during the webcast, and we’ll also collect all of the questions and if we have to respond via email because we run out of time, then we’ll absolutely do that.

Following the presentation, you’ll also have access to the on-demand recording of this webinar as well, just using the same link that you used today from today’s live event. That’s all the housekeeping. We can absolutely dive in and get this party started. Today, you’re going to get to hear from two of our favorite clients and see the evolution of their brands and feel the challenges that they faced and overcame along the way. At BrandActive, we take on 30 to 40 completely new clients every year, so we get to work with a lot of really smart people doing really big things and to have two of the best and brightest with us today is a real honor.

Both Dana and Kelly led their clients through their rebranding efforts, and they’ll share some of their insights into that process. Both had very two distinct reasons as to why they were doing the rebranding, which is also a good dynamic associated with this webinar. Both are also in highly regulated industries, which makes the costly and complex environment of brand change all that more so. Without further ado, I will introduce Dana Gandsman, who is the VP of Enterprise Reputation at Pfizer. She’s responsible for the pharmaceutical giant’s corporate branding, corporate advertising, digital channels, and monitoring and measuring Pfizer’s corporate reputation. Small job. Do you want to say hello, Dana?

Dana Gandsman: Hi, everyone. And it’s great to hear that I was one of your favorite clients, because this was a very ambitious undertaking that you all took on for us, so thank you. It’s great to be here.

Philip Guiliano: Absolutely. It’s good to have you. And Dana’s joined by Kelly Vives, who unfortunately is just joining us by voice today due to technology limitations on the platform here, nothing on our side. Kelly is the Chief Marketing Communications Officer at Allspring Global Investments, which was formerly Wells Fargo Asset Management. Kelly handles all marketing and communications for the independent asset management company, including its digital experience and go-to-market strategy. Kelly, if you want to say hello?

Kelly Vives: Yes, hi. Sorry I’m not able in this digital world, I’m not connecting, but I’m here on the phone and thrilled to be here and still a client of BrandActive as we continue our rebrand.

Philip Guiliano: We are thrilled as well. Okay, before we get to the panelists, we’d love to provide a little bit of backdrop for the conversation. Some stats up here that are interesting. Honestly, the more interesting thing is just what we’ve been seeing in the market. 2021 and 2022 saw a massive amount of rebranding. I’ve been in this industry for nearly 20 years on the agency side and then also here at BrandActive for 16 years, and I’ve never seen anything like what we saw in 2021 and 2022. I know if you talk to some of the branding agencies out there that do more of the creative side of the rebranding, they would say the exact same thing. Why are so many companies rebranding? Obviously, it’s not a shock that the pandemic had some effect on this. Many companies don’t look like they did in 2019, whether it was through mergers, acquisitions, organic growth, different pathways, things of that nature, but they really needed to shift how they were talking to their consumers based off of what those consumers were going to expect.

Healthcare with telehealth or financial services becoming more digital and getting out of the branch experience, tech shifting to connection enablement and enabling the new work environment, all of that kind of stuff. Merger and acquisition activity was the highest that it’s been. It was a blowout year, according to KPMG in 2021. That was small acquisitions, but it was also some pretty massive ones. It also saw a lot of splits and divestitures as well. Dow for example, or J&J has announced that they’re splitting. Just so many companies out there that are doing that kind of segmentation, separation, and refocusing of their business assets into areas that are going to actually grow the company forward.

That’s another thing, and then there’s also social aspects as sustainability became more and more of a driver. Employee retention and also employee attraction became a pretty significant driver. All of these things lay a backdrop as to why companies are going through what Dana and Kelly are about to share with you today. Dana, I’m going to start with you. Many people may have a misconceived notion that Pfizer’s rebrand aligned with the pandemic and vaccine development. There’s obviously a lot to be proud of in that, and yet there’s still a lot more to the story than that, which started before the pandemic even began. Can you share a little bit of the backstory of why Pfizer pursued this corporate rebrand and why the change was so important for the future of the company, and what that change even involved?

Dana Gandsman: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think it will be a surprise to many that we started this work in 2019, because Albert Bourla became our CEO, and he started to think about the future of Pfizer and our new purpose, “breakthroughs that change patients’ lives.” And he looked at the logo and felt that even though we had had this logo in this form of an ellipse or a football or a pill, whatever people would refer to it as, in some iteration for 70 years. We had made one little, modest tweak to it about 10 years ago where we lifted it up a little bit and modernized the font, but he felt that it just didn’t reflect the future Pfizer and wanted us to really consider a science first brand identity. I originally felt like, “Let me see how much brand equity we have in the old logo.”

And sure enough, 90% of people knew of our logo and linked it right back to Pfizer. My original recommendation was that we’d not do this work, but he came back and just said, “I want us to really look into doing this science first identity and come back with some options, and let’s do all the testing that we need to do.” Obviously, when the pandemic happened, this work was underway, but not fully underway. We didn’t have the design yet. We didn’t have the action plan yet, but then seeing where the company was headed and the light seed that went into the development of the vaccine, we were all just really motivated to get it done and get it done right so that we were able to start the new year in 2021 with the new identity.

Philip Guiliano: That’s great. That’s great. Kelly, you had a very different reason to jump into a rebrand, and I still remember the first conversation that we had and all of the excitement around what the future can hold for you and your teams. Can you share why? This wasn’t a CEO edict, this was a transactional edict. Can you share a little bit more about your situation?

Kelly Vives: Yeah. Yeah. I love hearing that story from Dana, too, how it all serendipitously worked together, that they were able to roll out during the amazing work that Pfizer did throughout the pandemic. So I love hearing that story. For us as marketers, I think we all were thrown into a digital world in COVID, and then I got the news a few months later that they had decided at Wells Fargo, which we were part of the bank as the asset management arm, had made a decision to focus and grow their consumer business and had decided to sell off a number of their businesses, including the asset management division of which I was the head of marketing. It really gave us actually an amazing opportunity once we were able to announce the transaction that we were being acquired by two private equity firms to start from scratch and build a new brand.

We had to actually build something quite distinctive from Wells Fargo, and we were legally required to remove Wells Fargo from all of our materials, from all of our web presence, et cetera. As a marketer, it gave me an amazing opportunity to build something from the ground up in terms of our brand story, strategy, identity, visual identity, verbal identity, a new logo, and then obviously the daunting implementation that took place in order to roll that out on a pretty swift timeline. But it gave us a great opportunity to launch a new company and roll out of Wells Fargo and carve out to be an independent 1500 person firm.

Philip Guiliano: That’s great. That’s great. Implementing a brand change, particularly a global one like these, takes time. Planning for that takes time, creating alignment to even do it in the first place takes time, building the business case for all of it takes time. Dana, can you speak to how you approached this internally and how you thought about what you needed to do to prioritize even before getting into the actual implementation conversions phase?

Dana Gandsman: Yeah. I think that’s a great question, because now that I think about it, while we didn’t have the brand identity ready, we did have BrandActive helping us navigate every possible asset that would need to be part of this rebrand. It was enormously helpful for us to really look at every silo at this global company, and right now we’re in the process of rebranding more than 100 of our sites. It was just a tremendous amount of work that happened, and then you got us to three budget scenarios that we put in front of our executive leadership team. We had the very big rush job where you have to do it immediately, the 18 month plan and the three year plan, which was a much slower push. And we really have two more weeks of our 18 month plan right now, but unfortunately supply chain shortages have impacted some of that work. But we had a lot of things that we had to get done right away because of all the attention we were getting. We’re literally rolling this out while the vaccine is rolling out.

We had President Biden at one of our sites. We had to get your help getting our Kalamazoo site temporarily rebranded for that visit because we launched this out. It was January 5th, and President Biden came February 12th, and we just wanted to show the new face of the company for that, so there was just a lot of starts and stops and then supply chain issues. But the original push was that this be digital first, so on day one, all of our digital assets were changed. And then working with BrandActive on all the marketing materials, hundreds and hundreds of marketing materials, print, digital, and otherwise that we were able to get it done. But I don’t think I realized going in what the implementation really looked like and how critical it is to have the right team in place to help guide it.

Philip Guiliano: In your situation, again, this was CEO driven. This is going to happen. This is the change that I want to make. Was there resistance to the change in the implementation internally that you had to… Sorry to add an ad hoc question here, but I’m curious.

Dana Gandsman: That’s okay. Well, I think originally, I was worried about it myself and I had been at Pfizer at that point a decade, just knowing the credibility that came with the brand. Then we did that research, it was global research that the brand is so well recognized. I think that’s why we were very careful with how we did it while we have the ribbon helix. We have animation that actually shows the ribbon helix evolving from the ellipse. We went through a whole experiment if we should change the colors, but people here say they bleed Pfizer blue. There was no way. When we look at other companies, yes, other pharma companies are blue, but really we were the original. That’s been our color palette in our 170 plus year history.

Philip Guiliano: We were first.

Dana Gandsman: We kind of were. Yeah, so we kept the blue and but you’re right. And we thought that it wouldn’t be well received by colleagues. We weren’t sure. And we kind of pressed the button on it on January 5th of last year. And it was universally well accepted. I think people understand too the future of science, research and innovation and the importance of the DNA Helix for things like gene therapy, which are really the future of how… obviously, we’re still doing pill medicines too, but a future of how vaccines and targeted therapies are being discovered now.

Philip Guiliano: Yeah. That was great. That’s great. I was just curious. You’ve had an 18 month timeline for brand implementation. I know things are going to extend now, supply chain issues and stuff like that, but Kelly, yours was significantly shorter due to the constraints of the deal guidelines. We’ve had some massive, what we consider to be massively aggressive deal constraints whether it’s six months to convert everything or else face penalties associated with things, but yours is even more aggressive than that. So can you tell us a little bit about how you had to think about and plan prior to brand launch and how you had to prioritize the things that you needed to get done just to meet deal requirements?

Kelly Vives: Yeah, I think I’m still recovering to be honest. Because it was a very quick time line to carve out of one of the largest banks in the United States, we had a nine month timeline to build the brand, the brand strategy. Naming the company was very difficult. Finding something legally available in 47 countries that would resonate with our client base. That was very difficult. So we didn’t actually have a name until July. We didn’t have a logo until August and we launched the company in November. And so it was a nine month window to carve out.

And then from November one, which was the first day as Allspring Global Investments, we had 30 days to remove all Wells Fargo marks from all of our digital properties. And then 90 days to remove from all over 100,000 pieces of either material or digital webpages. And so we were in the fast lane and I think the unfortunate thing about that was we ended up having to almost do two rebrands because we didn’t have time to fully push through our new visual identity. So we needed to basically do a cancel, replace, remove current logo and name and legal entities and disclaimers and cancel replace with Allspring Global Investments. And then the team had to undertake a second more strategic rebrand on the visual identity side. So keeping people motivated to do that was definitely tough. It was tough on the team, but we met the deadlines that were we were legally contracted to deliver against.

Philip Guiliano: Yeah. I mean, it is mind boggling. I mean, I’ve probably done 200 M&A style rebrand implementations at this point, and we’ve never seen a 90 day turn for anything. So I mean, the fact that you were able to achieve that. Yes. I mean, it took nine months for brand development and it took many months for planning and execution to have that happen, but even just doing a swap to meet, that is amazing. And now the fact that you get to go back and take advantage of some of those opportunities. Yeah. It’s a bummer that has to be done twice and the deal drove it. I am curious as you think about this second path of, let’s just call it the second rebranding, even though it’s really more of a revisiting and rationalization of what you were doing, what are you thinking about in that? What are the opportunities that exist within that for you now that you’ve achieved new clients?

Kelly Vives: Yeah. There’s two pieces, right? So we’re able to roll out our full visual identity, retrain all of our designers partner with our agencies, so that you really bring that elevated look, feel presence that the brand experience is only as good as what our clients see, what our clients feel. And so it was really, to me, our Q1 set of materials, which rolled out in April this year were really that. That to me felt more officially when we rolled out all spring. But I think the opportunity now, because we didn’t have the time to rationalize why do we have X100 pitch books? Why do we have 10,000 pages of web content? And there’s a lot of regulatory reasons and requirements, but it gives us an opportunity to kind of slow down before we speed up and think about where we can automate, where we can build in just more user friendly tools so that people could actually build their own decks and kind of set up the processes for that.

So I think it gives us an opportunity to be a little bit more strategic on both the kind of automation and implementation side and self user tools for some of our distribution teams, as well as kind of the visual expression of the brand and actually taking the time to do that. I mean, we had to hire firm of PowerPoint designers that I think BrandActive recommended to us. And they had to find them 25 PowerPoint designers. Because sadly, we still operate in PowerPoint throughout the country just to convert everything. But I think the opportunity is that rationalization of doing less better and the automation piece.

Philip Guiliano: Yeah, no, that’s great. That’s great. Kind of taking a step backwards kind of going through the journey and sort of where you’re up to now, sort of taking a step backwards because both companies really gave implementation a lot of thought. Both companies actually thought about this early enough in the process to make implementation effective within the organization. A lot of times what we see is companies thinking about brand development as well. I do research or I do brand strategy. I do messaging, I do brand identity. I do architecture, I do visual system. And then I think about implementation, and there’s this linear process that people go through. And I think what was unique about both of your situations and what made the partnership so valuable is that you saw these as very parallel path things. That as you’re developing brand and as you’re developing assets, you’re doing scenario modeling and cost analysis. And so I’m curious, just was it past experience that you’ve gone through? Was it just the overwhelm of just realizing just how big and complex this was right at the beginning? What had you make that decision of prioritizing implementation?

Sorry, Dana, I’ll start with you. Yeah, yeah. Dana, go for it if you’d like.

Dana Gandsman: Oh, I’m sorry. Well, I will say I didn’t have any experience doing this and it really helped working with the BrandActive team to help us prioritize. So obviously similar to Kelly, you have to think digital first, digital first, so working… so we had a very small team. We wanted to keep this very… it was top secret. So I don’t know how it didn’t get leaked inside and outside the company, it still amazes me, but we had a very small team helping us with the implementation, but the bigger team, extended team was our digital colleagues. So the thing we needed to get that right we wanted to make sure that every digital asset and Pfizer website had the change and had access to the brand ID site so that people could start to make and implement changes right away.

And PowerPoint templates were on that were part of that for us too. So and then some smaller things like if you can’t change a sign at a site, we could at least have flags with the new logo sent to everyone. So we ended up sending them out. We didn’t want anyone to really blow our cover on the launch. So we sent that out like three or four days before and swore everyone to secrecy. And we had some big signs too, to come and obviously it was a challenging time because a lot of people weren’t even in the office cause we’re all still were still hybrid here, but just trying to prioritize what was going to make a big impact. And we knew that people would be looking and wanting to experience the brand, the new brand identity digitally first.

Philip Guiliano: That makes sense. Kelly?

Kelly Vives: Yeah. I think on our side I had the benefit of being part of the deal team before the deal was announced. So I had started to line up some of the best branding firms in the world and doing an RFP under the guise that Wells Fargo Asset Management was going to refresh their persona knowing that it was going to be a much kind of different RFP, but at least got to know some of the firms. And I think it started to dawn on me there that there’s these two key buckets to a rebrand. And I think you had touched on this earlier, Dana, but it’s the kind of fun, creative, beautiful, visual, exciting piece of it in the storytelling piece of it. And then the daunting, oh my gosh. And the tentacles of implementation. And I think what it dawned on me and frankly, I think I serendipitously found BrandActive through an industry colleague, but at a very serendipitous time.

But when I was joining the work stream calls to X that were on the M&A team to execute this deal, I started to see that not only did the rebrand impact our marketing materials, but this was all of our legal documentation, our county counterparty agreements and contracts that we’re doing with all of these different, Bloomberg and all these different firms that we’re signing contracts with that needed the name and needed the legal entity name and the new product names. So the tentacles of the stream serve was a little bit when I had the oh wow moment on the real need to have a professionally managed implementation where you could see the percentage and the tracking and the prioritization because things still pop up right where we’re like, oh my gosh, wait, we have to throw out the stationary and buy the stationary.

And the signage like Dana was saying that they’re still continuing to go up and we just have holes on the wall because by 90 days, we had to remove Wells Fargo. But having the implementation piece parallel task at the same time as the brand strategy and identity or logo or whatever piece of a rebrand a company is doing, I think is critical to being able to do this successfully.

Philip Guiliano: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s amazing how many things still pop up I mean, whether it’s oh, I’m a hospital system and I’m rebranding fleet vehicles. So I need to actually reregister with the Department of Transportation in every city and state that I’m working with, or we’re doing product changes. So home obligation and import and export filings all need to get done. There’s interdependent there and each country’s blah, blah, blah, which sort of leads us into the nuances of your rebrands of the 200 M&As, there’s probably 300 other rebrands. So 500 projects total that I’ve had the pleasure to work on. And we still have situations that pop up where we’re like, huh, never saw that before. And most of the things that pop up we have a strategy for, but in general, there’s still things that pop up. So there’s always surprises. I’m curious if there’s anything that you’d share with the audience here around the nuances of your implementation and things that came up that were like, never saw that coming beyond some of the assets you just kind of highlighted.

Dana Gandsman: Kelly mentioned trademark review. I think she said 40 countries. We needed 92 countries. So the design is the first stage. You get a design, you finally have something. There are test markets that our trademark lawyers use to see if it will clear. So we looked good in the US. We looked good in Japan and some big other, Brazil. China they know will take forever. So they gave us a pretty good indication that we could move forward. But then we hit some obstacles we actually hit in China because there are like thousands of patent applications for branding a day. Or I don’t know if I’m making that up, but there’s something crazy and the process can’t really be expedited. So we ended up in another market too, having to negotiate to buy the ribbon hex image from another company in a key market for us.

So all of those obstacles came up right around the time that we had CEO and board approval to move forward. So that we were getting nervous on whether we were really going to be able to do this at the top of the year, the way that we had planned. So what we had to do was for 91 countries, we could use the logo as it was approved, but in China we could only use the Pfizer names. We still wanted to get rid of the lips and the older logo. And we had to have a lot of conversations with China to give them some lead time and to explain to them the situation. And then fortunately we got approval about eight or nine months later to move forward with the full design in China. But that was not an ideal situation because China such a key market for us. But we made the decision that it was the right thing to do. And we had 91 other countries ready to go.

Kelly Vives: Yeah. I mean, ours is… sorry. Are you done, Dana?

Dana Gandsman: Yeah.

Kelly Vives: Sorry. Ours. I mean, I think also we were both doing this during COVID. So in certain countries that we were trying to trademark in, they would say, oh, sorry they might be back in two or three weeks. We’re not sure. Oh, but we need the trademark. And so that was definitely a difficult part, but I think the legal and kind of intellectual property component of this project and the complexity of that by country, right? Having to submit a Chinese logo, but Allspring doesn’t mean Allspring when you translate it. There’s not a clear translation, right? So I think the translation, the domains, Pfizer you own probably all the domains related to Pfizer. We didn’t and we actually still don’t even own the clean domain. We own a lot of other domains, but the domains, the trademarks, the translation of the logo, that whole, that was one big slug of this project that I would put in that implementation bucket, that was really complex. Then something that surprised me too, was the fonts and the signage, as well. So we had to design a custom font, but then that was just more interesting, just to learn how that works…

Philip Guiliano: How that actually works? Yeah.

Kelly Vives: … and why it’s custom and buying the fonts, from Font Foundry and all these different pieces. And then getting signage made for all the different specs throughout the world and finding suppliers that can do the similar metal. That signage piece was definitely a bit of a surprise, but also on the beneficial side, a super fun motivating factor that once the signage went up for the new company, it really felt motivating for the employees to, show up and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, the signs out, my kid drove by and saw it on the school bus and we were so excited.” So, for some of the challenges, it was benefits, as well.

Philip Guiliano: That’s great.

Dana Gandsman: Naming a company, I have actually done that. So the name, we didn’t have to change name Pfizer, but we had the issue with the design. We just weren’t landing the design, it took months and months and months. In fact, we ended up re-pitching the business to other design firms, because we just weren’t nailing it after six months. And it took… We ended up going with a much smaller boutique agency with the final design moving forward. For me, I think we probably should have brought our CEO into the process earlier, but because of COVID it was… While he was engaged and knew we were working on it, there were so many other conflicting priorities going on at the time when we were dealing with the design process. But, we ended up with a logo that we all agreed on and moved forward with in November and we had some of the clearances done.

And so it was really just a race to the finish line from November to a January 5th launch date. So in the end, it really became frenzy, we were doing daily calls through the holidays. To make sure that we were thinking about everything and the aluminum shortages, metal shortages, all of those things are still coming into play. But we had the same thing when we made some small changes, even in temporary stickers that we put on our windows outside, people were just so proud and it really uncovered such a pride and brand love that not just colleagues were having, but the general public. So much so that we even started selling our Pfizer apparel on our website. Which normally that would be just an internal company store, but people were so proud to get their vaccines and it was a moment in time where people were asking for… We were seeing things being sold on Amazon with the wrong logo. So we at least wanted to put something out there with the right logo.

Philip Guiliano: That’s great, that’s great. Yeah, it sort of leads to a fun retrospective question really, for the audience. If you had this to do over again in the future, right? Or maybe not this over again in the future, but another rebrand in the future in your career. Is there anything that you would do differently? Dana, let’s start with you again actually, on this one.

Dana Gandsman: I think getting the CEO involved in the beginning… And some of the feedback that we got from some of our leaders was that, “Oh, it’s not scientific enough,” but really trying to delve into what were the aspects of the designs that they liked and where could we build from that? I have a slide somewhere that it was like 400 different Pfizer logos, which is crazy. So you can see it and to me too, because when I would look at something and I’m like, “No, this doesn’t feel right.” I think that’s why we ended up keeping our font and we didn’t do an all caps logo. There were so many things when we looked at it, it just didn’t feel like us. But trying to get your leaders involved early on and then if something’s not working, if you’re seeing that the rubber isn’t meeting the road with one design agency, bring on others to have more creative minds on a project like this. Because it’s a major change to be a new face of a company like this or a company like Wells Fargo.

Philip Guiliano: Yeah. It is and I will say that we are seeing less and less of the major agency doing everything for us kind of strategy, amongst our client base. And seeing a lot more of the, “We know this agency is really great at this and that agency is really great at that and sort of that piecemeal, but really focused work. Kelly, sorry. I cut in before you could answer that question as well.

Kelly Vives: No, you’re good. You’re good. I think I touched on some of it and I think we were obviously in a difficult situation, where there was a legal clause in the deal agreement that maybe we should have challenged, had I seen it during the deal. But it was one of many clauses and then it was set in stone once the deal was signed. So I guess looking backwards, that I think it would’ve been ideal to have more than 30 and 90 days to implement this, because I think there would’ve been a lot more efficiency in what we were able to do. We wouldn’t have had to do two rebrands. I think it wouldn’t have burned out the team quite as much, that had to do the two rebrands. So I think just being really thoughtful and pushing on the timeline and also educating. We were forced into our rebrand, which ended up being an opportunity, but many times, like in Donna’s case, you have the opportunity to say, “We’re doing this and this is why.”

And I think if you can communicate on the timeline required and educate on, “Hey, it’s X thousand materials and if we’re going to do this right,” and doing that inventory of the tentacles of the rebrand, to avoid the surprises and then what would the timeline be and what are you prioritizing? I think we were as I said, in the fast lane, so we were kind of building the plane as we were flying it, but we didn’t really have a choice. But I think if you’re doing this on your own accord and you’re doing this for strategic purposes, just really thinking through the implementation, the timeline, the prioritization and the sheer number of places that a rebrand impacts across a business, no matter what type of company it is.

Philip Guiliano: Yeah. I think you touched on two really important things there Kelly, actually. There’s the asset rationalization that you wish you had time to do, right, so you didn’t have to rebrand twice. But then there’s also the operational side of, we operate like this today, we know we’re rebranding. There’s a lot of opportunities within that rebranding to leverage the rebranding, to create a different way of brand management and governance tomorrow, whether it’s people, processes, tools, technology, whatever it might support that. And having the time to think through both of those things upfront, creates an even better rebrand implementation for that time that’s more efficient. And it also sets you up for future acquisitions, for a future rebrand, for et cetera, whatever might come down the line to be more efficient as well. Those are two really interesting things. We’ve got 20 minutes left and we have started to get some questions in from the group here listening. I want to make sure that we do have time to answer some of those. And if you have questions audience, please by all means, send them in and we will get to them.

One, question that’s come in is, do you have any creative ideas about getting your internal audience excited before you let the external audience know?

Kelly Vives: Go ahead.

Dana Gandsman: No, you go ahead.

Kelly Vives: We didn’t give anyone a heads up, so we couldn’t do that. But I will say one thing that we planned on, so that once we went live on day one, which we did do with an embargoed interview with The Wall Street Journal. So we let The Wall Street Journal announce the new brand identity and then everything else that followed, is we sent all 80,000 colleagues a swag box with all of, different items with the new logo on it. So notebooks, and water cups, and just you name it, just so that people could start to get excited. I kept seeing people posting pictures of their swag boxes on LinkedIn, so it was just a lot of pride around that, too.

Yeah, I love that.

Philip Guiliano: That’s great.

Kelly Vives: I think actually if you are able to… So we had to keep the name under lock and key until we announced it, but from July until November when the deal closed, we had a really… I think it’s an unexpected benefit and a change management exercise and an employee experience exercise, to bring people on the journey with you. And we crowdsourced names and we got hundreds and hundreds of names from employees that we sent to the brand firm for inspiration. We kind of treated it almost like a chapter book, where with each interesting thing that we were able to unveil, we had a moment for employees. So we made a video to unveil the name, we made a video to unveil the logo. We had five corporate values and we did a corporate value each week, where we brought that to life through a newsletter and featured an employee.

And so I think there’s… We had a full company chat where we were able to post things there to really just build that excitement. And I think like you said Donna, the pride and the excitement to work somewhere and to wear the logo and show it to their friends and their family. And there’s huge amplification benefits there from a brand perspective, especially for someone like Allspring where we don’t have brand awareness, which is the opportunity. But I think just really pulling employees in and if you’re able to, sharing some of the things before, even in the night before, the day before, it goes out to market, I think makes the employee base feel really special and engaged and like they were part of the writing of this chapter.

Philip Guiliano: Yeah, we’ve even had clients that did an internal tick down through a teaser campaign, right? Of something big is coming, right, and nobody really knows what it is yet. Which is, I thought, a really creative idea around that, but then teasing the evolution of the company at 10 day intervals or things of that nature, leading to where you want to go. I thought that was a really cool idea.

Dana Gandsman: It’s a great opportunity to go back in time. We did a video on the history of Pfizer, just from day one, to penicillin, to Lipitor, to everything else and then to the vaccine and then to the new brand identity. So that a lot of content that we created around this, that we had for colleagues to share across their personal social media channels, as well.

Philip Guiliano: I think that’s such a big point. The legacy and history element is such a great way to engage people, you know what I mean? Even our hospital and healthcare clients, they may have nurses and doctors that walk around with a 10 year pin or some sort of identification of, “I’ve been here for 30 years,” right? Making that aspect of things a priority is a great thing. I’ll throw out one other risk too, on the internal audience element of it, is the fact that both of you got to plan implementation ahead of time, also meant that you got to communicate to people on what to expect. Where a lot of companies fall down in this is, they announced to an internal audience, “This is what’s going to happen. This is who we’re going to be.”

They get everybody excited and then they don’t communicate the strategic way that they’re going to be rolling that out and implementing that. And by not doing that, they get a lot of eye rolling three months after launch, when an employee shows up and sees that their screensaver, the application that they use, isn’t converted yet, right? Because nobody’s communicated to them that this is actually, it’s not supposed to, it’s a strategic approach and here’s the reasons why and here’s what to expect and when. I think that’s another really interesting way to engage the internal audience, is just by being really clear about what to expect when.

Kelly Vives: Yeah, that was a huge piece for us on having very, we almost had a military timeline of when things would go out, but we would be transparent and active with the employee base. So they knew what to expect, it still was exciting, but like you said, if they opened a PowerPoint and it still had the old, the visual identity. They understood the context and the rationale and the fact that it was over 100,000 things were being rebranded, it’s coming. I think the communication strategy around this and the opportunity on the engagement side can be a missed opportunity, if not planned for.

Dana Gandsman: I agree. I think that’s the one value of what you guys did when you audited every area of this company, because you guys knew who was in charge of security badges and stationary. I didn’t know any of… They’re not people that I engage with, but we had those names, because we were trying to get a sense of how many assets they had. So as soon as we launched, we sent emails out to everyone who we had been in touch with, created kind of an internal captain for all of those different areas. And at least that people weren’t freaking out. Because you’re right. You can’t just launch something. And then all of these people are like, “How are we going to implement this? How are we going to pay for this?” And all of that was in the email.

Philip Guiliano: Right. That’s a good thing.

Dana Gandsman: Yeah. We were able to get it out early so that people knew, “We’ve got this. Don’t worry. We’re on it.”

Philip Guiliano: Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s great. That’s great. Definitely keep the questions coming in audience the next question is really around your teams. This is a massive undertaking. So just curious, the question is what emotional impact did the demands of the rebrand have on you as a leader and on your team? And how did you address it?

Kelly Vives: Well, my team had to do it twice. So definitely tough on morale. But I think there was very much of like, we are the SWAT team and we’re doing this together. And I think the second rebrand for us was more exciting, more creative, more visually expressive. So I think that felt a little bit more motivating and rewarding than just cancel-replacing something. But I think the cancel-replace, for us, was like we are meeting a legal deadline and we knew we had that. And so when we actually hit that on January 31st, that felt good too. So I think it’s same thing with implementation and planning. It’s having these milestones that people are working towards. It’s bringing in the cavalry when you need it.
We hired a whole lot of contractors. We partnered with different agencies. We brought the support that people needed. We took people out of their jobs in marketing to just do this. Just so that the team that was working on it felt really supported. And then we rewarded them. We gave transition bonuses and they weren’t big. But just to say, “Hey, thank you. You did this and we couldn’t have done it without you.” We did do extra swag and extra corporate apparel boxes for people that were really instrumental to the transition. We did give them to all employees.

But just keeping people towards the milestones, communicating those to the whole company. That this is the SWAT team that did this. Because I’m sure as Dan was just mentioning, and there are areas that were working on this that did not report into marketing. We had a lot of operations people. We had people in treasury, we had people that work underneath portfolio managers. So this was a true cross-functional effort. So you just have to keep people going and communicating the milestones and that we’re going to get there. But celebrating the progress along the way.

Dana Gandsman: Yeah, it was the same. Our team was much smaller and ’cause we did want to keep it very quiet and didn’t want it leaked. But we had to have daily meetings. Once we had the approval and the green light. And it was actually a very short window. We had done a lot of our homework over that summer. And we were just waiting for some of the initial trademark reviews to come through and then they needed another 30 days to clear the rest of the markets. So we knew we were going towards a top of the year launch. And yet it was a lot of work with this core team. And my job was to keep everyone motivated. And it was a daily call through the holidays to get everything done and BrandActive was part of those calls too. Because we just had to make sure that we were moving things forward and that everything would be ready. At least all the key assets would be ready for that January 5th date.

Philip Guiliano: Now, do you-

Kelly Vives: But I have to say, and Dana I’m sure you feel the same. Although it was tough and we were in the trenches together. And there were bumps on in the road. And there were things that didn’t go our way. And we had to rectify. But I think it does, when you look back, feel rewarding. And we did it together-

Dana Gandsman: It is.

Kelly Vives: You know?

Dana Gandsman: Yeah.

Kelly Vives: And-

Dana Gandsman: It does.

Kelly Vives: So I think the team building component of it, although there’s bumps and bruises along the way. I mean, I was in Boston this week with some of my team and I was like, “You guys a year ago, we didn’t have a name.” I’m like,

Philip Guiliano: That’s crazy.

Kelly Vives: “We didn’t have a name a year ago and now we have a full brand.” So I think there is a benefit to the team building as long as you care for the folks and make sure they don’t burn out.

Dana Gandsman: Yeah, no. I think everyone recognizes it’s a tremendous opportunity to work on something this high profile. And the team really stuck it out from the beginning to the end. Which was amazing. We had the same core people through the first iteration of this in Q4 of 2019 to when we launched.

Philip Guiliano: Yeah, that’s great. And I think one of the things that I’ll share with the audience. Because both of your situations were what we would consider to be more on the aggressive side, obviously. I mean, Kelly yours is massively aggressive. But even 18 months for a global conversion of a global country across 90 countries, that’s also an aggressive timeline. And a lot of companies, for those sitting out there that are considering this, don’t do massively aggressive, overnight conversions of their brand anymore. They tend to take anywhere between two to four years to roll out the brand. Really prioritizing 20% of the assets that create 80% of the impact in that launch window and then using operational cycles and rolling things out.

So I’m only sharing that as a you have the variables of time, operational cycles, quality, how you leverage internal resources, what you do outsource, and all of these things affect cost and impact. And they also can extend timelines. So it doesn’t have to feel like this. “I need 30 million to do my rebrand,” kind of a thing. There’s lots of levers to play with that can create different scenarios for how you might approach that. And that can then drive the business case and the fiscally responsible decision making that you need to make on the other side of it. So just throwing that out to the audience outside of the context of these two things. Do you-

Kelly Vives: Yeah, I think important Philip too. Because, again, we had to do our rebrand. But I think capturing everything through the audit, but then also thinking about the cost of that. I mean, signage isn’t cheap. A redesign of a website. But if you can lump everything together and give a ballpark of the range, I think it’s less surprising for my boss, the CEO, when you’re like, “Oh, Hey, I need this.” And you come back tin cup in hand for a million dollars at a time. You could also be more-

Philip Guiliano: No way. Yeah.

Kelly Vives: -strategic about the rationalization for the budget. It’s not like, Hey, I need $25 million or whatever the number is it’s these are the sleeves, these are the buckets. And they can see the tentacles of how large the rebrand is. That it’s not just a glossy logo. There’s a lot more behind that. So I think that was helpful for me as well in setting expectations from a cost perspective.

Dana Gandsman: Yeah, absolutely. And the detail that you all provided. Because I had to have conversations with my CFO directly and I’d never had a conversation with my CFO before this. So just the level of specificity that I needed to have for those conversations, it was… I would have like prep calls just for those calls. That was probably my biggest stress dealing with those discussions. And also the work that the team has done to help me manage the budget too and flag things. And now that we’re almost done, I mean we’re definitely coming in at budget or slightly under budget, which is amazing.

Philip Guiliano: Yeah. Yeah. But we probably have time for one more question. I’m going to rephrase this a little bit. But there are obvious business drivers as to why both of your rebrands happened. But the question is really more around, were there any unexpected benefits that you didn’t see coming around the rebrand?

Kelly Vives: I think for me, Dana referenced it a little bit. And I think it was one of the prior questions too. But I think the opportunity to engage our employees I think was a real benefit and the surprising excitement around that. And when we gave everybody a backpack full of stuff and they were so excited. And then we ended up having to launch an employee store cause people were so jazzed and wanted to buy things. But I think it also gave us that opportunity with clients. And that was really cool to see that I engaged some of our clients early on in a brand engagement. Like give us some advice exercise. And then we shared with them a little bit along the journey. “Oh, here’s the logo. We haven’t shown all of our other clients. But this is what we’re thinking.”

And then you can build that brand awareness, but also you can feel that the clients were rooting for us. Right. We had our big brand launch event. I said, “Oh my gosh. It’s so cool to see this all come to life from our conversation a year ago.” So I think that not only bringing employees in. But the client engagement opportunity to build that relationship. They’re rooting for you. But I do think the corporate apparel and swag part of it has been really fun. We’ve tried to partner with only vendors that sustainably produce their items or there’s a sustainable component to what they create for the most part. But I just think that’s been a total home run, both internally and externally. And I think Dana, you referenced the same thing.

Dana Gandsman: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s the one thing that we found. And then I think we were worried because we’ve seen so many examples when companies rebrand. And people demand that the brand go back. Like the general public does not like the rebrand. GAP did it. I was looking at all those examples and it was keeping me up at night. And once we did it, we turned the lights on. It was generally well received too. So I wouldn’t say it’s unexpected. But we weren’t necessarily expecting it. You don’t know if people are going to say “No, I like that football. How could you do that to the Pfizer logo?”

Philip Guiliano: Right.

Kelly Vives: Yeah. It’s a scary mode. Like I remember when we released our name and walking into the conference room with my CEO and I was like, “People like it.” I was so [inaudible 00:56:07] When you do the stress release and you get the slack and you see what’s happened to some other companies. So it is nerveracking. And it’s a risk. You have to strike the right balance. And I think we both had a really cool opportunity to do it in a time when the world was changing, both of our industries were changing. People are probably maybe more receptive to other things changing. ‘Cause there was so much change surrounding us. And so it was really just an amazing time to be able to be at this inflection point in the world and then evolving our brand to meet the world where it is.

Dana Gandsman: Agreed.

Philip Guiliano: Yeah. Well, we’ve got other questions. But rather than take one on with two minutes left, I think we will end here. And I just want to say a big thank you to both of you. Dana and Kelly, thank you for being here. And also wanted to thank the audience for being here as well. I know we all have a lot of things to take up our day. So thank you for prioritizing this. I hope it was an interesting conversation for everybody and that you learned things. If you do have questions, you are more than happy to submit them back. And we will get to them. We’ll go more into them. And as a reminder, today’s webinar will be available on demand. You will receive an email link for that. And other than that, I think I will say thank you everybody and have a great day.

Dana Gandsman: Thank you.

Philip Guiliano: Thank you.

Kelly Vives: Thank you.

Philip Guiliano: Bye-bye.