A picture and a couple of words

Dasarathi GV (Das), Director of Leanworx Technologies, shares a candid account of his organisation’s first tryst with a professional branding exercise.

After some years of existing (not so happily) with something we had devised internally, we recently undertook a brand strategy exercise. Here’s the story of the doubts, the conflicts, the hopes and the surprises behind the same.

Disclaimer: If you are a specialist in branding and advertising, do note; what you will read below is the point of view of someone who sits across the table from you, with zero knowledge of your area of expertise. Some of the stuff may sound elementary, or even silly to you. But this is how we, the typical branding-gyan-challenged-people, think.

We represent a single-product company: a product that improves the efficiency of machines in manufacturing organizations, and hence their profits. Our product has software and electronic hardware to monitor machines on manufacturing shop floors. Essentially, it collects data directly from machines and feeds it to an organization’s computers: a technology called Industry 4.0. 

We are a B2B company, and an engineering company. Our senior team comprises manufacturing engineers. In the manufacturing industry, we are small but known to be very hatke (as they say in Mumbaiyya Hindi) – for our innovative products, our stand-out trade show stalls, our brochures, even our company uniform.

Our customers are mostly manufacturers of automobile and aerospace parts, pumps and other engineering parts. The people in these firms are also engineers: people in their 20s to 60s. The person who actually makes purchase decisions on our product is the CEO. He/she is the primary person we need to impress.

So, here’s the story.

Once upon a time (4 years ago, actually), we had a logo and a tagline that we concocted ourselves, in maybe 30 minutes. The logo was the product name itself. We came up with other bright tagline ideas, and kept changing them depending on our mood and depending on where we were using it – the website had something, brochures had something else, the stationery something else, etc. We were vaguely unhappy with this and wanted to do ‘something’ to improve it but did not know exactly what. 

We had always imagined that brands were designed by big ad agencies, that it cost crores, took a year or more to finalise, and that only large corporates could afford the process. A few months ago, we got talking to the team at Flibbr Consulting and got to know what a brand can really do for a firm, and what a proper branding process really looked like. These were a group of people who were earlier heading the very same big ad agencies. Further, we also discovered, that we could get branding done without spending crores, in a few weeks (and not a year). Suitably impressed, we decided to take the plunge, and embarked on a professional branding exercise.

Thus began a fascinating process.

Flibbr roped in Sourabh Mishra, founding partner of Azendor, to run the program. The team did their own research to understand what we did: this included detailed explanations from us on various aspects of our business, exhaustive individual interviews with our internal senior team, followed by more exhaustive interviews with some current happy customers, some current unhappy customers, and some past customers. 

A few weeks of this was followed by an energizing day-long brand strategy session in our Bengaluru office. Our entire senior management team and our partners from Flibbr participated. The day-long session was punctuated by coffee/chai breaks, a working lunch, and numerous nicotine breaks on the office terrace. 

The session did a couple of things. 

It helped us peel away the unnecessary and home in on what we, as an organization and brand fundamentally did. It helped us narrow down on the value we were bringing to clients. And it helped us understand how to leverage that value. It also brought clarity – what we should be doing and should not be doing going ahead. This was not an external point of view being proposed to us. Rather, it felt like we had been guided to rediscover what we did in a new light.

A couple of weeks later, the team came back with a summary report of the brand strategy process. It was a pithy document that stated what we, as a team, had agreed to in that session. 

They also came back with a set of options for our logo and tag line.

Now, logos of engineering firms typically have an engineering component. Gears are a very popular motif. They also have sober colors – black or the duller shades of blue or green. The font tends to be heavy, bold, usually in uppercase, to indicate solidity, dependability. 

However, most of the options that the Flibbr team presented were the exact opposite of this. Strangely, most of our senior team of six people preferred the bolder logos and taglines. We in fact got excited by the boldest of the lot.

This was a butterfly in a mix of red and pink, with the tag line ‘Works like magic.’ The tag line, incidentally, came from how one of our customers described our product to the Flibbr team: “We connected Leanworx to the machines in just 30 minutes, and then started seeing data to improve our efficiency immediately. It was quite magical,” he had said. 

This plug-and-play capability happens to be one of Leanworx’s USPs. And the butterfly, to us, signified how the efficiency and profitability transforms rapidly, in just a couple of months.

This got us thinking:

What will our customers think of this? How can we use a butterfly as the logo – isn’t it totally non-engineering? Are the colors too bold, too bright, unserious? Is the tag line too impertinent, promising too much? Will we look like a consumer products firm instead of an engineering products firm?

Our branding partners, however, seemed to have understood our company’s culture and our psychology right in terms of how far they could push the design envelope with us. Because after a few days of agonizing with these questions, we finally settled on our choice. We felt comfortable with it.

It has been 6 months since we changed to the new branding. The tag line is seeping into the culture of the company itself, referred to often (sometimes seriously and sometimes in jest) in our marketing efforts, in sales, when we decide new product features, in customer support, even when we’re making coffee in the pantry. Will this work like magic? – we often find ourselves asking this question.  

To me, a tagline and logo must do these:

1: To the customer, convey the essential benefit that our product has to offer, convey our work ethic, and act deep in their subconscious to set us apart from and above our competitors.

2: To our team, be a source of pride, act as the North Star that guides our product development path, our customer support, our work ethic, our pricing.

Before our branding exercise, we did not know that a picture and a couple of words can manage to achieve all this. Now, to our delight, we do.