Sarah Stepic, Director of Creative & Marketing at ETHERFAX, sat down with Keypoint Intelligence’s Lee Davis to discuss the steps we took to execute our recent rebrand and what organizations need to consider when rebranding.
Listen the interview below:
Transcript:
Lee Davis: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Key Point. My name is Lee Davis, senior analyst here at Keypoint Intelligence workplace. Today’s topic is rebranding. As you all know, our industry is changing the same old, same old isn’t going to work anymore. There’s good news. A lot of the business owners in our industry are catching on to that and they’re starting to act. But the bad news is that they’re undertaking like incredibly difficult feats to pivot their business, according to our state of the channel survey. They always have their eyes set on expanding their presence in their customers IT departments by providing, you know, managed IT services and security services and all the other services that kind of get rolled into those as of getting the managed IT security practices off the ground if that. Not hard enough. The print dealer is that you know we speak with the service providers, and they’re facing an uphill battle. It’s hard to convince their customers that you can take on such a heavy lift that I can do your managed it. I can jump from managing your printers to your entire IT environment when they just see you as the print guy. So in another study, we asked IT decision-makers how they felt about print dealers getting into managed IT and cybersecurity. How would you feel about them handling that for you? And they’re very lukewarm to it. They saw it as a cash grab. They didn’t trust that the pink guy could set up, maintain, and protect their overarching IT environment. And that to me really says it’s a branding problem as much as it is a technical problem. So our guest today, Sarah, she’s the director of Creative and marketing at ETHERFAX. ETHERFAX recently rebranded, so I figured Sarah would be the perfect person to come on and give dealers a crash course on branding 101 to the show. Sarah, why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about yourself.
Sarah Stepic: Thank you. Thanks for having me. As you said, my name’s Sarah and I work for ETHERFAX. I started there about two years ago. ETHERFAX was founded in 2009, so a while back and, basically, you know, the short answer is we’re a document exchange company, and a couple of years ago we realized that yes, we needed to be on this journey. Needed to reinvent. Who even knows what fax is anymore? If you were born before a certain year, you probably don’t. But it is still very much a part of the landscape especially in healthcare or in situations where you need a secure document delivery service. We needed to reinvent. You know, we do more than that. We’re more than just a document delivery network. We sell to back that up. We needed to come up with a new brand. We needed to do that to get everyone behind us internally, and externally, and communicate that new brand in a single simple, unified voice.
Lee Davis: So you know, you did share some notes with me before you came on. And it seems like this rebrand is a really comprehensive process. You kind of talk about how one would go about rebranding, like what’s step one?
Sarah Stepic: Sure. Sure. It is a really long process that probably took us. I would like to say over a year basically you need to conduct a brand audit. Step one. That is basically you want to evaluate your brand’s position in the marketplace. So. You know, how do we even perceive ourselves internally and how people outside our company looking in perceive us? So it’s a very long process. I started by interviewing the founders. I conducted interviews with our employees. Then I moved to customers and partners. And one-on-one interviews to really get a feel for what ETHERFAX was doing for them, how they viewed us, who we were in the marketplace, how our IT department was, and how our LNP department was. So once we conducted all those one-on-one interviews, then we moved to doing anonymous customer surveys, you know through e-mail digitally that you find that people can be a little bit more honest when they’re anonymous. You get a little bit more honest. How was your experience working with us? Was it bad? What should we do better? Did we do great? So basically, it’s this whole process of interviewing people and getting feedback about the company internally and externally, and once we acquired all that data, we needed to compile it and then dissect it and really go through it and see what the common threads were and, you know, the common threat threads that we were doing good and common threads that we needed a little bit more help in. So basically, once you do all of that, you compile all of this data. Is the basis. For a brand’s brand-new brand platform.
Lee Davis: So were there any crucial elements in the market, like trends that you guys were noticing?
Sarah Stepic: What we found in our interviews and customer surveys was that security was a really big part of why people chose. We spend a lot of money every year making sure our certifications are. To. That has always been our focus since we were conceived in 2009 and it continues to. Our. So we already have and maintain our R2 High trust certification. We have PCI 3.2 level 1. Certification and we’re housed in environments that are SOC2 compliant and NIST. I don’t even know how to say those ’cause. I’m not a security person. But I know that we’re always talking about in meetings, you know? This certification is up for renewal and what do we need to do to get this X, Y and Z done. And so I don’t know if your listeners are familiar with the brand platform, but it’s basically a document that outlines your brand identity. For internal and external stakeholders. For everyone. So you know, we want to get everyone. Saying the same thing about the brand. And since we’re rebranding and we’re kind of changing it up a little bit, it’s really important to have that document. Sure that we’re all saying the same thing in the same way. Want to make sure our marketing actions are consistent and we all want to make sure we’re on the same page with our vision and our mission and our company positioning. Yeah, it’s a whole process, it takes quite a while to get there.
Lee Davis: Once you collected the stadium, you start to analyze it and you’re developing your brand platform like what kind of specific components? What makes up a brand platform and how do people kind of go about taking what they learned and synthesizing that into the platform?
Sarah Stepic: Right. So it is complicated the most, I’d say the most important thing that came out of our brand platform is that we had a solid vision statement, mission statement, and brand positioning statement. And the vision statement is very aspirational. What is your role in the industry? Why were we originally founded? What do we do in the world? Very visionary. So our vision statement is innovating the interoperable exchange of data. Yeah. When you really look at it at the core, that is why we were founded in 2009 and that is what our main focus is still today. And even though we’re updating that and always coming up with better solutions, that’s still who we are as a. That’s a vision. A vision statement basically answers three questions: What do we do? How do we do it? And who do we do it for? So with each one of these statements you get like a little bit deeper into who the company is and what they do. And then finally, your brand positioning statement is even a little bit deeper. What do we do that no one else does? Why is someone going to choose our product rather than our competitors? So I would say those three things. That’s the core of your new brand platform.
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