How rebrand followed rapid growth for customer experience management company

For Sitecore CMO Paige O’Neill, the arrival of a new CEO, the acquisition of four companies and a near doubling of the employee base in just 18 months meant one thing: It was time for the customer experience management company to rebrand.

“With all the change, rapid expansion of our product portfolio, and new team members, it seemed like the right time to check in on our brand purpose and refresh our brand identity,” O’Neill said.

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The rebranding team started with input from employees and took inspiration from customers, many of whom were interested in standing out via their websites. This insight informed the new brand promise and encouraged creative teams to be bold, inventive and passionate.

The rebrand, launched in January 2022, has recharged employees and Sitecore’s user community and is beginning to enhance acquisition efforts.

What was the process behind the rebrand?

We started with our mission, vision and purpose. First, we did workshops and surveys with employees to understand what they felt set Sitecore apart and what they wanted our brand to represent. We also factored in a global brand survey we had done on what brands were looking to accomplish with digital experiences since we are a digital experience company and wanted to reflect the larger intent of our customers and their needs.

Then we did a virtual executive team offsite to take that feedback and crystalize it into our new mission, vision and purpose. Once that came together, we partnered with Superunion to bring the new brand to life in terms of messaging, color palette, new imagery and iconography. All in all, it was about an eight-month process from start to launch. 

Were there any “aha” moments? 

Many; one came from the brand survey on digital experience where we learned that the top thing companies hope to gain from their investment in digital experience is a way to stand out from competitors. I also hear this every day from CMOs I talk to during our sales cycles. We took this input into the brand and used the notion of standing out as one of the key pillars of our brand messaging. It also inspired us to go bolder with some of the elements as we also want to stand out ourselves as a brand.

What are the key elements of the new brand? 

They start with our new mission, to elevate leading brands through unforgettable digital connections with their customers, and our guiding vision, to disrupt the market with innovative solutions that turn consumers into fans.

In our business, we’ve always been driven to empower brands to deliver memorable digital experiences, and as we continue to grow and bring new, solutions to the market, we want to fulfill our promises to our partners, customers and employees to elevate the brands that work with us and bring innovation to the digital experience market, as set forth in our mission and vision.

As we bring our new brand to life in the market, we will focus on three key personality traits: boldness, passion and inventiveness. We want to be a brand that is thought-provoking, disrupts for the right reasons at the right moments, embraces imaginative ideas to create groundbreaking solutions and shares our enthusiasm for what the future holds in our industry.

Did you make visual brand changes?

In addition to the new brand messaging, we also have an all-new visual look and feel, new color palette, fonts, graphics, icon library and all new templates. We rolled out a new website and a new look and feel on all our social properties upon launch.

How did you involve employees?

In addition to generating excitement by announcing the rebrand, featuring it at a company all-hands and previewing brand elements, we also made a “brand ask” of them during launch every day for a week. Asks included sharing on social, giving them new Zoom brand background images to download, asking them to update their signatures and asking them to visit our content hub to download brand materials such as imagery and PowerPoint templates.

How did you bring the new brand to market?

We launched globally in all our locations worldwide, 30 countries, in January. The launch included a blog from me describing the intent behind the new brand, social and digital campaigns, a new website (translated into seven languages), a new look on our social properties, new brand kits and assets for our employees and partners as well as the internal launch. 

How is the new brand resonating?

It is early days (about two months), but the feedback from our employees and our community has been very positive. The social posts that we did around the new brand generated some of the highest engagement we’ve ever seen, and the traffic to our new website is up considerably with time on site increasing. The bold new color palette and graphics have infused a new energy into our marketing.

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