Welcome to the new us. We’re still the same people in the same place, but we’ve given our brand a major overhaul.
Why Rebrand?
We’re twelve years old this year. At this point you might assume everything is nailed down and set in stone for us but the truth is, a lot has changed since 2003: The economy is different, our industry has evolved, our business model has shifted, and our team is different. In short, it’s time to update our brand to more accurately reflect who we are today and where we are headed.
A Brand that Pulls Us
You’ll find dozens of different definitions for what a brand is. This post isn’t about creating a new definition, but we do want to share a bit about what we think a brand should do for the employees of a company as partial explanation for why we’re changing our brand.
We believe a brand should be aspirational to the people working for the company. The brand should support the company’s vision and provide a framework within which to communicate that vision. For employees, their ability and their desire to “get on board” with a company’s vision are in part shaped by the brand itself. The brand helps create that ever-so-important feeling of “I’m part of something great.”
Over time we came to feel that our former name “Agency Fusion” was pulling us backward instead of drawing us toward the future we were working hard to achieve. The old name, because of our old positioning, felt like baggage we were fighting against, instead of a brand that we are aspiring to build in the direction we’ve been heading.
Evolution and Revolution
When we chose the name Agency Fusion, we wanted a name that represented our core business model. At the time the majority of our revenue came from providing education and development services to other creative agencies. As far as we know, we pioneered the phrase, “You design it. We build it.” This business model worked well for years but with the economic downturn in 2008-2009, the flaws of this model were exposed in a dire way.
Rather than continue to rely on business from other creative agencies, we opted to begin transitioning away from this business model. Over time we shifted from getting most of our revenue from other agencies, to now getting the majority of our revenue from our own clients and our own software products.
We’re fans of a Harvard Business Review article about how companies go through periods of evolution and revolution. Our big shift in our business model was a time of revolution that likely saved us from an early demise. Our name, however, has been stuck back in the pre-2009 days of our existence and this rebrand aims to fix that.
Today the types of projects we choose to accept are bigger and more complex than in our former life. We work for a lot of startups and often for big companies who want to launch a new product or act more like a startup. We’re less of an ad agency and more of a digital product design and development company. If you mashed up an ad agency, a startup, a software development firm, and a business consultancy you’d have something very much like us. People hire us when they need to create something both technical and elegant, and when they’re willing to invest what it takes to do it right.
Looking to the Future
A full rebrand is time consuming. We’re still dotting i’s and crossing t’s to roll out our new brand. We hope the change has minimal negative impact on our clients. Our proposals, invoices, and other documents will have a new look. Accounting or accounts payable departments will need to update our vendor profile (the new name is a DBA so our tax ID stays the same). Clients will need to contact us using our new email addresses (although the old ones will continue to forward for a while). But other than these few inconveniences, everything else moves forward as before but with a new brand that works with us instead of against us.