Strategy in TECH...
The conventional wisdom of branding says that you never mention your competitors in your marketing – it only serves to promote them. Less professional companies have sales and marketing teams that go one step further by publicly or privately criticizing their competitors!
Which is better? Complement or criticize your competitors? New research holds what might be a surprising answer!
I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but thanks to Strata-gee’s amazing readers, both long time subscribers and many, many new converts, Strata-gee had its biggest year ever in 2020! The data are clear and unequivocal, pageviews this year were not only greater than last year…they exceeded it by a margin far greater than I could have ever dreamed possible! And that’s just one example of surprisingly positive stats in Strata-gee’s 2020 results in the wake of a branding and web presence overhaul.
The race is on as marketers conduct myriad surveys to try and understand how the forced self-isolation resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the consumer psyche now. Also, marketers want to determine if there will be any lingering effects in consumer sentiment – and perhaps more importantly, spending patterns – down the road, when life begins to return to some sort of normal again.
One thing marketers have discovered is that consumers are making judgments about your company and your brand, by looking at you through a COVID-19 lens – which, depending on your actions, could be either positive or negative.
“You are WAY too excited about this news,” Jason Sloan, Sonance Chief Sales Officer joked when first telling me about their rebranding plans a few weeks ago. But I was excited – these plans put forth a major shift in the position of the Dana Innovations, Sonance, iPort, & Trufig brands. To Sloan and CEO Ari Supran, this was more of a refocus than a rebranding – a return to their largest and most beloved brand after a long and at times frustrating period of trying to establish another overarching entity.
But to me, it was much more than that.
San Clemente, CA-based Dana Innovations announced today that it is launching a major rebranding effort, the results of which will better reflect their business initiatives, clarify the meaning and positioning of their various brands, and assert new brand “pillars” to better convey who they are and what they represent. It will also reassert the prominence of the Sonance brand.
The company will no longer be known as Dana Innovations thanks to a “back to the future” decision to elevate Sonance – the brand under which they were founded. Company management has granted Strata-gee exclusive access to this story, including to behind-the-scenes information revealing the depth and detail of the thinking, discussions, and even arguments of the last year and a half or so that were behind this major – and some would say somewhat risky – decision.
