Written by Jennifer Slinger
Strategist
Four lessons from Infront’s successful launch campaign
Great rebrands are reincarnations, not reinventions. And this is even truer in B2B.
Why?
10 years ago, Google research showed that buyers have a greater emotional connection with B2B brands than with B2C ones.[1] It’s less surprising when you think about it, since a poor B2B purchase can cost a decision-maker their job. And recent research backs this up: most buyers don’t even consider more than two B2B brands.[2]
Trust is therefore a very valuable commodity. And this makes repositioning all the trickier: you need to be authentic and make improvements. Offering what customers want and sticking to what you do best.
Infront managed to strike that balance perfectly. The company, a leading WealthTech provider, rebranded in 2023 with a launch campaign that made a big splash. It drove strong viewing statistics, above-benchmark click-through and strong conversion too. Striking a chord with a niche audience, building awareness, and reigniting connections with existing customers.
Here’s how they did it, with our support.
Lesson 1: The core of any brand is the customer
Too often, rebrands become a self-indulgent lick of paint: thousands of hours get invested in templates and colours, while both the customer’s needs (and the genuine strengths of the business in answering those needs) are forgotten.
Instead, Infront did things differently. The company crafted a new brand story, sure. But for the launch campaign, we also distilled this into a ruthlessly customer-centric proposition.
The brand story used sailing as a metaphor. This captured the personality which the brand needed to adopt, to reflect the company’s strengths. It positioned Infront as competitive, expert, and quick to adapt.
But for the launch campaign, our research identified the most viable immediate prospects for Infront. Then, we found an area where we could help this niche audience with a core problem. They had a web of tricky tasks to tackle, and while their life would never be simple, they craved something simpler. This gave us our single-minded proposition: ‘Performance made simpler.’
Our proposition made sure that subsequent creative focused clearly on the audience and remained believable for new and existing customers alike.
Lesson 2: Plan your route from rebrand to lead gen
If you’re ruthlessly customer-oriented with your rebrand itself, it’s easier to plot a clear path from brand campaign to conversion.
We worked with Infront to create a four-phase plan – laddering from big-picture launch to audience-specific lead generation. This meant there was a clear roadmap from creating a new logo to driving business success.
There’s an added benefit too. If you’ve got a clear commercial case, it’s easier to secure the budget for your beautiful new brand in the first place.
Lesson 3: Start with a serious splash
You’ve spent months on the logo, website and brand guidelines. But your customers have no idea yet.
You need a serious relaunch campaign. One which leaves your audience under no illusion about your new look, or what you’re offering. It needs to:
1. Speak to a pressing desire of the customer
2. Arrest attention
3. Immediately announce what you do
For Infront, we took the ‘Performance made simpler’ proposition (the core desire of the customer) and explored tens of different creative possibilities to convey that message.
Ultimately, we used the brand metaphor and pushed it as far as possible, conveying almost unreal ease. Vivid visuals, crafted from tens of different images, were not only unique in this market, but strikingly unusual for any campaign.
Meanwhile, the copy linked the visual metaphor to Infront’s core offering – so the audience knew exactly what Infront did, from any advert.
Lesson 4: Give the internal launch some love
It’s easy to deprioritise internal teams. But these people need to live and breathe your new brand: telling the story and championing the change.
For Infront’s rebrand, the internal launch got serious creative attention. We met sceptical individuals on their terms, acknowledging their cynicism about marketing in general:
“It’s just some pictures.
It’s just some words.
What could it change?”
Then, we dispelled this “Who cares?” attitude, showing Infront employees how powerful a new attitude and a new story could be for their personal success.
A final word from the CMO
Infront Chief Marketing Officer, Mark Baker, reflected on the success of the campaign shortly after its launch. After plenty of hard work crafting the rebrand, he said:
“The campaign exceeded our expectations. It’s clear that the creative was perceived as different in our space, causing viewers to be curious, and driving them to find out more.”
Make waves in a complex space
If you want to make a big splash in a tricky B2B market, we’d love to talk it through. With strikingly simple strategy and creative, it’s easy to make waves.
We make the complicated simple.
[1] “Not only did the B2B brands drive more emotional connections than B2C brands, but they weren’t even close. Of the hundreds of B2C brands that Motista has studied, most have emotional connections with between 10% and 40% of consumers. Meanwhile, of the nine B2B brands we studied, seven surpassed the 50% mark.”
2013, Google Consumer Insights https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/promotion-emotion-b2b/
[2] 2021, How brands grow, The B2B Institute and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science