Since announcing the Augure and Fashion GPS merger in January, there have been a multitude of extremely exciting transformations within our new company, Launchmetrics. The objective has always been clear: to make create a vibrant brand that’s full of energy— ready to take on the new challenges that await us.
From now on, you will start to see an electric turquoise or “aquamarine” color everywhere. That’s because Launchmetrics has a new branding. The change has begun.
As the American businessman and prominent investor, Warren Buffett once said, “Great things take time.”And that is exactly how we consider the transformation between our two companies, as a major project that consists of a progressive process. We are making sure we are doing things right. For that reason, we have divided the transition into several phases with the final step resulting in a new website and an integrated product offering during the second half of 2016.
In the meantime, we are going talk about the entire branding process and the different branding elements you will be seeing, so you can understand our transformation and get familiar with our new identity.
We hope that our new “look & feel” makes you fall in love the same way we did!
In this article you’ll learn…
Why a complete rebranding?
Both Augure and Fashion GPS have had an exciting journey since the beginning, becoming references in their respective markets and sectors: Augure as a key Influencer Marketing platform for Communication and Public Relations professionals and Fashion GPS as the software responsible for digitalizing the fashion industry. The bar was already set pretty high. What would come after had to be bigger, more innovative, groundbreaking.
It’s as if our tools were destined to be combined— they complement each other in such a way that we wanted the new name, brand and product positioning to reflect their compatibility. We have evolved into a 360º platform, providing data insights that enable brands to accelerate their launches into the marketplace and build strong and lasting exposure through the activation of key influencers that are relevant for their audience.
A change of such magnitude deserves to be represented by a new brand image that signifies our global vision.
Branding, step one: Who are we?
So, the first things we had to ask ourselves in order to create a new branding that united philosophies from both companies were: “Who are we?” “What are we now?” and “How do we want to be perceived?”
The “who” part was easier to answer because we had already announced the merger in January and had come up with our company name, Launchmetrics. We simply jotted that down along with our core purpose and we got to work!
It was essential to involve our employees from the different departments and offices around the world (product, marketing, human resources, R&D, customer success, etc.) as well as C-level executives to take down ideas and find the right words that would describe our company culture, giving us a strong identity to continue moving forward with the project. We wanted to hear what everyone had to say.
After several meetings, where we talked and reflected as a team, we came up with the three main concepts that highlight the essence of our product. From there, we linked those principles to a series of valuable and unique characteristics that describe our identity.
After that, we created a moodboard— a similar but more extensive version than the one you see above—to visualize our new brand through imagery.
The final step was to move from the conceptual, more artistic side to a business perspective based on a concrete understanding of our product, target and market. That consisted of providing solid answers in response to why and how we truly are “innovative,” “trendsetters” and “disruptive” (“global” was easy, we have 7 offices around the world).
A logo and a color with personality
After several weeks of going back and forth, trying different logo formats and color palettes, we made our decision. The logo you see today caught our attention right off the bat. It was closely related to what we wanted to communicate and represented by a personalized typography. We knew from the moment we first saw it that we were onto something special.
“Launchmetrics” means “to measure every step involved in a launch campaign—” in other words, control the entire lifecycle of a product by obtaining valuable data insights from each stage of a launch. The partially cut letters of our logo represent data in the form of columns, bars and pie charts. At the same time, the fact that the characters are “incomplete” symbolizes the development and design of the before, during and after phases of all product launch strategies.
We also welcome a new color. One with personality and strength. Aquamarine is a color that represents fluid communication and clarity of thought— attributes that we associate with the functions of the tools we provide to Marketing and Communication professionals that help them to map out actions and pinpoint results for their product launches in a clear and concise way.
And finally, we have our logomark. We bet on an icon that was capable of synthesizing the essence of Launchmetrics in just one glance. It doesn’t only reveal the initials of the two words that make up our brand, but also represents the elegance, disruption and innovation we want to communicate on social networks and other content produced using this deep and synthesized understanding of the logo.
The Best is Yet to Come
From this point on, you will start seeing content and media designed with the new Launchmetrics branding.Some of our social channels such as Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter will also become Launchmetrics brand platforms as we progressively move forward with the project.
We do not want to cause confusion, but rather want to be completely upfront and transparent about each phase of our evolution. We will continue to share updates and involve you every step of the way so you can connect with us the same way you did before. Launchmetrics is composed of the same elements, made up the two companies it once was. We’ve just combined both entities and have a new positioning that helps brands devise and develop each stage of their strategy to accelerate their product launches into the marketplace.
This is only the beginning— the best is yet to come. Following this phase will come our new website along with a fully integrated product, so stay tuned!
By Gina GulbertiVICE PRESIDENT OF MARKETING
Gina is passionate about storytelling, creativity, and digital strategies. As Vice President of Marketing, she leads a rockstars team from the sunny city of Madrid! Being a crazy savvy marketer, in 2020 Gina co-founded the global community of b2bmarketers.com and currently combines all this activity, teaching Inbound Marketing in different business schools.
