Tag: Brand strategy

  • Rockwell Collins – Soaring to new markets

    Rockwell Collins – Soaring to new markets

    Innovation marks a company’s ability to sustain competitive advantage and market leadership. Without question, Rockwell Collins enjoys a reputation as one of the most future-focused companies in the world. More precisely, Rockwell Collins is known for innovation that performs in the most demanding applications without fail. From its participation in the space program in the 1960s to designing the most advanced avionics and communication systems in use today, Rockwell Collins is the brand that customers charged with delivering critical missions count on.

    Defining independence

    While its history is worthy of celebration, it also presented an interesting dilemma for Rockwell Collins as it sought to clarify and strengthen its identity after spinning out of the conglomerate, Rockwell International. The Rockwell and Collins names are deeply embedded in the history of America’s aerospace and communications equipment industries – each with a powerful legacy and a source of great individual pride. Unfortunately, these strong brand names kept the combined Rockwell Collins from seeing itself as one entity.

    When heritage meets innovation for the benefit of customers

    Starting with a deep look at the business and research with customers, investors, employees and other key audiences, the Tenet team guided management as they made the choice to keep the name for the company, embark on a new strategic positioning and innovate its brand to achieve future growth ambitions.

    Tenet reaffirmed and articulated the Rockwell Collins brand attributes: a heritage founded on reliability, a continuous drive toward innovation and a relentless commitment to building strong customer relationships. The brand promise, Building trust every day, conveyed a clear sense of purpose. Together with a bold new word-mark, dynamic visual and verbal identity, website, and brand engagement programs, the stage was set for a reinvigorated culture and market momentum.

    With confidence and revitalized energy, Rockwell Collins was ready to move forward. That’s reflected by its rapid ascent as one of the most admired and best performing companies in America.

    Preparing for the 2017 Paris Air Show

    The bi-yearly Paris Air Show provides the biggest audience of OEM and manufacturers of commercial and military systems. In 2017, the show offered a prime opportunity to position Rockwell Collins as the leading provider of solutions that span the entire aircraft, given their recent acquisition of B/E Aerospace. It was an important venue to show the full cockpit-to- cabin expertise of Rockwell Collins, and to position the company as innovative and forward-thinking.

    Tenet Partners created a common theme for all media surrounding the Paris Air Show that captured the spirit of innovation from Rockwell Collins: “See the future from here.”

    To maximize the power of a consistent message, Tenet mapped visitors’ journey along the path of their potential media exposure bought by Rockwell Collins. Next, we produced digital ads to cover wraps and ads in aircraft industry magazines, air show billboards and ultimately the entire Rockwell Collins chalet, from inside video to outside signage. Rockwell Collins’ signature color identity and evocative skyscape imagery were used across all visuals.

    Kelly Ortberg, CEO of Rockwell Collins, said, “It’s the best Rockwell Collins has ever looked.”

  • Citrix Systems

    Citrix Systems

    2008 marked an important year in the growth of Citrix Systems. Having just broken the $1 billion revenue mark and completed numerous successful acquisitions, Citrix had earned its seat at the “big table” as a contender for leadership in desktop virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions. Global companies, like Microsoft, were knocking at the door and looking for partnership opportunities. It quickly became obvious that something had to be done to give the brand the stature it deserved and to create the brand experience clients were looking for.

    Now a strategic partner with Microsoft and a key competitor to big-league players like Cisco and Oracle, Citrix had to shed the ad-hoc branding practices of its days as a scrappy tech startup. Citrix reached out to Tenet Partners for help. Starting with a re-tuning of the brand positioning from functional-based (access) to a broader, benefit-driven strategy (infrastructure), Tenet’s team of strategists and designers worked together to translate the new direction into a brand identity that expressed openness, transparency and scale.

    Now that it was playing in a decidedly different league and appealing to a much broader market, meaningful connections with their customers were going to be key for success for Citrix. To that end, it was vital to create a more robust and clearly defined partnership and ingredient branding program. Tenet helped rationalize, structure and communicate the expanded program. The program was recently voted one of the best channel programs in the market.

    Citrix continues its growth trajectory, doubling their revenue to just under $3 billion in six years. When customer experience and business strategy align, the sky’s the limit.

  • Vantrix – Opening express lanes to quality mobile video experience

    Vantrix – Opening express lanes to quality mobile video experience

    Looking beyond the challenge to the opportunity that laid ahead, Vantrix, a company born out of the alliance of two leading Canadian industry innovators in optimization technologies, saw how the customer experience in the mobile video arena was falling short of its full potential. Technology hurdles stood in the way of optimized content – mobile TV, video on demand, multimedia alerts and messaging, user-generated content and video share – being delivered in a seamless fashion to audiences everywhere and on every mobile devices.

    Vantrix’s vision: change the paradigm by developing software that would enable content owners and service operators to optimize their media processing operations and give their customers the highest-quality media experiences on any device, at the lowest possible cost. Major corporations including ABC News, Orange, T-Mobile and The Weather Channel were ready for a solution.

    The beginning of a new era in telecom

    Vantrix was looking for a powerful way to signal its arrival and express the transformative nature of what the company was bringing the marketplace. Working with the executive leadership team and the organization’s investors, Tenet Partners repositioned Vantrix around its industry-leading technology and its ability to take something complex and reshape it into something simple. And this is where the Vantrix brand idea took root, in a simple yet almost revolutionary phrase: “We make mobile video work.”

    A vision for everyone to see

    Next, our design strategists explored a number of conceptual directions to support Vantrix’s future-focused strategy. The team quickly narrowed in on the human eye as a metaphor for what Vantrix delivered. The logo represents the impressive structure and function of the human eye. It alludes to both the end-user experience and the integrated, seamless way Vantrix works with its customers.

    Launched at the CTIA Wireless Conference in San Francisco, the new brand helped Vantrix capture imaginations and mindshare. It set the stage for them to define how multimedia content should be processed and exchanged over wireless networks. Today, Vantrix’s technology is part of everyday life for millions of mobile content consumers, worldwide, a testament to its ability to continue to “shape how the world experiences media”.