CloudStuff is thrilled to unveil ‘Trackier‘ as a new brand identity of vNative. The process of finding a new name and building a new identity is long, complicated and uncertain, In this post, I’ll explain why we decided it was time for vNative to find a new name, how we went about finding new ideas and testing them to make sure not to make the same mistakes again, and all the steps between selecting a name and building a new brand and identity. I knew that we were going to be starting our marketing from scratch, and doing the rebrand six months or a year from now would be a pain. It would interrupt the flow of everything we have going on from both a marketing and product standpoint. Why Rebrand? More than two years ago, my two co-founders (Udit Verma and Hemant Mann) and I had about ten minutes to find a name for a project we were about to pitch at a Startup Event. Our initial idea was to offer a revolutionary native content recommendation engine software to increase engagement time of users on websites, to help millions of website visitors around the world get content which they will like. We were throwing some buzzwords vaguely related to our idea in Google Translate. Then eureka moment happened and ‘vNative‘ was born.
In the following weeks after the event, We were very emotionally attached to the name vNative (it has been who we are in the last two years). Within the next 2-3 months, we quickly realised that people are more interested in tracking their ads/content performance. Some startups iterate from their first product and find new product applications or market segments.
Our name is confusing for quite a few of our first-time visitors. When they first arrive on our website, a lot of the users I meet during our test sessions think that we are a Native ads network. Our name really makes it hard for us to explain that we are Tech company and our product provide performance tracking for their CPA, CPI, CPS, etc campaigns and smoothly managing of their affiliates.
A few months ago, after two straight years of 100%+ annual growth, we looked around and realised that vNative had evolved to a point where we needed to refine how we communicate with the market, employees and the community at large. Specifically, it was becoming clear that our core messaging and visual identity hadn’t kept up with some big changes
- Our product vision has expanded far beyond native ads tracking and now solves more tracking problems than ever for our customers.
- We’re now serving over three different industries
- From larger companies to individual business owners, we have a wider variety of customer sizes.
Clearly, our need was to sharpen our identity, communicate more clearly on how we help our customers right now and provide a framework for thinking about how we can help them in the future. After our first brainstorming, no name sufficiently convinced us to pursue the process, and we let it drop for a few months, going back to running our business. We tried again last winter, ending up with a few potential names, that we started to test quite extensively. Now that we were going through all the trouble of finding a new name, we didn’t want to make the same mistakes again. So we consulted with BrandBucket and bought the name Trackier. Ingredients for a Successful SaaS Rebrand The real impact of our rebrand will be felt over months and years, but we’ve already counted one big win: our whole team is bought in and eager to embrace the new Trackier. They can see how it helps solve challenges they face, how it will help customers understand what we do, and how it will move the company forward. There were a few major elements of the project that contributed to that.
- A strong sense of purpose and clearly defined goals – Ours were: Create a clear and consistent way to describe why we exist. Deliver a more relevant message to the growing variety of customers we have. Foster an emotional bond between Trackier, employees and customers. Elevate our visual identity to convey our broader ambitions.
- A willingness to embrace change – For a process like this to work, everyone involved needs to be ready to challenge the status quo in the name of putting the whole team on a stronger footing for the future. Our team put some big ideas on the table, like changing our name. We didn’t adopt every idea, but knowing that no stone was left unturned gives us even more confidence in the work we’ve done.
The New Trackier Our new mission statement acknowledges our broader audience and the fact that we’ve grown beyond ads performance tracking and ad serving. And it highlights the common threads in what our products do and the value they deliver for customers. But it also narrows our focus by stating a couple of key differentiators:
Mission Statement: Trackier helps businesses grow by making companies smartly manage their affiliate, Optimize their campaign performance, and Protect from Affiliate Fraud, making it simple and easy for everyone. We make our customers look great online and keep them in front of people they know, automatically, so they can build stronger relationships, uncover new opportunities and stay focused on what they do best.
Trackier is all about “the people you know” as opposed to a pure lead-gen product, and we’re committed to done-for-you marketing because we know that our customers aren’t interested in tools they have to run themselves. That captures what we do now, and it lays down some broad guidelines for how we approach the future. Brand Identity In updating the look and feel of Trackier, we wanted to communicate our evolution to the market, modernise our aesthetic, and create a system that’s easier for ad networks and affiliates to work with. We started with our logo mark.
And, finally, our tagline. We used to say that Trackier is “Your Affiliate Network and campaign optimisation on Autopilot,” and that’s still true. In fact, that old gem may still make an appearance every now and again. But it’s a bit too broad for frequently use. Wrap-up We know that for our customers, the vast majority of transactions are driven by a happy customer coming back or referring to their friends. Because of that, we deeply believe that the best thing a business owner can do is nurture the relationships they’ve already worked hard to build. That is what all of our products do, and that is the bar that new products will have to meet if we’re going to build them. So where do we go from here? Trackier is going to continue to evolve the product. We’ll be launching new tools and eventually package everything under our Smart Affiliate Manager, Campaign Optimisation, Performance Automation or Fraud Detection. We look forward to better serving you 🙂
