Technology has been a business game-changer at every level — revolutionizing customer experience, enabling groundbreaking innovations, and accelerating the speed of business. Technology giants are expanding their reach while companies with decidedly non-tech histories like Maersk and even McDonald’s have reinvented themselves to excel in the digital era.
B2B tech companies need to…
In 2015, a year marked by unprecedented M&A activity in the technology industry, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (itself a spin-off) made headlines with its announcement of plans to spin-off its technology services operations and merge them with those of Computer Sciences. As then-Chief Executive Meg Whitman told it, the deal was…
Keeping the world safe from cybercrime is big business. In 2019, the cybersecurity market totaled $112 billion annually. By 2027, the market is expected to swell to more than $282 billion annually, an annual growth rate of over 12 percent, according to Fortune Business Insights. The reasons for this massive growth include the increasing prominence…
Innovation. It’s been a recurring theme in almost every one of our conversations with B2B companies looking to refresh their brands. From the CMO to the CEO, B2B executives have been laser-focused on building brands that convey innovation.
When did this word become so ingrained in our lexicon? According to Google Ngram, the…
When a company makes a major strategic pivot, such as M&A or entering a different category, leadership often ponders a new name, design language, and messaging. These are all important considerations, but too often one of the most crucial underlying aspects of a customer’s experience is overlooked—the company’s brand architecture…
As strategists and designers, we are always curious about the use of color in culture and business. Recently, we took a look at brand colors in the top 100 technology firms. While the range of colors and combinations is varied, we noted a few intriguing themes.
For tech company colors, blue is always true
Not…
Forrester researchers published a report about a new customer-centric era in business. As part of DeSantis Breindel’s ongoing relationship with Forrester, we’ve reviewed the report to summarize key findings for our readers — and offered our own analysis about what this change means for B2B brands.
Customer experience is king
Over the past…
According to the Harvard Business Review, “study after study puts the failure rate of mergers at somewhere between 70-90%.” More often than not, brand is not promoted or leveraged to provide unity, clarity and solidarity during this critical inflection point, yet brand can make all the difference between success and failure for the companies…
The traditional lines between technology and management consulting are blurring. And consulting firms of all sizes are trying to keep up, broadening the scope of their offering (often through acquisitions) to meet the increasing demand for technology solutions and services.
We first looked at this situation in 2015, when we read the TBR 2015 Professional…
A competitive review is an important part of any brand strategy initiative. It helps answer questions critical to a successful branding effort: How are competitors positioning themselves? What are the messages that consistently rise to the top? What is the white space that can be “owned” by a brand?
For dataxu, a client in the…
SailPoint, a worldwide industry leader in identity and access management, had succeeded in winning over technical buyers with its superior products. But it struggled to connect with the C-suite and business executives who were becoming increasingly involved in security and IT purchase decisions— and who did not prioritize identity management as a critical IT…
According to Dealogic, a record $962.6 billion worth of cross-border deals have been announced via 5,498 transactions so far this year. This represents a 38% increase in volume year-on-year ($696.1 billion in 2017 YTD), despite deal activity having dropped 18% over the same period (6,680 deals in 2017…
Today, innovation is everywhere we look, and in this fast-paced and increasingly digital world, we don’t just embrace it – we expect it. Recognizing this, brands have jumped on the opportunity to signal to their audiences that they, too, are innovators. But when everyone’s talking about innovation, branding and messaging around it can…
When B2B technology companies seek branding help, it’s often for a similar reason: their formerly product-focused, sales-driven organization needs a brand that goes beyond what they do and tells a larger story that elevates their position in the market. This quest to minimize the role of products often raises doubts internally. More…
Every year, Fortune ranks the world’s top companies across a range of criteria. Looking at the classic Fortune 100, the more recent list of Unicorns (private startups that are valued at $1 billion or more), and other lists, we were curious to see how color was used in the brand identities of these successful…
Millennials. Generation Y. Whatever you call them, consumer brands understand the importance of the huge cohort born between 1980 and 2000. Whether they think millennials are refreshingly confident and engaged, inappropriately self-centered and entitled, or some combination of the two, marketers realize they are critical to the success of consumer businesses, responsible for $600…
It’s not easy being a market leader, or even an established player, these days. Once upon a time, if you had a dominant market position you could count on holding the lead for years, if not decades. Pesky start-ups might nip at your heels, but it would be years until they had the…
Virtual reality. Artificial intelligence. Drones everywhere. One minute a new technology seems like the stuff of sci-fi. The next minute it’s this year’s hottest Christmas gift. We are inundated with the magic and wonder of innovative technology, even if we aren’t exactly sure how it will ultimately affect our everyday lives…