Momentum Episode 12:
Branding and Rebranding

When you're looking into a new company, what's one of the first things you notice? It's services, functionality, pricing, user experience. Probably not the very first thing you likely notice is their brand, which can tell you a lot about all the above. Today we'll dive into what branding means for a business and why here at Jotform we recently updated our own branding.

Welcome to Momentum, a podcast by Jotform where we talk about technology, productivity tips, insights, and best practices that help us move forward in business and in life. My name is Elliot, your host, and today I'm here once again with Jotform's Vice President of Marketing Communications, Chad Reed.

I feel like it's been a while. Good to have you back.

It has been a while. I'm excited to be here.

It has, and it's good to have you here. Plus, we have this nice new podcast studio now for those who are watching on YouTube, which spoiler warning has our brand new logo on it.

Let's get straight to it. Obviously, branding is a lot of things, but at its core, it's marketing, one of the most important pieces of marketing a company has in fact. So as the head of marketing here at Jotform, what does branding mean to you and can you explain to our audience why it's so important?

I mean, not to overstate the obvious, but branding is your identity. It's how your customers see you. It carries enormous weight. It's your first impression, it's also your lasting impression. It's how people are going to remember you even if they have no direct association with your brand. It's how you're remembered, so extremely important.

Yeah, it's how you actually envision the brand and see it in your mind's eye even when you're not interacting with it. The impression, I think, is everything there and it speaks volumes to what the company actually does.

Why do companies rebrand? Why do they change it up? What causes that and how often does that typically happen for a company?

I did a very lazy Google search before this podcast on how often companies typically rebrand and the first result said seven to ten years.

Well, it's going to vary a lot depending on industry and the reasons for rebranding. I think there are a myriad of reasons for rebranding. Some of them are just an executive decided to get a fresh look and they've implemented a change. Or maybe your identity as a company changes or what you're offering or putting out to the world has changed since the inception of the brand, and that's a good cause for rebranding.

In other cases, it's just reminding customers that you're still innovating, still relevant, still fresh, and that's a great reason for rebranding. But you see all three. Some companies wait maybe a little bit too long or longer than the seven to ten year window, and then some companies just change for the sake of changing, even before their new logo is even caught on to customers, they go ahead and make a new one. So yeah, it really depends.

I thought that seven to ten year time frame was kind of an interesting one. I'm not sure if that even holds true in our space, in the SaaS productivity app space. Technology is changing all the time, right?

Yeah, it's always going to depend. It's a matter of evolving with the times and I think it's reflective of the product or service your company is offering because if that stays static, your brand is probably going to suffer. But as you update your product and services, you stay relevant with the times. I think branding is reflective of that, so that time frame makes sense.

One interesting thing to note about branding, kind of the pinnacle of it, is how you use Google. Your first line of this, I googled, did a lazy Google search about this. You know you've made it as a brand when you become a verb, like someday I'd love to be able to say, 'Oh, I Jotformed' or something like this. Or Kleenex, I think, is another good example of that with tissues.

I think that's the pinnacle of branding when it becomes the verb that it's associated with. It's a pretty rare distinction for a few, but Google is a great example of it. We see on a much smaller scale, we do see components of that. I always get really happy when someone publicly says, 'Oh, we'll accept your order, you just need to fill out this Jotform,' as opposed to this online form or this Jotform form. When there's an implied sense that they know what Jotform is, that's kind of a win and we're fortunately seeing that more and more.

Absolutely, and that's always exciting for us because people are making an assumption that other people know what Jotform is, and it spreads. They feel out of the loop if they don't know. So exactly, it's all part of the process.

Are there some examples you can give of a good rebrand and maybe a rebrand that sort of flopped?

Good rebrands, just through the lens of our space or our peer companies, I thought Mailchimp did a fantastic rebrand. Monday.com had a really interesting or important rebrand. They had a maligned brand before they rebranded their full name as Monday.com. I think they were Depulse pre-2017, something totally different, and they completely overhauled and now everyone knows what Monday.com is. I think they did a really fantastic job.

One that comes to memory is Asana. They just had a visual identity shift with their logo. They kept a small element with their dots but completely changed the logo, the interface, the colors, everything else. I think they executed it well and carried that through with their progression as a company.

It goes on and on. I think design trends now are focusing on simplicity and minimalism, a little bit. There are definitely a lot of really great examples.

As far as famous flops, they're really funny. Obviously, locally here, Gap had a really bad rebrand. I read that it cost the company about a hundred million dollars to go through that failed rebranding exercise and they only kept the new logo for six days. That's what you don't want to do. That's why you want to vet beforehand rather than rolling a dice like that.

If you'd asked me to make a logo, I would have probably come up with that or something slightly better. It was far, had no real purpose or carryover from what they were doing. It was just, I don't know, obviously they caught a lot of flack for that. It was historically a really bad one.

Maybe any press is good press in a sense. There were six days and all the headlines and we're talking about it a decade later. Maybe it was worth 100 million.

There was a company I read about or saw a meme about on Reddit, a Japanese-based company, not Nintendo, can't remember exactly which one. They went through a whole exercise about their rebranding. They brought on a really famous consulting agency who'd done some famous rebranding around the world. At the end of the exercise, they settled on a rebrand that was almost exactly the same but one corner was rounded instead of squared, and that was literally the only difference.

It got a lot of flack because people said they spent tens of millions of dollars to achieve the exact same look. An interesting response was that they had to go through the process to spend that money, do the vetting, and realize they were actually in good shape. If they did something different, it would alienate audiences and still chew the brand. So as needless as it was that they didn't change anything, they got that level of vetting and were happy with the outcome.

That shows where your priorities lie as a brand. If you go through the process and people still like your brand, that's its own validation. Lots of different ways to look at it.

Coca-Cola has a fantastic brand. Their logo has not changed significantly in a hundred years. They haven't gone the minimalist route because they still have the typography, which is not the trend many companies are doing. It's interesting, but it's so ubiquitous there's probably a very good reason they haven't done that yet.

An interesting brand story is sort of a flop and also a brand strengthening example: Pizza Hut. They got tagged as a branding flop back in 2009 because they very poorly decided to rebrand as The Hut to attract millennials who were just texting. It reminded me of Jabba the Hutt every time. It was not well executed. I really hated their logo before that; it was really busy and added colors.

Recently, they did something where they pulled on nostalgia heartstrings with Craig Robinson in ads, pulling up the full aesthetic of what Pizza Hut was back when generations before me were kids. It's a fantastic re-rebrand where they've reintroduced something. It's funny how things have gone full circle, but it's how people are looking at design now, going back to simplicity. Their older logo is simple and iconic, and that's their modern identity too.

I think it's timing too. I read an article judging the commercials for the Super Bowl this year, and a lot were based on nostalgia, probably because of COVID and world traditions, having that little bit of nostalgia is like comfort food almost. Brands are catching on that this is the time to go back and remind us of some of those old days.

Speaking of pizza, branding encompasses a lot, including taglines. The pizza tagline that always got me is Little Caesars' 'Pizza Pizza.' It's literally at the end of their commercials and has stuck in my mind annoyingly. Whenever pizza comes up, it's the little voice of that guy in the Little Caesars ad going 'Pizza Pizza.' You cannot get simpler than that. I don't know how much money they paid, but it works and sticks with me.

What are you trying to say back on topic?

No, but one totally random question I wanted to bring up because I've always been curious: why do you think Monday.com rebranded to include '.com' instead of just saying Monday?

Above my pay grade. I've wondered that too. I'm sure it creates some complications because it has to. You can't own Monday, right? Maybe they want people to type in Monday.com into the search bar. It's just more guaranteed to bring them up because of the dot-com and because it's their website address.

Also, branded searches of people looking for a company without typing it into the URL. We see this with Jotform all the time. I'm guilty even periodically of Googling Jotform to log in, which is ridiculous but I do it regularly. Maybe they're trying to combat that early on and fight people just Googling Monday because you're not going to compete as a SaaS company against a literal day of the week. That's true; it's good for them to identify that.

Moving forward on this track, let's dive a little bit more into our own rebrand. Maybe you can shed some light for the audience. This rebrand happened back in October 2021. Shedding some light on the context behind our rebrand, what motivated it, and what we're hoping to get from it.

It was a really long process, going back years of discussion and iterations, landing on what Jotform is now and how to convey that accurately. The Jotform of 2022 is quite different than the Jotform of 2009 or 2012 or whatever iteration of our previous logo was. We wanted the look and feel of the brand to match what the product has become and what the customers have evolved into.

We hadn't rebranded in a while. We had a few rebrands early on but then had been static with the same look for a while. I think you actually brought a prop of the original Jotform logo for those watching on YouTube. This is the very first Jotform logo, one of the second or third, but it started morphing.

If you look at that compared to the current logo, it's a lot of evolution, completely different. It was a bit busier. This is the first shirt I got when I joined the company, and even by that point, it was a little outdated. We had refreshed our look. I'm actually wearing another relic of the past, completely unintentionally, just a comfortable shirt.

This was our old logo, our old pencil icon, which we had for a while until we rebranded last year. It was time for change. None of the rebranding meant our old logo was bad or didn't serve a purpose; it certainly did. Our brand has always been rooted in approachability. The old logo was very approachable, rounded, and warm colors like orange conveyed friendliness. It aligned well with what we were as a company.

For the longest time, Jotform didn't even have a homepage. You could use Jotform without creating an account. It doesn't get more approachable than that. We had a mascot, Podo the friendly cat, which you might have seen on our media page if you're an avid Jotform user, though I don't use them as much anymore.

It was also a sign of the times because Mailchimp, Asana, and several SaaS companies rebranded in the last few years. There's a trend toward sharper, cleaner designs that are still warm, friendly, and approachable. We might also be trying to appeal to a more enterprise-focused audience or broaden our scale and play both sides of it.

We didn't want to change just because our competitors were rebranding in droves. We noticed that at least a dozen rebranded recently, like Keap, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Trello, Asana, and some competitors have rebranded multiple times. Some even changed their tagline and core messaging. We wanted to be deliberate and do it for the right reasons.

In the last three years, our product is not the same product it was prior, and that needed to be shown visually too. One key driver is that the form is now much more than just a form; there's much more substance.

Once we decided to rebrand, we hired a design consultancy agency to kickstart the process, help with copy blocks, and create visual identities. We liked their work but believed we had unbelievable design talent within Jotform to do the same exercise. The agency helped us get started and facilitated interviews to understand what people perceive the brand as now and how it speaks to them.

Starting with customer research and vetting is important because if everyone loves your brand, maybe you don't go through the process. But if there's room for improvement, then you do. We brought the process in-house with two aspects of brand redesign: the design aspect, which is the look, shape, feel, and logo, and the copy rebrand, which is changing the tagline, slogan, and overall positioning. These need to work in harmony.

The design process was different for us because our core design team is housed in Turkey and worked somewhat independently but with the same information as the marketing team. Our old tagline was 'The easiest online form builder,' which served a phenomenal purpose 10 years ago when forms were difficult to create. Fast forward to 2022, the assumption is SaaS products are easy to use, so calling ourselves the easiest way to do something devalues us and is not a strong message anymore.

We looked inward at what Jotform provides: the most integrations, best security, phenomenal mobile capabilities, Jotform Tables, PDF editor, and more. We wanted to incorporate the word 'powerful' and include productivity. We landed on the tagline 'Powerful forms. Get it done.' It was a combined effort and landed on during a messaging retreat with our CEO.

We did hack weeks for both design and marketing teams. Hack weeks are periods where teams focus solely on a project, like creating a new identity or nailing down messaging. It creates urgency, competition, and team building. Everyone worked hard and produced amazing work, even those who aren't writers by trade. It was a unification exercise that gave us a foundation for the messaging retreat where we finalized the tagline.

We settled on 'Powerful forms. Get it done.' Regarding design, our lead designer spearheaded the effort with many concepts. We kept refining until we saw the bigger picture. The current logo is a complete overhaul but carries over the pencil icon, which bridges past and future. The colors and roundness reflect that we're not just forms; we have multiple products, tiers, and use cases. The logo's flexibility reflects different products.

One overdue change was the lowercasing of the 'f' in Jotform. It was a point of contention for a long time. We used to coach publications and employees to capitalize the 'f,' but no one referred to Jotform with a lowercase 'f.' It was simpler and cleaner to lowercase it, and after about a week, we all settled into it. I can't imagine going back to an uppercase 'f' now.

For those interested in our graphic design overhaul, we have a video and blog article on our YouTube channel and blog that take you through the process and where we arrived.

We have the brand settled on, know what we want to look like and say. Now it's a process of redoing everything. It's not just changing the logo. We needed a new landing page, a whole website overhaul including changing all uppercase 'f's to lowercase, new graphics, copy blocks, videos, PR announcements, press kits, and blog posts. We treated it like a product launch because it was our rebranded product.

I completely underestimated all the work needed. I've done smaller scale rebrands before where you just change the color and update the main navigation, but this was not the case. There were hundreds of pages with the old logo, blogs, headers, and all products have their own designs that needed configuring and implementing site-wide. Thousands of mentions of Jotform needed the 'f' changed to lowercase.

Thankfully, we automated much of it, but there was still a lot of manual work. That was the easier side because there are also external sites, partners, third-party websites, review sites, social media profiles, Glassdoor, and more where Jotform is listed. Making a list of where to update the logo was substantial and took a huge team effort.

This wasn't just a marketing or design effort; it involved product, growth, support — all hands on deck to execute the rebrand thoroughly. We didn't want a half-assed launch with people finding the old logo. We wanted to be thorough on every touchpoint we could control.

It was exciting from a marketing perspective. We treated it like a product launch. We announced it, coinciding with reaching 10 million users and our 15th year in business. It was an amazing time to remind people we're hitting milestones and ready for the future, all packaged into our rebrand.

We created a new advertisement with the highest production value we've put into a video, setting the stage for future videos. We had PR opportunities, new advertising, blog posts, and billboards. It was our first dabble with out-of-home advertising. We wanted Jotform to be known by those who don't know us, not just users.

For those watching on YouTube, I have a mini version of our Jotform billboard that was out for a few weeks last October in San Francisco. We got great feedback from people who saw our new brand and thought it looked good.

It was rewarding for everyone involved. The marketing team and others really stood behind the rebrand. If you're with a company that rebrands all the time, people might not get it, but everyone was genuinely on board. Leadership communicated why we were doing it, and during demo days, everyone was impassioned and proud of the new message and look.

The billboard in San Francisco was a cool moment for me as an employee and many others. It was a milestone to get that out there. Our team in Turkey saw pictures of their work on billboards in an international hub, which was really cool.

We also got rebranded swag, which we sent to partners and employees. I have a shirt and socks with the new logo, which are very comfortable. Not sure if the socks are for sale, but they should be.

Thinking about the entire journey, what was the single biggest challenge and the most rewarding part of the whole thing?

There were many challenges. Getting consensus is always difficult. Our CEO was very involved and opinionated. Many people liked different things, so choosing the best ideas was tricky. It’s hard to turn down good ideas, but we went with what we did.

The best part was the payoff. More people know about Jotform now and are excited about it. It was great to have interviews during the process and say, 'You might have seen our billboards on Highway 101.' It lent us credibility in recruiting and was cool to hear one-off stories from people who saw our ads.

It's exciting to see the ecosystem grow. Every ubiquitous brand had to start somewhere. Getting awareness out there has been rewarding for many reasons.

Ultimately, we got awareness, relevancy of our brand and product suite, and powerful tools. Anything else unexpected or unanticipated?

Nothing unexpected. It’s amazing to have a new brand that doesn’t feel like a burden or misaligned with future goals. We achieved what we wanted. Many companies get blowback after rebranding, but we didn’t. We even got recognition months later, like being listed among the best rebrands of 2021 alongside Fortune 500 companies.

People are resistant to change, but we didn’t get negative feedback. We even got recognition from a tech design blog without reaching out. That was a great validation and shows the significance of our changes.

Based on everything discussed, what would be your recommendation to other companies looking at a rebrand?

Be deliberate. Do your due diligence and do it for the right reasons. Ask yourself why you’re rebranding. Hopefully, it’s not just because you grew sick of the color. Think about it through the eyes of your customers or potential customers, not just because you’ve seen the logo too much.

Don’t rush it. Taking your time and having it feel right before launching is smart. It shouldn’t be a rushed decision or something knocked out in a week. Be patient. Work hard and take your time; it will pay off.

Anything else we missed?

I don’t think so. Visit Jotform.com to see it for yourself or just look at the logo. We had a great time rebranding, are proud of our new brand, and stand behind it. We hope you do as well. Thanks for tuning in today and we'll catch you all later.