The Clevertouch rebrand, Why now?

Our tenth year has just come to a close, and our wider position in the world of marketing technology has never been more central to our progression.

We work in an industry in which marketers are constantly presented with new and innovative technologies that will supposedly make their lives easier.

However, the sheer volume of technology that's appeared has both overwhelmed and frustrated marketers who are forced to adapt fast to the changing faces of martech.

These technologies are there to create opportunities for marketers to expand their capability, proving their worth to the rest of the business, not clutter up their processes and complicate the message they're trying to communicate.

Our brand and philosophy needed to reflect this simple fact. Essentially, Intelligent engagement didn’t quite cut it anymore.

The previous brand revolved around the central premise of Intelligent Engagement, in particular Digital DNA.

We focused on campaigns and tracking customer behaviour, believing that with the right technology in place, prospect interaction would leave a trace of this DNA behind, and marketers, much like forensic scientists, would then analyse this DNA to make sense of the customer journey and improve their experience.

We were mainly focused on Marketing Automation, partnering with the leading platforms Marketo, Pardot, Marketing Cloud, and Eloqua.

However, as the market expanded and our customers began to advance in their use of technology, so too did our capabilities. We realised that we were missing key martech initiatives such as Customer Experience, Insight, Information Management and Integration. Subsequently, we moved away from exclusively Marketing Automation (although this is still a huge part of our business), and into the realms of Sales Enablement, Strategic Content Management, and Martech Analytics. We ceased to be a marketing consultancy focused on a single category, and instead one that encompasses the wider martech landscape.

We began to think more about what we really provide our clients. What problems are we solving for these organisations, and how have we gone about delivering this to them?

With this in mind, our new marketing initiatives in 2020 will be centred around one core aim, to make sense of martech. Throughout the year we will embark on an extensive exploration of what we offer, and the business will be presented under our new ‘Love Martech’ brand which is underpinned by our three core principles: Simplify, Connect and Inform.

We started with the initial concept of simplification, this revolving around our consistency of message as a single entity. Our new brand has 5 core categories within its business model, yet we had well over 100 different descriptors of our software and services spread across the company. This amalgamation of ‘stuff’ (Yes, ‘stuff’ needs to return to the fold of brilliant words, lets break the Oxbridge rubric together) was disparate, disorganised, and sadly disconnected from our audience. It simply, well, needed simplifying…

We also needed to show our clients the full extent of what we can do, from producing cutting edge software that makes the day to day operation of organisations like Fujitsu easier, to benchmarking processes that enable our clients to know exactly where they stand against their peers.

But this needed to be done in less words.

Minimalism is making a comeback.

These 5 categories, while distinct, are integral to each other. We want to show our clients the importance of all martech, be that data management software (we made our own called the Pardot Data Extractor, it’s pretty cool), or Marketing Cloud. Our offering even extends to training our clients in becoming more proficient with the platforms inhouse.

According to Gartner, 2020 will be the first year that the spend on Marketing Technology will exceed the spend on Marketing Resource. This is a clear indication that martech is on an enormous growth trajectory, and informing and educating our clients is a high priority in contributing to this expansion. We are there to inform you, the new marketer, in how to make the most of your martech, be that through aid or education.

A huge part of the new brand is our championing of the Martech Spine™ over the martech 'stack'. The martech landscape is full of a broad range of software, and the reality is that some of these are more important than others. The martech stack is an incoherent mess of jumbled up thinking, while the Martech Spine™ is both clear, coherent, and prioritises some technologies above others.

Most importantly, it works.

The point here is that all these different platforms, ideas and services work together under the remit of marketing technology, and Clevertouch exists to steer you successfully through your journey with them, joining up the dots where the vendors can’t. That’s what was missing from before. We wanted to make clear that we aren’t simply a services business focused on just Marketing Automation, but a leader in all things martech. We really care about this stuff and our brand needed to reflect that.

"Clevertouch exists to help you make sense of martech."

The new message of the rebrand described above has hopefully shown you the variety of martech offerings we provide. However, if you wanted to read more, our CEO, in a heartfelt memo to the business, explained our love of martech and why it felt like the right time for change. In all honesty, I think it would be impossible to do our rebrand justice in just the one article. This is a part of the journey and not the ending, and we sincerely hope you decide to join us on it.