A New Name, A New Brand Identity, And A New Energy

Concerns about Syslink Xandria’s name started with its own employees. Customers, they said, were confused about Syslink’s product offering and didn’t understand why the company and its product shared the same name. The solution to that confusion was easy: Find a new name.

A truly memorable name needs to connote meaning without clutter or verbosity. To understand what Syslink Xandria’s new name should communicate, we started the renaming process with a brand personality exercise to help identify those most-important brand traits. But identifying those traits and selecting a name that somehow conveys them is only the beginning of the process. Due diligence must be completed to make sure the domain name is available and, just as importantly for a global company, those language translation issues aren’t going to cause a public relations nightmare somewhere down the road.

This foundational branding work culminated in a fresh, intuitive, and uncluttered website for Avantra — one focused on getting this new message out to the market.

The initial plan was to launch a fully redesigned site, but time and resource constraints meant those plans had to change. However, we didn't let that constrain our enthusiasm or creativity. Instead, we dug into the data and created a phased, iterative approach, batching the pages based on their visitor traffic and importance to the site. We then relaunched the most important pages first, followed by batches of less-visited pages.

Now that the leaders at Avantra have a new story to tell and a new way to tell it, they have taken on new energy and run with it—incorporating that new look and new messaging into new brand videos, new tradeshow booths, digital campaigns, and even social media graphics.