Share
I’m not sure there is anything more fun or rewarding in business than being part of a team tasked with creating a whole new brand from scratch. So, when Abaco was spun out of GE a little over a year ago, I guess I was excited—and just a tad intimidated.
When we were part of GE, we did very little—if any—branding work. We didn’t need to. When you’re with a company that has one of the most recognizable brands in the world, it’s not something you spend any time on.
With Abaco, it couldn’t be more different. We needed to create ourselves in the minds and imaginations of our target customers. Job one was, of course, our web site—the most visible element of who we are. It needed to both define and reflect how we wanted to be seen—but also, it needed to be a useful resource to our customers and prospective customers.
The web site will always be a work in progress. Its goal in the early days was primarily to establish our name, what we stood for, how we were different. We think that job is largely done: the marketplace now knows who we are, and what we do. We can now focus much more on what our customers really want to know about: our products.
Over the past year, you’ll have seen our site evolve from talking “about us” to telling the story of how our products can solve real customer problems. Increasingly, you’ll see these stories and our products front and center. We’re also fanatics about collecting usability data. You’ll notice small details on our site changing as we tweak it to make it the best customer experience we can deliver. We’re always looking for feedback and suggestions, so please send them to me.
Still much to do
But there’s been a whole lot more to what we’ve been doing over the past year than branding. Of course, we needed to rebrand much of our existing marketing collateral—brochures, data sheets, presentations, white papers and so on. We’re talking thousands of materials—no small feat! Thankfully, that exercise is largely complete—but something that became clear while we were doing it was how much more we needed to do, and how much better our collateral could be.
Hopefully, you’ll have noticed, for example, that we’ve published more white papers over the past six months than we probably did over the previous six years—and that we’ve given them a fresh, more modern design. Our customers are telling us those are a hugely valuable resource. You’ll find them here. We’ve also begun to place far more emphasis on the brochures our customers told us they needed—like our comprehensive Product Selection Guide. You’ll find our brochures here.
Our video content tends to be very popular, but our old videos needed much more than a simple re-branding. So, we’ve been hard at work rebuilding our video library on YouTube. We also recognize the changing ways in which our customers wish to engage with us and how individuals and organizations obtain news and views. That’s why we’ve put a lot of effort into social media with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
I have to say: we’re very proud of what we’ve achieved in a relatively short space of time. But: we’re far from resting on our laurels. We still have plenty we want to get done—constant improvement is the Abaco way. Our aim is to generate value for our customers while delivering the best customer experience in our industry and we’ll need to ensure that we continue to adapt to our customers’ changing needs.
It goes without saying: if there’s more, or different, that you think we should be doing, we very much want to hear about it.
