Performance: A Riverbed Rebrand (2015)

Business hates to wait, to guess, to be constrained, to be prevented from what’s possible.

As legacy enterprises evolved into hybrid enterprises, adding cloud to their on-prem infrastructures, they ran into the challenges of location and distance. How could they reconcile, integrate, and align data and apps, ensuring performance, while distributed around the globe? Enter The Application Performance Company.

In 2015, after an acquisition allowed us to expand the functionality of our application and network performance platform, we repositioned the company away from a traditional pure speed message (Old tagline: “Think Fast.”) to redefine the definition of performance. Using insights from customers and analysts and research from the annual brand health check, we crafted a new vision for our company (“To enable hybrid enterprises to transform application performance into a competitive advantage”) and a new strategy (“To offer the most complete platform to ensure applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues can be proactively detected and resolved before impacting business performance.”) Summed up in the brand positioning line “The Application Performance Company,” we were ready for a new brand to take this story to market.

We launched the new brand via an updated messaging architecture, a redesigned look and feel, and a global advertising campaign. Colleagues and partners were also given brand training to amplify the new positioning across all the customer contact points.

Our positioning, “The Application Performance Company,” captured how Riverbed’s platform erased the problems associated with distance and location, actually detecting and fixing problems before they impact business. We then turned to customers to validate this positioning through their success stories and help power up our ad campaign, bringing the new Riverbed story to life with clean, modern designs, and honest testimonials. Traveling across the US, UK, France, Germany, and Australia, we interviewed and photographed the IT leaders at global brands like Allianz, Siemens, Del Monte, JLL, Maersk, and Philip, capturing no-bull endorsements and no-fuss portraits, unearthing exactly how “Riverbed makes it possible.” With this campaign, we were connecting the c-suite to their peers, a critical step to building our brand’s credibility.

OUTCOME: The most visible expression of our new brand, the testimonial ad campaign, garnered 84 million global print impressions in such international pubs as Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist, and Forbes, 100 million global digital impressions on wsj.com, Economist.com, Forbes.com. and computerwoche.de and 66 million radio audience impressions. Additionally, the global IT leader testimony creative showed a 24% CTR, greatly exceeding the industry standard for B2B digital. Lastly, and most significantly, the campaign increased awareness among c-suite decision-makers, setting the stage for improved engagement by Riverbed’s and partners’ sales teams.