You’ve Rebranded… Now What?

By: Joanna Burgraf, Enova Studios Manager

Good ideas are a dime a dozen. What matters most with any idea is superior execution. The rebranding from Creative Marketing to Enova Studios was not an overnight implementation, it was in fact a year in the making. The rebrand was a natural progression into becoming a strategic creative partner to our clients (our clients are primarily Enova’s marketing team, though we work with all departments). We were already functioning like an in-house agency — renaming was an exercise to solidify that change.

What’s made the transition successful for us (it has been so successful that other teams around Enova are requesting that we present to their group about the rebrand) can be broken down into four key areas: skill, support, stability and systems.

Skill

The Studios is a hard-working, talented team.

Enova Studios has had a stable team for a couple of years. Our group of talented team members have many different types of skills: copy, design, social media, UX, code, content, photography, production and more. Because many of us have been here so long, we have in-depth company and product knowledge. For an in-house agency, in-depth company knowledge is one of the key differentiators and a competitive advantage against a traditional agency. Having knowledge of what’s been successful and what hasn’t is incredibly valuable information to share with our clients.

Support

Enova Studios has buy-in from relevant stakeholders.

Once the decision was made to rebrand, we worked for months to create the transition plan. It started out as a brainstorm, moved into a shared document and finally a presentation that could be rolled out to the team. We thought through how this change would impact our clients, the team itself and the higher level Enova corporate goals. We then identified the key people who we needed buy-in from and prepared mini-presentations on our rebranding objectives. For us, it took a handful of stakeholders to buy in to the idea and we were off to the races, rolling out the changes.

Stability

Enova Studios is already practicing as an agency.

As I mentioned above, we had been practicing as an agency for the previous 12 months, so the transition wasn’t jarring or unexpected; rather, it was exciting and sparked curiosity across the organization. We had already adopted the practice of presenting our clients with additional design options rather than exclusively executing on their mockups. We had already been looking at performance metrics. We had already been researching design and UX trends across our industry. The change that I am seeing now is that our clients are beginning to ask us to create out-of-the-box options for their projects from the get-go. We have arrived! Enova Studios has demonstrated that we have the specialized knowledge to help our clients meet their goals, and our clients are asking us to deliver on just that.

Systems

Enova Studios has project management systems in place.

All of the aforementioned would not have been possible without an effective project management tool. This is the single biggest trust builder — delivering high quality work and meeting deadlines. The tool isn’t important; what matters is that the tool works for your type of office. It can’t be overly complex nor too simplistic. It has to work with the way the work flows. We have been using Robohead for several years. The ability to have templated frameworks and timelines for our projects has proven incredibly valuable. We’re able to build in time for reviews and brainstorming. We hold our clients accountable to deadlines. When we can’t deliver on time, we let our clients know and negotiate new deadlines. This level of transparency and communication has built the trust, and that is the foundation by which we can now take chances with our creativity.

I am eager to watch the team’s capabilities and strengths unfold in this new direction! Stay tuned to future posts, where I’ll be sharing tips and tools on the day-to-day management of our in-house agency.

Enova Studios is a team chock-full of creative minds and curious professionals, eager to discuss the world of design, content, coding and more. Want to get in on the conversation? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at studios@enova.com.

Enova Studios is a full-service in-house creative agency. We partner with our brands to concept and create the ideas — big and small — that accomplish our shared goal: selling our products and building our business.