Brand Makeovers: Grant Polachek Of Atom On The 5 Things You Should Do To Upgrade and Re-Energize Your Brand and Image
Don’t forget customer service — No matter what changes you make, keep your customer service top-notch whether that means informing your customers of the changes to the brand before they find out publicly. Excellent customer service is what leads to happy clients, positive reviews, and a thriving business.
As a part of our series about “Brand Makeovers” we had the pleasure to interview Grant Polachek.
Grant Polachek is the Head of Branding at Inc. 500 company Atom, a top naming platform with 50,000+ customers, from early-stage startups across the globe to large corporations, including Nestlé, Philips, Hilton, Pepsi, and AutoNation.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit more. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
My career path was winding. For me it has always been important to work on projects that are interesting and challenging. I started my career as a martial arts instructor with leadership roles at some of the most successful karate schools in the midwest. At one point, I planned to be a teacher, but that path seemed too rigid, without a lot of ability to carve my own way.
Then, early in my career I started a boutique marketing agency with a friend. This was in the fairly early days of social media marketing. So many businesses were rushing to try to figure out digital marketing. That’s how I got into it.
Can you share a story about the funniest marketing or branding mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Early on in my career, I had not yet mastered the project kickoff process. At Atom, we have built an excellent client kickoff process that includes a detailed interview, project brief creation, brief alignment, and checkin cycles. However, this has taken a long time to master.
When I started, the process was much more ad hoc. This led to one of the most comical conversations of my professional career.
I was delivering the first draft of a website redesign. And as everyone in the profession knows, you have to do the big reveal. And the reaction was — what everyone experiences sometimes — that the client did not like it, which is fine. But here’s where the conversation becomes almost slapstick.
Grant: “What do you not like about it?”
Client: “I don’t know.”
Grant: “Is it the overall design and feel?”
Client: “I don’t know.”
Grant: “How do you feel about the fonts?”
Client: “I don’t know.”
Grant: “Do you like the image style?”
Client: “I don’t know.”
Grant: “You like the messaging, right? You had approved this previously.”
Client: “I don’t know.”
Grant: “Do you have any thoughts about what would make it better?”
Then I got the dreaded response for any creative.
Client: “I’ll know it when I see it.”
This was the epitome of failed creative communication, and it led me on a quest to perfect my kickoff and collaboration process, which of course will never be perfect, but based on client feedback today, is much much better.
Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Is there a takeaway or lesson that others can learn from that?
This year, there was a point where I felt like I knew what I was doing and it may still not be true. But the lesson is to just stick with it. Getting a degree or taking a course won’t make you an expert; having 2 years of experience won’t make you an expert. I felt that at the 15-year mark that I knew what I was doing and that there’s still a lot to learn. My takeaway is that other people might be better experts in many areas but you do your best and learn from others — surround yourself with smart people; by the sheer work itself and consistency over time, you may actually get pretty good at what you do.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
We recently did a rebrand — Squadhelp became Atom. We did so because we understand the importance of a world-class brand and its impact on business results. Squadhelp was a great brand and name for what we used to focus on — crowdsourcing business names with the help of a large creative community. But, Atom helps us take everything to the next level. With Atom, we can confidently bet on ourselves. Atom is an inspiring, memorable, and innovative name that people can get excited about. I am super excited about our new mission and our expanded vision. It will help people because Atom is a full startup ecosystem for ambitious new businesses, providing the brand building blocks every startup needs to thrive, starting with the perfect domain. The biggest thing is that we are a marketplace — not only will we help a lot more startups launch with ease, we will also help our stakeholders, find better clients, and in the process, become more successful.
What advice would you give to other marketers to thrive and avoid burnout?
To thrive, you have to be consistent, be willing to take risks, and be ready to fail. You’re not gonna thrive on your first experiment — you will fail more than you succeed, especially in the little things like tests and ideas. To avoid burnout, you need to do two things — I talk a lot about Zen mind with my team. To me it means you show up, do your absolute best, do excellent work, and that’s it. It’s not always about the results because those might be out of your control sometimes. Your whole job as a marketer may not work or you may not have a great product or a great team. While you need to take responsibility and not make excuses, nothing replaces doing great work over a long period of time. And despite all the highs and lows, you have to take delight in the work itself. When our rebrand was done, we received predominantly positive feedback. But there’s still a laundry list of things to be done and problems remain. It would be easy to not be excited but you have to pause and celebrate.
Ok, let’s now jump to the core part of our interview. In a nutshell, how would you define the difference between brand marketing (branding) and product marketing (advertising)? Can you explain?
The essence of brand marketing is creating a unified experience that links your vision with your customers. One of my favorite ways to understand a brand is the human experience — we experience things within the continuum of the day. We experience toothpaste while brushing, car while driving, coffee while working and so on. The human mind is set up to categorize and to filter through mass amounts of data. So, in brand marketing a huge component is building a link between who you want to be (vision) and how people experience it. You do that with symbols, colors, short slogans, visual input and most importantly, alignment between the big picture and the audience. Product marketing does live within the brand so your focus should be on the experience it defines for your audience. It’s the same reason copywriters are encouraged to focus on the fears and dreams of people. I remember hearing from Frank Kern — a great marketer early on in my career, something to the tune of how the number one way to sell a product is to envision someone using it and believing that it would help them.
Can you explain to our readers why it is important to invest resources and energy into building a brand, in addition to the general marketing and advertising efforts?
There are many articles that will attribute a % of revenue to branding and I would say anybody who grew up with the early iPod and iPhone commercials and understands the success of Apple would be hard pressed not to see the value of a brand in its role with revenue. If we correctly understand a brand — it is the backdrop of the business. I started thinking about this many years ago — from a customer perspective, predominantly a brand is a reality altering experience and an irresistible offer in its best form. Starbucks wanted to bring the European cafe to America and as they started, they had wifi, cool music, ambiance — that’s the brand. You can be doing it via commercials, digital platforms or anything but that ambience you create — that’s brand. And if people want to be there as part of that experience, you will make money. No matter how good your offering is, if the experience does not align with the customer you won’t be that successful.
The Starbucks brand is its experience; the Fruit Loops brand is the Toucan Sam.
Let’s now talk about rebranding. What are a few reasons why a company would consider rebranding?
When looking at a rebrand, two factors are critical: what are you moving away from and what are you moving toward because either one gone wrong can botch the rebrand.
A successful rebrand moves away from:
- Brands that are becoming outdated and tired (Dunkin Donuts).
- Brands that make a big mistake or have an ongoing series of failures (Meta).
- Brands that align with an old business mission and vision (Upcoming: Squadhelp to Atom).
- Brands that could be more powerful and meaningful (Upcoming: Squadhelp to Atom).
A successful rebrand moves toward:
- A brand that is seen as unique (USP).
- A brand that is seen as powerful (is it a “good” brand?).
- A brand that is seen as relevant (why rebrands like Abrdn feel they’re targets of corporate bullying).
- A brand that has a clear and exciting vision for the future.
- A brand that aligns clearly with the business mission and trajectory.
Are there downsides to rebranding? Are there companies that you would advise against doing a “Brand Makeover”? Why?
If you have a good brand, you don’t need to rebrand. A rebrand is always going to cause some sort of commotion — you have to reintroduce your customer to the brand; you have to take the risk that your audience may not like the new brand, whether it’s 5% or 15% or 30% you will upset some people. It is a huge undertaking so you must do it for the right reasons. An example is Fiverr — their business model and what they originally started with ($5 gigs) is not the case anymore but it’s still a cool, modern and short name.
Can you share 5 strategies that a company can do to upgrade and re-energize their brand and image”?
- Get a great name — a domain in particular. Here are some great ones: https://hilcodigital.com/domains/. As a naming expert, there’s a reason we went with a four-letter.com domain name. And many others have followed this strategy in the past. Intercom was intercom.io before it became intercom.com.
- Get your visual branding elements right — This refers to the logo, colors and overall UI of your website. Your customer’s core experience needs to be aligned with your brand. If you’re a classic brand, customers should feel classic; a modern brand should feel modern, and an outlier should feel like one. Aligning your core elements with how you want to be perceived is an incredibly powerful aspect of the business. A great example is Warby Parker. In fashion, where most people want to be modern and trendy, they have been exceedingly successful with a very classic name. It doesn’t feel old, their colors are clean, it’s a simple classic brand and the name, logo, colors everything aligns with that.
- Focus on engagement (reenergize) — Make sure you run campaigns that actually care about engagement. Whether it’s a campaign for philanthropy or social, it may not always be directly related to making money or telling your story but you should focus on building a true following and then leverage that to get people excited. Toms’ “One-for-One” campaign, when it first came out, is a good example.
- Conduct tests — At Atom, we strongly believe in audience testing. Do that for your brand image too. You need to see what’s actually working — it can be totally different from what you thought would work or be the same but you must test. When we did our rebrand, we were sold on a couple of names but upon audience testing, we found that others didn’t approve those names. You never know what you will find about your brand when you take a step away from it and ask others.
- Don’t forget customer service — No matter what changes you make, keep your customer service top-notch whether that means informing your customers of the changes to the brand before they find out publicly. Excellent customer service is what leads to happy clients, positive reviews, and a thriving business.
In your opinion, what is an example of a company that has done a fantastic job doing a “Brand Makeover”? What specifically impresses you? What can one do to replicate that?
Reebok recently did a makeover for its Reebok Answer III, originally launched in 1999. This is part of their strategy to reintroduce classics. Nostalgia is a big trend in rebranding right now, and Reebok is tapping into that with the Answer III and Shaq Attaq. Nostalgia branding works because it invokes feelings of comfort and connection among the audience. So, think about what you can refresh while still linking it to something from the past. It doesn’t have to be a full rebrand but maybe a style or colors or images that you can integrate into your brand marketing that evoke nostalgia.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
The unsung hero. For most of my life I have written poetry — poorly — as a personal creative outlet. Many years ago, I wrote a title called, The unsung hero, with the line, “who seldom get a song”. There are so many great people who will never have a statue, an award, or a social following. In a world where 1 in 4 young people want to be influencers, I’d love to start a movement that helps people develop reverence for such unsung heroes and a quiet, simple life.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
The quote I have sitting on my desk is from Mother Theresa. It’s pretty intense, but I’ll share it with you: “Work without love is slavery.” What is love? To care about another. To want the best for another. To be willing to be uncomfortable to make someone else’s life better. Great companies make people’s lives better. Great leaders make people’s lives better. Make it your life’s goal to make someone’s life better — even if it’s only a few people.
How can our readers follow you online?
https://twitter.com/grantpolachek
https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantpolachek
Thank you so much for these excellent insights! We wish you continued success in your work.
Brand Makeovers: Grant Polachek Of Atom On The 5 Things You Should Do To Upgrade and Re-Energize… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.