In the lead up to On Demand 2008 Xerox announced XMPie would be "revealing its fresh, new look for the first time at next week's On Demand Conference and Exposition in Boston." The new brand was not incorporated into their trade show booth at the show and I did not see any collateral with "a fresh, new look," but I heard from many analysts covering the event that the new look was "so fresh, so clean."
I had completely forgot about the rebranding until Eliot Harper, Digital Printing and VDP Blogger provided a look at the new XMPie logo and brand. Eliot also offered some insider information on product rebranding that's in the works:
Head over to the VeeDeePee blog for a look at the new logo. Special Note: This blog post is presented in the true spirit of April Fool's Day. None of it is true, nor does it intended to reflect the strategy and intent of any real person or company.An insider informs me that the new brand identify is just one step of a larger project to to fully integrate XMPie within Xerox Corporation. The name 'XMPie' is actually a legacy acronym from the original company tagline "X-Media Personalisation in eBusiness". However, when the 'eBusiness' buzzword lost popularity during the dot-com crash, the tagline was dropped. But, Xerox now plan to re-introduce the acronym, changing the tagline to "Xerox Makes Personalisation Incredibly Easy". It doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but maybe it will catch on...
It's also rumoured that XMPie will be adapting their product names to bring them inline with Xerox's product naming convention. Similar to Xerox's DocuTech, DocuColor and DocuPrint product names, we can expect to see uDirect being renamed to 'DocuDirect', uImage to 'DocuImage' and so on.
Discussion
By Moe Farsheed on Apr 02, 2008
I don’t speak as a marketing guru, nor do I understand much about branding, but one thing I and others at MindFireInc understand is customer; customer service and customer support.
Offering Integrated Marketing Campaigns to one's customer is not necessarily "easy". Unfortunately, in today's world, we see some companies adding "easy" to their name to divert attention from the task at hand of offering this difficult, yet very critical and needed service.
In an interview with Charlie Rose couple of months ago, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon stated the following:
"In the past some businesses may have relied on un-knowledgeable customers being part of their profit stream. They may have charged a price that may have been a little higher than competition. The Internet has changed all of that. That does not work anymore"
Well, Jeff spoke about price in his world, but in our world, it is all about value and service.
We must all strive to provide better, more personalized value each and every day. We must carefully listen to our customers to see what their needs are and strive to deliver that value at a competitive price point.
I am not suggesting branding as a bad thing, but stating that everyone in this business knows what the PSPs need. They need world class software, world class support, world class training and world class hand holding. Any company that is willing to invest in these areas will reap the rewards.
One example that I am aware of is our own company MindFireInc. We have been able to sign up 400 PSPs over the past 2.5 years with an old website and not great branding. However, what we do have is a group of incredible, focused individuals that are out to serve the customers each and every day.
We have invested all of our resources in offering the best product with unparalleled customer support and training at an affordable price. More importantly, we never forget who is our boss! When our clients talk, we listen!
Its all about the value we deliver to our clients.
Moe Farsheed
CEO
MindFireInc
949.375.4460