Avid Ramps Up Rebranding Efforts Prior To New Product Announcements
Avid, formally Digidesign, recently reached out to FutureMusic to present their new branding strategy and showcase some upcoming products. The company is somewhat anxious about the public’s perception of their rollup of various companies and products under the Avid umbrella, and is going to great lengths to limit the collateral damage from potential brand confusion.
Now it’s not too difficult for members of the industry to get our arms around the fact that Digi, who purchased M-Audio and most recently Euphonix, is now cooking all the products in the Avid oven, but the California concern wants to make sure that there’s no confusion in the marketplace and is undergoing an awareness campaign, starting with the press. Some may say that this branding exercise is overkill, but how many times does a company simply change their name or a product line and hope it will all work out. Too many. Kudos to Avid for making the effort.
However, Avid should direct their attention to internal rebranding, instead of external overtures at this point. Avid’s employees now have a completely new product line to comprehend and new employees to absorb. The company needs to sharpen its employees focus on the several tiers of products and be able to precisely represent to the public the Avid “experience.”
Without employee understanding and involvement, a company cannot effectively brand itself to the world. A company such as Avid needs to successfully identify their core brand attributes and educate their employees to represent those values in their interactions with customers, which for a music technology concern, is not just a 9 to 5 affair. Music industry employees are usually involved in their local music scene and are in a position to represent their company’s brand in a a variety of online and offline environments. Employees are the foundation of value creation and with the pervasive social media outlets now part of everyday human interaction, these individuals must believe in, promote and contribute to the company’s brand beyond the office setting. Therefore, Avid’s new branding needs to begin as operations and then blossom outward via the various communication channels. However, the underlying question for management, after this campaign has run it course, is how Avid will be able to quantify the impact of their new identity on the company’s fiscal performance?
One of Avid’s employees at the event was very proud of the fact that they didn’t pink slip any of the Euphonix crew after the acquisition, but that certainly didn’t impress me. Not that anyone wants to see a music industry employee get the axe in this economy, but the reality is that Euphonix has been on the ropes for the last couple of years, despite a solid product line, and has been actively soliciting a buyout. The first order of business should have been to retain the engineers and product development personnel and dump the weak Sales and Marketing crew that was responsible for such faux pas as the advertisement below. (Bottom Line: if Euphonix has the opportunity to hand pick a quality musician/producer from anywhere in the world to represent their brand in an advertisement, why would the crack Marketing team pick someone who is a performance artist? All together now…because they just don’t get it. —Ed.)
The takeaway is that it really doesn’t matter if they are Avid or Digidesign. The music industry, at this point in time, only really cares about ProTools. ProTools is their real identity, and from the peak behind the curtain that we received, the future looks bright for Avid’s core users.
