How smart tech can help deliver BTs rebrand

Jesper Theill Erisken of Templafy

BT’s move to make EE its consumer-facing brand is a bold move, and a clear attempt to compete with more mobile centric brands such as Vodafone, Virgin and Three. However, in a competitive market, there is no room for error when rebranding such a household name, says Jesper Theill Erisken, CEO at Templafy.

BT needs to be able to merge multiple systems and product roadmaps so it can deliver EE as the only brand for its consumer solution. This is essential, as any uncoordinated use of off-brand, non-compliant documents will hurt BT’s brand repositioning. External and internal rollouts of the new brand need to be as smooth as possible, ensuring the delineation between the two brands is clear as possible.

Think about the vast amount of branded content such as contracts, logos and metadata that needs to be updated and rolled out company-wide. Now consider a second brand expected to emerge towards the end of the year if the BT Group’s Joint Venture with Warner Bros Discovery goes through. With this additional layer of complexity, making sure employees can seamlessly find the right content at the right time is essential to achieving a rebrand and requires cutting-edge technical assistance. BT and EE therefore need to ensure their tech stacks are as integrated as possible in order to manage this transition seamlessly.

How a bad content infrastructure hurts rebrands

BT removing itself from consumer operations will require a herculean effort to simplify business systems, product roadmaps, and brand collateral. Without an infrastructure that supports content lifecycles and allows employees to seamlessly migrate from BT to EE offerings, any rebrand risks doing more harm than good.

Employees will be creating business documents in droves, from emails to pitch decks to contracts and more. These documents are key pillars of building a strong brand. If employees are using outdated branding in these documents, it can cause major problems, especially in the beginning phases of establishing a new brand identity. This lack of brand consistency and integrity across all business content is called “content anarchy,” and it’s a £20.5 million per business problem.

Sadly, many businesses lack a content infrastructure that can handle an upheaval of this sort. In a recent global survey of over 2000 professionals, more than half revealed that they do not feel confident that they are creating content that meets their company’s current guidelines. In fact, just 27% noted that they use the latest company-approved version of relevant assets when creating content. This level of alignment could potentially prove disastrous in a rebrand on the scale of BT’s. To succeed, BT’s tech stack will need to support a content infrastructure that can remove these roadblocks from day one.

The role of content enablement in rebrands

Rolling out new content to a global organisation is complex to say the least. Think about the consumer facing content created and managed everyday contracts, logos, instructional videos, websites and more. Marketing teams need to ensure new content finds the document workflows that employees use every day. Otherwise, you can’t be sure new content will get used by every employee. Achieving this manually is a near-impossible target that will strain employee time and energy, allowing human error to creep in.

However, next generation document generation solutions, powered by content enablement, can deliver a seamless transition for organisations that are undergoing changes in brand strategy. These solutions directly serve employees with the latest approved on-brand, compliant content within the applications they’re already working in. As a result, all legal guidelines are met, and the risk of non-compliant, off-brand documents ending up in customer-facing materials is drastically reduced.

Future-proofing needs to happen now

BT and any other organisations considering extensive rebrands must analyse their tech stack to ensure that brand collateral is seamlessly integrated into daily-workflows, user-friendly and intuitive. The consumer mobile market is highly crowded, and BT’s brand has been a household name for over 3 decades. To reposition BT’s brand, only a cutting-edge content infrastructure, powered by automation will suffice.

However, a modern content infrastructure isn’t just a stop gap to ensure the moves like the smooth repositioning of BT and EE. Content is becoming mission critical to the success of any company. Historically, static content solutions like enterprise content management (ECM) tools were enough to get by, but in today’s world, it simply won’t suffice.

Content is being created in new forms across a plethora of new applications, and that content needs to drive value rather than introduce risk. Creation points are exploding, and if BT is to succeed with its future plans, such as an ambitious £633 joint venture with Warner Bros Discovery, these issues must be sorted sooner rather than later.

The author is Jesper Theill Erisken, CEO at Templafy.

Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @VanillaPlus OR @jcvplus

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