New VOC programs, change management, visual identity support Business Australia rebrand
- 11 July, 2022 13:09
A focus on product and services innovation, fresh voice of customer programs, visual identity overhaul and regular brand tracking are critical elements supporting Business Australia’s rebrand to My Business.
My Business is an online platform supporting Australia’s smaller businesses through operating advice, tools, templates, products and services and resources. Its chief customer experience officer, Richard Spencer, told CMO the primary trigger for the rename and rebrand was to provide more clarity around its mission and what it’s striving to do.
“It’s about being as clear as we can make it: We’re working to help their businesses to grow, be more profitable, be a better employer and be safer from a cyber perspective,” he said.
While the organisation had committed to renaming and rebranding just prior to the pandemic, Covid has had a huge impact on how the team has gone about the work. The pandemic also had substantial impact on organisation’s member base, which grew from under 20,000 members pre-pandemic to 90,000 today.
“During the pandemic, we helped businesses to keep the doors open, lights on and cope with unprecedented trading patterns,” Spencer explained. “Things such as Job Keeper never existed prior to the pandemic and standing down staff and employee furloughs were things many small businesses had never had to take their employees through. We provided lots of free advice, templates and direction to help that process.
“Off the back of the pandemic, the demand we are seeing is for more products, services and tools to help these businesses help themselves, rather than just providing advice. The renaming and shift delivers even more transparency on that aspect of what we do.”
Tackling a company rebrand
The first stage of the rebrand was research with existing and prospective businesses to test what each naming convention implied. Spencer noted the organisation had reasonable prompted brand awareness with Business Australia at 53 per cent.
What My Business as a naming convention demonstrated was a better alignment to small business rather than all businesses.
“Nearly 50 per cent of our member database have fewer than 20 full-time employees. So we focus on the smaller end of the SME market. The ‘My Business’ name more readily connected to that,” Spencer said. “Then all the things we wanted our business to represent– that we have the products and services, tools and we work right beside the business owner as they go through all the challenges they face every day – came out strongly too.
“It’s become even more clear through the pandemic starting and owning a small business is a series of hurdles you don’t know you’re coming to until you hit them. Being right there at that point in time when a business owner needs help means they make the right, compliant decisions and can put time back in their day. The concept around My Business was it seen to be more that kind of organisation – we are there when we’re needed.”
The organisation then tackled the identity management process, working with branding design agency, Principals, on a new logo design, brand positioning and visual identity guides. It’s also partnering with The Works on developing the marketing campaign creative. The overarching tagline is ‘getting the unfun done’.
Credit: My Business “The aim was building a value proposition around this that makes sense and making it appeal to small business owners in newer business,” Spencer said. Typically, the businesses My Business works with are less than five years old.
“That’s where we came to the concept of ‘helping you get the unfun done’. If you think about a hairdresser: You don’t start your own salon to worry about submitting BAS statements every quarter or health and safety. You do it to cut hair because that’s what you want to do and you want to drive business growth that way.
“All the things that are not fun about what you do for a living are the kinds of things we can help with.”
Alongside this, Spencer said highlighted the cultural shift and change management process My Business has been undergoing post-pandemic. From an expectation of posting one new advisory article a day on its website, My Business was delivering 10 articles daily during the pandemic.
“There was so much businesses needed to know about, and so much was changing in the operating environment,” he said. “We were constantly trying to feed content through. We have largely been at that pace for 24 months. So we had to get our internal teams off that pace and into a different strategic direction, away from content and advice to products and services.
“It’s been a significant shift both in terms of direction, responsibility and accountability. The brand conversion is almost the end of the beginning of embedding that within our organisation and ensuring the systems and process we follow will continue to help small businesses through the challenges they’re facing.”
The My Business rebrand launch coincides with the debut of one of the organisation’s new products, Workplace, aimed at providing a simple, cut down HR information system for very small employers to employ staff with the same process flow as major corporates. Spencer said the SaaS tool meets a real unmet need in the marketplace.
Spencer flagged a series of fresh tools will follow. “These are not just about advice, this is about showing we have heard you and see there is a genuine unmet need in the market, and that we’re meeting it,” he continued.
External partnerships are part of My Business’ strategy, and Spencer saw the renaming as well as push to build more products and services also opening up new opportunities there. A current example is working with Domestic Violence NSW on research to help ensure small business owners better understand their responsibility and arm them for conversations with employees around domestic violence.
“Businesses don’t operate outside of society, they are a critical component of how societies are structured. When there is something like domestic violence, which cuts across all aspects of society, we need to work with business owners to understand how they can help,” he said.
Voice of customer program investment
My Business has also launched new voice-of-customer programs to lean into the understanding of how the business is trending, what are the unmet needs and if there is brand equity stretch allowing My Business to step into new areas.
“We are doing that quantitatively, as an ongoing, everyday ‘omnibus’ to really get a sense of what is happening right now,” Spencer said. “One thing we picked up in the pandemic is you can’t do these things quarterly or six-monthly in an operating environment that is literally changing week by week.”
My Business has adopted Qualtrics to run its VOC program, which Spencer said provides the flexibility to approach this more regularly. This is fully integrated into its CRM, Microsoft Dynamics 365, as well as the organisation’s entire tech stack, opening up the ability to bring existing data into the mix.
“This allows us to reach into different components of data, test different things almost in a live environment and very quickly,” Spencer said. “It makes it easier to augment with particular topics if we see need, or we see something in the market or are getting feedback in a particular area. We can upweight particular questions if we want to dig into insurance for example, or any other part of operating a business. That allows us to respond very quickly to what’s happening.”
To measure the brand transition, My Business has also implemented brand tracking on a fortnightly basis.
“We didn’t want to lose what we had with Business Australia and want to transition equity over. Rather than wait on quarterly trackers, we’re running fortnightly so we can be more granular on what is working for us, what do we need to dial up or down to maintain success,” Spencer said.
But ultimately, financial success will be the key measure of the rebrand’s success long term.
“It’s about if we are on target with selling the products and services, we hope organisations want to buy from us,” Spencer added. “We know the brand won’t cover element of the business – we don’t want to be jack of all trades and masters of none. That also brings us back to partnerships. If there is another organisation doing this well, and we can leverage that into the organisations we know, that makes more sense than doing it ourselves.
“We see our role as trying to fill those unmet needs, rather than compete on those.”
You can also follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, follow our regular updates via CMO Australia's Linkedin company page
