Chris Higgins – Netcore Cloud: Our new identity reflects a powerful, forward momentum

My recent interview, originally published on Mediabrief - original post is here

Give us an overview of Netcore Cloud and its journey of more than two decades.

Since we started our journey in 1997, Netcore Cloud has grown from an email marketing company into a globally recognized SaaS company, offering a full-stack of MarTech solutions that help product and growth marketers deliver AI-powered intelligent customer experiences across all touchpoints of the user’s journey. Netcore Cloud today serves over 6500 clients across 20+ countries, delivering over 20 billion emails a month and tracking upwards of 120 trillion marketing events annually.

What are the milestones that Netcore Cloud has achieved so far? What landmark accomplishments are a core part of the Netcore legacy?

Our twenty-five-year-old journey has been a very eventful one. One of the key milestones that stand out is our strategic investment of close to US$100mn for a majority stake in Unbxd Inc. based in California, USA; Unbxd is a leader in intelligent search relevance and personalization. This was one of the largest investments in SaaS undertaken for the decade. With Unbxd, we now have a strong foothold in the US and developed markets and immense cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Unbxd’s AI-powered search solutions augment Netcore Cloud’s full-stack Digital Experience Platform (DXP), enabling ecommerce retailers/ D2C brands to deliver a rich shopping experience.

This was not Netcore’s maiden move towards inorganic expansion. Since 2019, Netcore Cloud has undertaken three major acquisitions, the first being Quinto.ai (Conversational AI platform), followed by Boxx.ai (AI-First Omnichannel Personalization & Recommendation Engine) and Hansel.io (Real-time no code, product experience platform). These three platforms, teams, and capabilities are already successfully integrated with Netcore Cloud.

We are currently present in 20+ countries including India, US, SEA, Middle East, Europe and ANZ.

Netcore Cloud recently revamped its brand identity. What was the goal behind it? What changes with the new branding?

There were a number of reasons for the brand revamp. Firstly, as Netcore continues to expand globally, we needed a brand framework that diverse teams could quickly and consistently apply to their local promotions, ensuring agility in our marketing. Secondly, while operating in multiple global markets, we needed a distinctive brand identity that could help us stand out visually against a wide range of competitors. Thirdly, Netcore has become known as one of the most innovative brands in the martech space, and our previous brand identity wasn’t capturing that spirit of boldness, dynamism and innovation.

We met with a number of global brand agencies looking for the right partner to help us, and selected Focus Labs from the US.

We began with a series of workshops and surveys with many employees across Netcore to create a shared understanding of the vision, mission, and purpose of the organization - What makes us different? What is the core of the value we provide to our customers worldwide? What are the principles we believe in that guide our work?

Next, we worked on the messaging, the new voice and tone and the message architecture for Netcore. What we needed to communicate was important, but also how we spoke was. Again, consistency is essential. As we have scaled globally, we had multiple teams writing content on behalf of Netcore, resulting in multiple voices - some people wrote formally, some casually. The new brand identity laid out careful guidelines on how to communicate, the types of words to use, and the style of writing.

To bring the new brand identity to life, our visual elements – logo, colors, graphics and illustrations, fonts, templates, etc – have a new and exciting look!

Give us an overview of the elements of the logo and the creative team that’s executed it.

Many people loved the existing logo, so we looked at how to evolve it to capture the new Netcore better. The logo included an infinity symbol for the letters ‘co,’ and we wanted to retain it, so we brought the infinity out of the letters and turned it into a logo mark, as a stylised letter ‘N’. This gives us a beautiful ‘N for Netcore’ mark that we can use in designs. Our in-house team custom-created logo font - we wanted the 7 letters of Netcore to reflect a powerful, forward momentum.

**5. Are there any campaigns in the pipeline to build on Netcore Cloud’s new identity?

Definitely, we are very excited about the new identity and showing it to our audience. We are rolling this out at the most basic level across all our global marketing assets. All existing campaigns are already updated with the new identity. Beyond this, we are working on brand-specific campaigns to bring our new messaging to life.

From a business perspective, why is rebranding crucial? What are the opportunities it unlocks?

Many companies overlook the importance of a visual brand identity that accurately communicates how they want to be seen. It’s the same with people - the way you dress and speaks impacts how you are perceived. Do you go to a meeting in a suit and tie or jeans and shorts, or shorts and a t-shirt? Do you use a 20-slide ppt filled with numbers or a 5-slide ppt filled with images? Each of these choices communicates something about you.

The way you present yourself for a brand should help your ideal customers relate with you. Do you want to be seen as creative? Secure? Traditional? Aligning your visual identity and brand voice can help you to make the right impression. The opportunity is simple - faster alignment with customers by helping them to understand Netcore better.

How is Netcore Cloud powering ROI and growth through AI-powered customer communication?

We have all seen the buzz around ChatGPT. Beyond the novelty of writing content on demand, these tools have powerful applications for helping marketers to create more impact. For example, generating SEO schema codes and metadata. Done manually, this is time-consuming, and repetitive, and it’s easy to make mistakes that reduce the impact of your work. Using ChatGPT lets you create these faster and without errors, giving the marketer more time to think about what should be the focus and outcome of these SEO efforts. There is a similar impact found in Netcore’s AI-powered marketing technology. Providing the marketer with AI to complete tasks that would otherwise be time-consuming or impossible.

For example, when you plan an orchestrated messaging journey - a series of messages sent over time to a customer, you need to decide which channels to use for each message. Email, sms, push notification, in-app, browser push, WhatsApp etc. Often marketers need to run complex experiments using customer segments to understand which channel is best for each set of customers. With Netcore’s AI, you can simply tell it to select the channel for each customer they have the best chance of engaging with. The AI does all the data analysis for you.

Another example is Send Time Optimisation (STO) for emails. Some customers read their emails in the morning over breakfast, some on their commute, some at lunch, and others in the evening. In all cases, we give more attention to the emails at the top of our inboxes. Using STO, when you send an email campaign, the AI will deliver the email to each customer when they are most likely to engage with emails, so it is at the top of their inbox then.