Brand Relaunch: Stock price increases 5.5% after global firm's rebranding efforts

SUMMARY: After several years of evolving its offerings and expanding business, the team at AllianceBernstein realized its branding did not reflect the advancements the firm had made. Along with a more integrated and collaborative company culture, the firm required the creation of a brand that reflected its new focus.

By implementing a synchronized global relaunch, AllianceBernstein publically rebranded itself to be "AB." Learn how, through this campaign, AB was able to better reflect its goals while improving company morale and culture.

by Kayla Cobb, Reporter

THE CUSTOMER

AB, also known as AllianceBernstein Holding, is a global asset management firm that provides high investment management and research services to customers worldwide. From big-name corporations, such as Intel, to private wealth clients, the company manages over $500 billion in assets. It works with clients primarily in the U.S. as well as individual investors who invest in mutual funds globally.

"We are a wholesaler, so we sell to what we call the 'retail intermediated business firms,'" William Hays, Global Brand Director, AB, said. "We can partner with them to do that."

CHALLENGE

AB always had the goal of keeping its clients "ahead of tomorrow." In order to keep its clients on the cutting edge of an ever-changing industry, AB spent the last several years after the financial crisis developing a diverse range of opportunities to help clients achieve their investment goals.

According to Hays, "We've diversified our business over the years to be able to offer more and more to our clients to meet those goals."

In addition to offering a more diverse array of investment offerings, AB as a company had also evolved with the times.

"We went from being sort of primarily focused in equities to being a firm that isn't just in equities but also in fixed income as an alternative business and is able to do so much more," Hays said.

However, the company faced an awareness challenge. Most of its customers did not know that AllianceBernstein had changed from the firm they knew in 2007 and 2008.

"While we've evolved, we hadn't stopped and taken the time to really explain to people that we've evolved, so a lot of people were surprised to hear that we could do as much as we could do," Hays said. "We needed people to understand who AB is today. That was really at the core of it."

CAMPAIGN

To better reflect the new company AllianceBernstein had become, and to publically share the firm's relatively recent innovations, a large-scale rebranding effort was put in place. This large rebranding campaign utilized a website redesign and a B2B multimedia marketing campaign that included email campaigns, event promotion, mobile advertising and full page print ads. The rebranding effort also included both an external and an internal brand launch to transform AllianceBernstein into AB.

This transformation helped to simplify what the brand now offered to its target consumer.

"Legally we're still AllianceBernstein," Hays said, "but part of what we found through our strategy and the rollout is that there was an opportunity to just simplify how we refer to ourselves."

Learn how, through the course of this rebranding campaign, AB was able to better reflect its goals as well as reflect and improve company morale and culture. Since this launch, AB's stock price has increased 5.5%.

Step #1. Assess the company's strengths and weaknesses

The team at AB knew that their company needed a rebrand, but they weren't sure what exact elements that rebrand should consist of.

To determine the direction the new AllianceBerstein would be going in and to ensure this new direction would reflect the firm's current identity, Hays and the team at AB's agency started on a comprehensive deep dive focusing on the firm's strengths and weaknesses. The internal effort for this rebrand started in 2013.

The team used interviews and competitive analyses with the use of the company's marketing material, all while looking at the industry landscape. Specifically, this assessment was created from a global review of client survey data, industry brand awareness studies and interviews with employees and executives. There was also a communications audit of AB materials and competitive samples. From this assessment, AB targeted opportunities for distinction.

"I think there was clearly a need or an opportunity for us to have greater distinction," Hays said. "We needed to put some definitions around exactly what is our tone, where are there more opportunities to be more consistent both in the writing as well as our visuals and all of the other aspects of our touchpoints — whether it was print or digital or video, any of those pieces."

The name AllianceBernstein also proved to be a challenge for the global firm.

"Globally, we were not able to use the AllianceBernstein [logo] in parts of Europe, and it was cumbersome in Asian countries," Hays said. "Having so many logos in use around the world created confusion about our firm."

This assessment gave AB a much clearer idea of what it currently was as a company, which gave the team insight into how the company should be presented in the rebrand.

"[Our vendor] did a phenomenal job of taking us through the process to hold the mirror up, look at ourselves and say, 'You know this is who you are and this is most compelling way that we can articulate that,'" Hays said.

Step #2. Alter company strategies to reflect rebrand

AB focused on building the strongest brand platform possible to ensure the firm's strategy was being implemented consistently worldwide.

"We really had to look at, how do our strategies and our ideas externalize our culture and, ultimately, how are we going to connect this idea of who we are to a tangible client benefit?" Hays said.

Step #3. Encourage an atmosphere of collaboration

An essential element of AllianceBernstein's transformation to AB was collaboration. This focus on teamwork also complimented the changes CEO Peter Kraus had made to the firm.

"He's really been instrumental in driving a much more collaborative firm," Hay said. "He's brought a lot more cross-pollination of ideas across all of our business and all of our investment teams."

Not only did the company assessment reveal AB's awareness problem, but it also showed the team potential collaboration opportunities they had previously missed. According to Hays, the assessment identified collaboration as a point of differentiation.

In order to ensure that the new AB accurately reflected the company's current climate, employee feedback was used during the rebranding effort.

"We spent a fair bit of time socializing the strategies, the logos, all of the messaging internally and working with internal teams in highly collaborative workshops to develop the messaging," Hays said.