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Rebranding your technology company always carries some risk.
From website traffic declines to customers worrying that it’s part of something more or a reaction to weakening business, it’s never easy to make a new name inspire confidence.
However, in this case, we’re talking about a technology company that dwells in marketing and making messages consistently hit home.
LucidPress is now called Marq and it hopes the new name will better communicate its ability to produce, control and publish marketing content.
The rebrand coincides with Marq’s dedication to staying on brand, the Salt Lake City-based company’s CEO Owen Fuller said in an announcement on the rebrand.
“We champion the brand and promise to make it easier for our customers to deliver customized content to their audience,” Fuller said. “Consistent messaging builds loyalty with customers, and without that, brands are often only scratching the surface of their reach.”
Marq earned 4 stars when reviewed in 2020 and set a strong example of how top-level real estate marketing executives can ensure offices and agents never slip up when inserting a logo or choosing a brochure font.
Marq is best described as brand-templating software. It empowers users to strictly control how company brand assets are visually designed while balancing creative input from marketing teams across an organization.
Design rules can be put in place at multiple levels, approvals granted and changes made across multiple documents at the same time. Copy blocks, font types, imagery and all forms of visual addenda can be replicated and automatically inserted by multiple users to make content creation quickly scalable and ideally benefit, for example, company rebrands.
Marq’s administration capabilities allow brand managers to stay on top of everything being used and where it ends up being published.
The software’s user interface has been updated in places and new additions include Feature Templates and tools to make document sharing and delivery easier.
“I have experienced the pain as a creative who is completely overwhelmed with design requests,” Marq Creative Director John Perry said in the release. “I’ve also witnessed what happens when, out of necessity, you let teams make their own content and are forced to sacrifice the brand.”
Real estate brokerages are often very specific about the way franchises around the country use creative materials. In fact, the very idea of a franchise is rooted in leveraging corporate-supplied marketing messages, and offices are under strict watch to ensure they’re on track.
Even though a brand is much more than visual, it relies on aligned communications, something Marq is designed to support.
In the Inman Handbook on Branding Your Way to Success, Jennifer Marchetti, chief marketing officer at Realogy Expansion Brands, cited the challenges of rebranding across the geography of a large company in a specific case: ERA.
“We found a couple of important things,” Marchetti told Inman. “The brand was viewed as experienced and full service. It was respected in the industry.”
She also noted that while the company had a strong local culture, it also seemed to need more structure for “agents and brokers to live the brand.”
“I wanted to codify it to give it almost like a visual identity and a tonal identity,” she explained. “To take what made it strong and codify it and then figure out where it can differentiate in places that can give it an edge.”
Marq is hoping to deliver the kind of structure ERA, and other big brands driven to compete, seek when delivering services to buyers and sellers.
Marq is a play on the word “mark,” namely as it relates to logos, trademarks and a company’s overall visual presence. It also refers to “leaving a mark.”
“Through the platform’s team management tools which contain brilliant administrative-level permissions, organizations can feel confident in the brand control parameters that they set. The result is quick content creation and seamless content delivery across multiple channels,” the announcement stated.
