GoToAssist is an industry-leading IT support tool that gives technicians the ability to provide remote support directly to their clients and customers. In 2012, through a series of acquisitions and software developments, that offering was expanded a complete, integrated platform for IT. Historically, marketing target efforts centered around the internal IT support technician, but new market segmentation research along with the evolutions to the product offering warranted an evolution to this approach. Our team was tasked with evolving the core brand perspective for GoToAssist to embrace this new market opportunity and expand the approach to marketing. Despite the clear research indications and market imperatives, the GoToAssist leadership team was enjoying a comfortable degree of success targeting end users, and was thus reticent to significant changes for the brand. Our challenge was to embrace and extend the legacy and goodwill that had been built with the current customer base, while finding new and meaningful ways to connect with customers of the future.

Through a series of key stakeholder interviews we gained a more clear understanding of the customers we served today vs. the customers we needed to reach. We learned a revealing insight - each segment cared about problem solving, but valued it in fundamentally different ways. For our current segment, problem solving meant putting out fires. For the new targets, problem solving was about a higher order business value - proving our ROI for personal advancement, or providing a more meaningful strategic business value through technology.

With this insight in mind, we evaluated the creative currently in-market and found several revealing elements. The creative was disjointed across deliverables, but more importantly, in content and thought leadership the work actually talked down to the audience. Rather than focusing on things like ingenuity and strategic thinking, the work focused on terminology like geeks and nerds. This may have been an effective approach for technicians but didn’t map strategically to the new customers needing to be reached.

We teamed with Hybrid Design to evolve the GoToAssist brand centered around key ideas of possibility, ingenuity and precision. The core design elements included more appropriate photography choices focused on solutions rather than problems, and a more expansive photographic range of people, devices and business contexts. Photography was supplemented with a set of transparent panes and an evolved color palette, that when pulled together as a single shape, symbolized integration. Along with the design systems, we developed a new flexible messaging structure that told a higher order brand story, with clear copy points of the business value that story delivered on.

The work provided a more refined and elegant approach to the GoToAssist brand, recognizing the creativity and intelligence of the customer, rather than talking down to them. New design and messaging systems gave marketing teams the tools they needed to scale their work and provide a more meaningful, on-brand story. Because problem-solving was at the core, the GoToAssist leadership was confident that this new brand approach embraced the spirit of the past while successfully pivoting focus to a new customer.