Regardless of the industry, having an outstanding product or service alone isn't enough to make you stand out.
This is where effective purpose-driven branding comes in.
In the need to give its brand a professional face that reflects its high-quality services, market intelligence provider ch-aviation prioritized rebranding to better reflect its professional standards.
I spoke with ch-aviation co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer Max Oldorf to find out the company's five-year rebranding journey and how it maintains brand consistency.
Who Is Max Oldorf?
Max is the co-founder of ch-aviation, a market intelligence provider for the airline sector, where he oversees the Sales & Marketing department. Max transformed his high school hobby into a business that now employs over 75 people and serves over 800 leaders in the airline industry. Before starting ch-aviation, Max worked for a European Regional Airline where he gained experience in Airline Management.
Every rebranding project has its own unique story, including ch-aviation’s journey to giving its brand a professional face that reflects its high-quality services.
From a hobby website in the late 1990s, ch-aviation turned into a business by 2012 but with current resources back then they couldn't afford to hire a marketing agency and invest in branding.
As the quality of their product outgrew the brand's appearance and with the funds they had available, they prioritized rebranding to better reflect their professional standards.
“There was an increasing disparity between the quality of our product, its appearance, and how we presented it,” Max tells me while sharing their rebranding story.
Max says his team debated changing the brand name entirely because "ch-aviation", which stands for Swiss Aviation (as CH is the Swiss Country Code), is quite generic and doesn't explain the company’s offerings.
However, he remembered the advice he heard from his marketing university professor that made him not change the name at all.
“You shouldn’t change a name too drastically as long as you already have some followership.”
As Max says, they made the right decision.
“It wasn't so much a matter of identifying the right time for a change as having the funds available to make it happen," he concludes.
Watch our video to discover the main steps of the rebranding process.
It Took ch-aviation Five Years to Rebrand
Describing the rebranding process that started in 2019, Max highlights it took them five years to make the changes:
“It took us five years from coming up with the first ideas on how the refreshed brand should look and feel, what values it should represent to final implementation globally as we had to align our entire online platform with its graphical user interface, etc."
Lacking in-house experience, they hired Simonas Bartkus, a seasoned marketing executive and current CEO at Lithuanian Airports, for his expertise in airline branding. Simonas structured the entire process, managed agency selection, and guided the branding strategy.
"We opted for an evolutionary process, so we first updated our existing user interface with elements of the new CI to the best extent possible and then started to build up our platform from scratch. Hence, our customers had time to already get familiar with the general idea of the new brand,” Max explains.
Discussing the outcome, Max highlights that their business has grown significantly:
“What I struggle with is that, for a company that is growing that much, it's very hard to say what can be attributed to the rebrand, to a better product, to a better-performing sales team, etc. In the end, it’s a mixture of many different components that should work together as best as possible.”
Max notes it’s important to recognize when a brand feels outdated, needs new energy, or needs to align with market changes.
He highlights that, when considering unexpected costs in rebranding, it's vital to have a decisive leader to avoid endless changes. In their case, Simonas managed this by setting deadlines for feedback and decisions.
Max advises brands to be conservative in estimating time and costs, multiplying initial estimates by 1.5 to get closer to reality.
If you're looking for a professional partner to assist your branding efforts, be sure to check DesignRush's listing of top branding agencies.
How to Maintain Brand Consistency
I asked Max how businesses can maintain their brand consistency across online platforms:
“You can create very detailed style sheets or corporate identity handbooks; still, the moment multiple people are working on a brand, you need to have someone in place whose desk will see any of the marketing and brand elements that go out,” he said.
Max emphasizes having a dedicated person who will oversee the brand and ensure consistency with all marketing and brand elements across platforms.
Our discussion also covered the biggest obstacles businesses should know when maintaining a digital brand voice. In light of this, Max suggests that the biggest obstacle is knowing all the places where your brand appears.
To maintain consistency, businesses should:
- Start by mapping out places where your brand appears
- Regularly update and check these areas, ensuring everything is reviewed at least once a year
We also covered the considerations businesses should take into account when choosing brand visuals to ensure they accurately represent their values:
“I'd always start with the values and feelings your brand should instill in anyone touching it. Once you have this defined, it will become a lot easier to decide on the brand visuals because you have some emotional guidelines to refer to. If you create a visual that doesn't appeal to any of the feelings you want to instill, you know you have rework to do.”
When it comes to ch-aviation’s approach to content creation as a key strategy for keeping the audience engaged, Max says:
"By definition, our business model is creating content, either by publishing news articles about the aviation industry, which helps us drive a lot of traffic or by publishing reports and data graphs on industry topics.
Aviation enthusiasts run the company, so many of the topics that we write about or cover as part of our content strategy are topics that we're interested in ourselves.
That helps a lot with engagement because we see that what we are interested in is very often super interesting for our clients and prospects as well.”
I also learned how ch-aviation ensures brand consistency across all customer touchpoints:
“What helps is using your own product. If you use your product daily, which not only me but also our CEO and our Chief Data Officer do, you will examine the product with even bigger scrutiny than your customers.
If you're the owner of a company, you are aware of every single flaw that your product has, which very often are things that your customer will never notice, but you are annoyed by them, because you know they're there. That's what I think is very important to ensure brand consistency across all touchpoints,” Max concludes.
Lastly, I asked Max how businesses can create a brand that will stand the test of time:
“I think nothing stands the test of time," he notes.
"At some point, everything is outdated and in dire need of an update, but what I see in general is that people like some form of consistency, so if you want to create something that will stand the test of time, maybe try to relate to something that's been there already.
Colors, names, design elements, or similar functionality. I think you can make some pretty drastic changes as long as you keep some elements that the customer's emotions are familiar with.”
