NetApp

New:  Legal name, and logo

Launched:  March 10, 2008

Story in brief:
With refreshing candor Elisa Steele, NetApp's SVP of corporate marketing, put the problem this way: "The customers who loved us really love us, but we don't have enough customers." In his March 9 blog post, founder and EVP Dave Hitz said the company's engineering-centric executive staff had tended to view branding "as so much marketing bullshit," until research showed unaided name awareness among potential customers at less that 10%. Ahah. Could a stronger (and more consistent) brand plus more aggressive exposure increase awareness, and customers? (See the full Hitz postings of March 9 and 18, superb launch statements by a senior executive.)

The company, incidentally, is a $2.8 billion provider of data storage systems whose "unified storage architecture—a single platform for a broad range of networked environments—gives customers the most versatile and scalable storage platform in the industry. "

Name confusion was one issue; people used both "NetApp" and the actual legal name "Network Appliance." Solution: change the legal name to NetApp. Design confusion, too, was an issue; apart from being graphically weak, to many the old "nuts and bolts" symbol was simply puzzling. 

Landor won the rebranding assignment. Hitz reports that the logo design criteria were:
1. visually distinctive
2. memorable and easy to get
3. foundation of a visual system (not just a stand-alone symbol)
4. can absorb meaning and feeling over time
... and adds that The Arc de Triomphe inspired the "blue gateway" solution.

Credits:
C.E.O. - Dan Warmenhoven
Identity design - Landor SF;
creative direction Nicolas Aparacio & J.J. Ha
 

First Impressions:
Strategy: Engineers meet branding and get it! Fantastic
Nomenclature: As Federal Express learned, when your communicative name overshadows your formal name... accept the inevitable. I just wish "netapp" was as nice a word as "fedex," and am uncomfortable when a name solution depends on special capitalization to be correctly read. (But does this justify a complete name change? Very doubtful.)
Design: I love the simple graphic strength of this form, and its doorway reference... and that on another level it's a monogram, an N (or is it an A?). The symbol works better, I feel, in the horizontal than in the vertical lockup, where its proximity to (and alignment with) the wordmark cramps it.  Finally, I'm not sure that retention of the old Helvetica Neue letterforms (even with a little refinement) made for the best possible combination of symbol with wordmark.  But that's quibbling. Good job all around.

Corporate Brand Matrix ratings:   to come