Autodesk

The Client

Autodesk makes software for people who make things. If you’ve ever driven a high-performance car, admired a towering skyscraper, used a smartphone, or watched a great film, chances are you’ve experienced what millions of Autodesk customers are doing with its software. Autodesk gives you the power to make anything. 

The Situation

Autodesk wanted to establish itself as the industry-leading platform for designing and making things — by helping its customers focus on the outcomes they want to achieve rather than the products they need to make it happen. With this in mind, the company needed to create strong connections between customers and Autodesk, the brand — not its individual products. By developing this connection, the company could achieve stronger, more meaningful relationships with its customers and ensure it tells a coherent and consistent story.

The Challenge

In 2021, Autodesk rebranded to reflect how its business is transforming from a house of brands to a “branded house.” The rebrand required a significant investment in stakeholder activation, as every employee, vendor, channel partner, and strategic partner needed to make the leap to the new Autodesk persona and branding. While this work would create better brand recognition in the long term, in the short term, Autodesk’s teams and processes were mired in product-first ways of working. The company’s goal was to build a brand that customers feel connected to, creating a culture that breaks through old ways of thinking and encourages new ways of making.

The Solution

With the rebrand, Autodesk’s brand team developed a multi-month rollout plan to engage its immediate stakeholders: employees, vendors, and partners. The company’s DAM librarians provided support in numerous ways:

•  Provided audience insights and usage data to the brand team
•  Packaged, uploaded, and added metadata for rebranded content
•  Created asset groups and portals to release the assets in a permissioned manner
•  Reviewed reports on training completion and assigned users to the correct asset groups
•  Monitored uploads of rebranded content by employee
   

Brand assets are stored and managed on the Acquia DAM platform, which allowed Autodesk’s teams to collaborate and deliver rebranded content to users across the globe in a timely and efficient manner with appropriate tagging to ensure accessibility.

In the first phase of the new brand rollout, Autodesk granted approximately 1,000 early adopters access to in-depth training and the company’s core assets needed for the brand launch. These early adopters were vetted by leadership, and all content needed to be as secure as possible while still allowing early adopters to access it — to achieve this, the team created a password-protected website. 

In phase two, Autodesk gave all employees access to the new brand assets. On launch day, the company updated DAM system messages to include a banner promoting its new digital toolkit. This banner linked to a portal from which employees could download new logos, messaging tools, fonts, and templates. Soon after, Autodesk’s channel marketing managers held training across all geographies and directed channel partners to their dedicated portal of newly branded assets. 

In the final phase, Autodesk updated its product branding to align with its product release schedule. Because this happened about six months after the parent brand launch, Autodesk’s brand team created a series of short trainings to remind stakeholders about the importance of leading with the parent brand. To ensure that marketers used the new brand paradigm, the brand team locked down the assets until users had successfully completed the training. The company’s DAM librarians accomplished this by creating temporary asset groups, monitoring daily completion reports, and adding users to the role only after training completion. 

Throughout the DAM librarian and brand team partnership, Autodesk broke down silos by communicating and collaborating on timelines, strict embargoes, and asset management. This ensured that the company’s internal and external stakeholders had all the information and assets necessary to effectively use Autodesk’s rebranded content as they delivered meaningful parent-brand-led customer experiences. The teams used the Acquia DAM platform to adhere to strict embargoes and confidential information regarding the rebrand process. Without Acquia DAM’s special permissions and asset groups features, this endeavor would have been a more complex, time-consuming process, given the strict public, channel, and employee embargo dates. It also would have been more difficult to enforce the new brand guidelines, as well as heightened the threat that information would be released before launch.

The Results

Following the rebrand and global launch, Autodesk’s DAM team conducted a user survey to determine user satisfaction with the DAM platform, the DAM team, and support materials, as well as a Likert scale to assess satisfaction with marketing assets, images, and user interface. 

The company’s net promoter score (NPS) on the DAM platform improved from -3.0 to +7.0, with users feeling increased satisfaction with the materials offered on the platform. In addition, the number of daily requests for asset upload and revision increased by 49%, with many of these requests centered around the rebranded assets. 

Since their release, product brand assets have been on the list of top downloads for the platform. The Acquia DAM platform is extremely efficient for Autodesk and they've been able to show a 50% reduction in time to market, in terms of getting assets out to customers, agencies, and partners. And the process of packaging, uploading, and policing the release of assets to employees, partners, and the public has resulted in increased customer satisfaction.

Image