A glimpse of HaulerAds
In 2015, HaulerAds was born, driven by the vision of CEO and founder Casey Binkley, who identified a unique marketing opportunity – trucks with ample space for ads that remained unutilized. Leveraging delivery trucks and semi-trailer trucks as mobile billboards, HaulerAds quickly evolved into a profitable venture. However, it is now in the process of rebranding itself as Movia, aligning with the ever-evolving advertising landscape.
Successfully turning a clever insight into a profitable business known today as HaulerAds, though it will soon be re-branded and recognized as Movia. To understand why HaulerAds is currently being re-branded to Movia we must first understand the current market we operate in and how it influences marketers and their brands.
In today’s consumer world, people are inundated with around 4000-10,000 advertisements every single day, this translates to a minimum of 166.6 advertising messages that potential customers are being exposed to every single hour. With a vast quantity of messages being sent to consumers every day, brands are faced with the challenging problem of getting their brands to be heard and stand out among the clutter.
With a highly innovative advertising industry that’s comprised of a plethora of brands and tech-savvy customers, brands must do everything they can to reflect today’s cutting-edge market. This is precisely what HaulerAd’s re-branding to Movia is working hard to accomplish. Re-branding will change the brand from being identifiable with hauler trucks to being synonymous with the data-driven ad-tech market we live in today.
The importance of re-branding
Being innovative, providing value to your customers, and delivering your brand promise are three major components of getting your brand to stand out according to Forbes. HaulerAds is doing exactly that with their re-brand to Movia and will successfully stand out from the cluttered market as an innovative mobile billboard supplier that is fully adapted to serving customers in today’s evolving consumer world.
Re-branding oftentimes is a very successful and necessary marketing tool that businesses must use to keep up with their competition and meet changing consumer needs. Without re-branding, businesses become at risk of falling into marketing myopia and may fall behind the competition, lose opportunities, and/or ultimately lose profits as a result of not re-branding at an effective and needed time. Just like many successful brands in the past, HaulerAds will be re-branding itself to Movia to reflect the innovation that is incorporated in it’s business model and to better stand out as a tech-focused company. To further understand the impact that re-branding has on different businesses, let’s take a look at brands that gained success through re-branding.
The world’s biggest search engine which almost every brand & person uses underwent a complete re-brand only two years after its launch. In 1998, the search engine Backrub decided to re-brand as it needed to reflect the tech industry’s rapidly evolving market and appear as a search engine that could answer almost any search query.
Backrub accomplished this by changing its brand name to Google as it represented 10 to the 100th power, which equates to a number with 100 zeroes in it. Founders Serge Brin and Larry Page claimed the brand name Google “reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.” Today Google is the most used search engine in the world and is utilized as a marketing tool by brands trying to advertise to their target markets and to consumers searching for the best products or information available.
Amazon
Another huge company that is used all over the world by millions of people, especially in today’s climate is the largest online retailer Amazon. The famous entrepreneur Jeff Bezos launched the company in 1994 under the name Relentless. After Bezos was told by his friends that the name sounded too “sinister” Bezos changed his company’s name to Cadabra.
The initial re-brand was short-lived and Bezos changed the brand’s name again as he didn’t like the fact that his lawyer misinterpreted Cadabra as a cadaver over the phone. Ultimately, Bezos brainstormed through a number of brand names until he stuck with what we know today as Amazon.
Tangerine
The bank known today as Tangerine, famous for being almost 100% online, wasn’t always as innovative or youthful. Before April 2014, the bright and techy bank was previously known as ING Direct. What served to be the catalyst for ING Direct’s re-brand was selling the company as a subsidiary to Scotiabank. In the agreement Scotiabank made with ING Direct’s owner ING Group, Scotiabank was given 18 months to change the brand name of their newly acquired subsidiary. Being aware there was a huge push in the banking industry for online banking, they decided to re-brand ING Direct to Tangerine as the name was simpler and had a strong cutting-edge brand voice. The re-branding was a success and the online banking brand Tangerine appealed to and attracted a following of millennials looking to do banking.
Keds
This century-old American shoe brand began its marketing endeavors by marketing its shoes towards women in 1916, using the tagline “There’s comfort in every step.” They successfully became popular among women and as their popularity grew, Keds were worn by A-list celebrities which helped bolster them as both a popular and fashionable shoe brand. During the 60s and 70s, the women’s shoe brand steadily increased in popularity as Keds released a line focused on athletics. Then during the 80s and 90s, Keds received another increase in popularity as the brand was worn by Actresses on the TV shows Full House and Saved By The Bell.
However, the women’s shoe brand lost its decade’s streak worth of consistent growth as it wasn’t appealing to millennials and failed to adapt to new fashion trends. Keds wanted to get back in the spotlight and used the marketing tool of re-branding to accomplish its goal. Keds re-branded themselves by using Taylor Swift as their celebrity influencer to target millennials. They followed up with a campaign titled “Ladies first since 1916” which brings attention to women like Taylor Swift who have led extraordinary lives and are impressionable to younger women.
Signing Taylor Swift as a brand ambassador and launching a campaign aimed at bringing attention to powerful women resulted in an increase in Ked’s popularity. The brand became popular with pre-teens and teens and successfully regained its popularity with young women.
Hudson’s Bay
Arguably the most historical business in Canadian history, The Hudson’s Bay Company is no stranger to the profitable effects of a successful re-brand. Hudson’s Bay has seen two significant re-brands in its 350 years. The first was in 1965 which involved changing Hudson’s Bay to the catchier name that was already being used as a nickname for the brand, The Bay. The second significant re-brand for the historic company was in 2011.
The Bay was falling behind the boom of competitors that entered the Canadian market during the mid-1990s and early 2000s. To compete with them, The Bay went through a bold re-brand that involved purchasing franchisee rights from both a UK retailer called Topshop & the American luxury retailer Saks Fifth Avenue. The re-brand included changing the brand name to Hudson’s Bay as well as changing the logo to its former coat of arms. The Hudson’s Bay Company is another great example of re-branding as this quadrupled their net income in only a year’s time.
Best Buy
Sometimes brands make complete re-brands not because they are lacking success, but because they know they can achieve even greater success by refreshing their brand identity. This was the case for Best Buy (formerly known as Sound of Music). Sound of Music’s rebrand was sparked in 1981, 15 years after the launch of the company, when a tornado struck one of its stores.
As a result, the tornado-stricken store had a parking lot sale days later with all their damaged & leftover merchandise. They promoted the sale by promising customers the “Best Buys.” Despite the sale lasting only four days, the sales reaped the equivalent of 1 month’s average sales for Sound of Music. Thus, the electronics company was re-branded to Best Buy Co. in 1983 with the intention of chasing the wild success they encountered with their “Best Buy” sale.
Stella Artois
The beer company that has its roots traced back all the way to 1336 is another brand that has used re-branding in order to recapture the success it once had. The premium-priced beer brand fell from grace due to three unfortunate variables. The beer brand is pictured along with rioting football fans, Stella Artois being publicly blamed for encouraging binge drinking, as well as Stella Artois failing to re-brand by offering their premium beer in supermarkets instead of being exclusive to pubs/bars.
Stella Artois was able to optimally re-brand after challenging the public perception that they were a beer brand that encouraged binge drinking by releasing a line of lager with an alcohol content of 4.8% (formerly 5.2%). The release of a lager with a lower alcohol content compared to other Stella Artois products effectively communicated the premium beer brand’s sensitivities towards the topic of binge-drinking.
To recover the damage inflicted on Stella Artois’ reputation as a premium beer brand, Stella Artois launched a campaign in 2010 that began with changing its logo to a coat of arms. Their campaign then advertised that there was a technique for pouring a pint of Stella Artois. The re-branding efforts made by Stella Artois resulted in success with the public’s negative perception of the brand changing. They now believed it to be a brand that invoked the positive perception of a sophisticated premium beer.
A look into Movia’s future.
The above examples all demonstrate the importance of re-branding and how it can be vital to a brand’s success. We have seen that re-branding can be used as a solution to a variety of complex challenges brands may face. It’s a tool marketers can use to pull brands drowning in the shadows of their competitors, a tool that can be used to push brands into the pockets of new target markets, and a tool that can be used to give brands a fresh start in markets they have existed in for centuries. HaulerAds plans on using re-branding as a tool to reflect and communicate its innovative business model to its current and potential customers who are looking for OOH suppliers that are known for their AdTech/MarTech.
Although re-branding can lead a business to success, businesses should only consider re-branding if changing their brand identity, marketing, and/or advertising messages will benefit the business heavily, as re-branding is expensive and time-consuming. HaulerAds re-branding to Movia and changing the brand’s identity works as the brand name Movia is just as recognizable as HaulerAds in being synonymous with mobile billboard suppliers. However, the brand name Movia not only leaves behind the hauler truck identity it used to have but also carries with it a new brand voice of innovation. An element that isn’t automatically identifiable with the brand name HaulerAds, regardless of its innovative approach to using data-driven mobile billboards.
Despite re-branding being an expensive marketing tool that takes time and money to execute, the costly process of re-branding HaulerAds to Movia will reap a rewarding ROI. With a change in brand name, Movia will have a louder voice within the cluttered marketing world, will be more identifiable, and reflect both its AdTech business model and today’s high-tech industry.
