3 Steps McAfee Should Take to Ensure a Successful Rebrand

McAfee has long required a successful rebrand. Dogged by years of association with its infamous and often-newsworthy founder John McAfee, a 2010 acquisition by Intel, and a 2016 move in which investment firm TPG gained control of 51 percent of the company, marked a new day for the 30 year-old brand.

Chris Young, McAfee’s VP of global channel operations, promised a quick rebrand at a November 2016 Focus conference and this month, the company delivered.

When overseeing a sensitive, and in some ways subtle, rebrand that involves the creation and handing-off of a great many assets from an agency to a company, it’s important to have a strategy for storage, management, and dissemination that goes beyond static internal servers. What do I suggest? Digital Asset Management (DAM), of course. Here are three steps McAfee should take to ensure a cohesive and successful rebrand.

1. Disseminate Easily & Save Time

If you’re McAfee, you’ve likely just spent a good deal of time and money with partner agency Solid Branding to refresh your name, logo, and tagline. So how do you get everyone in your company on board, and how do you get those assets safely and easily from your agency to your employees?

DAM is the answer. The right Digital Asset Management solution allows your agency to upload new logos, images, brand guides, color swatches, and more along with proper formatting guidelines, so that your company can begin using your new brand assets immediately. And industry analytics features ensure that you can see who’s using assets and how, so you can monitor how your new brand is being used during the rollout and beyond.

By having your agency or an in-house team populate your DAM, you save everyone from having to sort through emails or get on the phone to track down assets that so-and-so on the second floor has ... you think. DAM makes the hand-off of these assets efficient, secure, and immediate.

2. Create a Press Kit

Once McAfee has rolled out their rebrand internally, it’s important that the right media sources are aware of the rebrand and the assets it bore. Ensure they aren’t pulling outdated assets from Google by sharing them on the press kit portion of your DAM.

This empowers you to share certain public-facing assets with the press, allowing them to easily access and download approved logos, product images, taglines, and more. Oh, and you can monitor which contacts are downloading those assets too, so you know who’s covering your crazy-successful rebrand and where.

3. Ensure that Sensitive Materials are Secure

With any rebrand, there are going to be assets that are for internal eyes only. With DAM, you can set up simple passwords, restrict access to some internal users, and set expiration dates for certain user access. You can also share specific “Collections” (DAM-speak for folders that are visual rather than traditionally stacked) with users, while keeping the rest of your DAM secure.

For a cyber security company, this is a big talking point and, I’d guess, a big area for concern. The right DAM serves as a safe vessel for your brand, with you as the gatekeeper.

The Case for McAfee Getting a DAM

For these reasons and more, I believe a DAM could save McAfee a great deal of time in the early stages of rebrand rollout, and ensure that the next few years see the use of those rebranded assets to their fullest.

Hey McAfee, if you’re interested in learning more about Brandfolder, the world’s simplest Digital Asset Management Platform, let us know!