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Crafting A Brand Positioning Strategy to Stand Out in the Atlassian Ecosystem

The Atlassian Marketplace website currently has over 8,000 app listings – In such a crowded ecosystem, having an effective brand positioning strategy is not only “a good idea”, but critical.

Building a strong brand identity is what will differentiate you from the thousands of other vendors. What’s more, once the audience is aware of your brand, you can begin to build trust and encourage your prospects to look for you to solve other problems.

During Brighttail’s Ignite: The Marketplace Growth Conference last year, Elements Chief Strategy Officer – Julie d’Antin presented several tips and strategies on branding and the importance of creating a strong brand identity. Below is a summary of her presentation.

What is a Brand?

To craft the perfect strategy for your brand, you must first understand what a brand is. This may seem elementary but even today many continue to think of a brand as a logo which is only a single element of branding.

In his book “This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See” Seth Godin describes a brand as “the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a customer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” Godin’s definition not only encapsulates how broad branding is, but it also emphasizes the importance of brand positioning.

Building a Strong Brand Identity

#1 Naming Your App

Naming your app is perhaps the most important part of your brand positioning strategy. This is how customers will look for your product, so it’s worth taking the time to think of a good name. Moreover – renaming is difficult!

  • Ensure that the name is easy to pronounce for everyone, and remember and is relevant to the function. The last thing you want is to confuse prospects. 
  • Consider factors like trademarks, domain availability, SEO potential, and Atlassian Marketplace’s character constraints, so keep the name short.
  • There are three strategies you can consider when naming your app:
    • Combining a company brand and your app’s function is best used when you want to facilitate cross-selling across your brand’s products.
    • Combining an app brand and its function is useful when you have multiple product lines within your company.
    • Having an evocative product brand is a creative way to convey the value proposition of your app.
Learn about the 3 effective naming strategies to improve your brand positioning strategy
During her presentation, Elements Chief Strategy Officer Julie d’Antin presented the three naming strategies along with examples of each strategy.

#2 Designing Your Logo

When it comes to logos, you’ll want to make sure to focus on scalability, simplicity, and meaning. Here are four things to remember when designing your logo:

  1. It needs to fit in a square.
  2. Account for the most frequent displays.
  3. Think about your portfolio of products as a consistent suite.
  4. Try to convey meaning while remaining simple.

#3 Going Beyond Basics

There are several things you can do to drive home your brand’s identity to the audience. This includes defining your typography, colors, logotypes, illustration styles, your product interfaces and even going as far as including merchandise that fits with the overarching theme of your brand.

By defining a consistent theme for your brand across all touchpoints, you tell your prospects that this is your company and how you represent yourself visually. You tell your story.

Standing Out in a Crowded Marketplace

Standing out in Atlassian’s Marketplace is one of the main reasons for creating an effective brand positioning strategy. To do this, you need to be able to communicate your unique selling proposition (USP) to a clearly defined target audience. 

You go about doing that through three steps:

  • First: Make sure you identify your target audience and market.
  • Second: Highlight customer benefits over your product’s features.
  • Third: ensure your USPs resonate with your potential customers by testing it through feedback, surveys, A/B testing, and interviews.

Your efforts towards creating a strong brand identity do not end after the third step. Building a strong brand identity necessitates that you continue going through these steps so you can refine your messaging to remain relevant as the market changes.

Enhancing Customer Engagement and Loyalty

Learn how to enhance customer engagement by building strong relationships with customers
Julie d’Antin also shared a journey map highlighting each customer touchpoint from problem discovery to renewal.

Every customer touchpoint is another opportunity for you to engage with your target audience and assure them that your app is the right choice. 

Map out all the touchpoints based on how you believe potential customers will choose your app and ask yourself how good of an experience did you give them each step of the way. This will help you identify areas for improvement.

Adapting to Trends While Keeping Innovations Intact

When it comes to creating a brand identity for a business, you must adapt to current trends. This could eventually lead you to having to change certain elements of your brand like your logo or name.

Some of the reasons you may want to redesign your logo or go through renaming are:

  • You’re going through an acquisition and you want to consolidate the products under the same brand.
  • Trademark issues.
  • Adapting to evolving customer needs.
  • Market trends.
  • Change in your positioning.

Note that changing your name or logo will require a transition period. Take every opportunity to reintroduce your new name or logo to your audience as often as possible. This may seem like “unnecessary” work but staying relevant in an ever-evolving market spells the difference between whether you last or are forgotten.

Here are two examples of Atlassian Marketplace brands that successfully rebranded:

1. Elements

Example of an old flyer by Elements featuring their old logos and messaging focused on Jira administrators
This is a previous flyer from Elements featuring both their old logos and messaging focused on Jira administrators.
Here are Elements' new logos that convey more meaning and more flexibility
These are Elements’s new logos conveying more meaning and allowing for more flexibility as they evolve their portfolio.
The changes of Elements which led them to focus exclusively more on the ITSM Market
Elements’s messaging also changed as it began to focus exclusively on the ITSM market.

2. Tempo

Here are the new Tempo messaging and app logos which upscale their brand positioning to be more modern and enterprise
Tempo’s new messaging and app logos feel modern and enterprise.

After acquiring several products, Tempo was faced with the challenge of consolidating several brands. To address this issue, Tempo revamped its messaging and visuals into a modern, fresh, and consistent brand that feels enterprise.

Tempo’s Brand and Content Director, Joe Ford noted that it is important to remain open-minded during the process and welcome ideas from others.

Conclusion

In crafting the right brand positioning strategy remember: a brand is more than just a logo, clearly define your target audience so you can effectively communicate your USP, every customer touchpoint is another opportunity to engage with your audience and build loyalty, and that this journey towards finetuning a brand identity for business is never-ending – rebranding may very well be part of that journey.

This was just a summary of one of the several presentations made by expert speakers during Brighttail’s Ignite: The Marketplace Growth Conference. For a more in-depth look, check out the full clip of Julie d’Antin’s presentation on our On-Demand Session and schedule a consultation with us!

This year, Brighttail will be holding another virtual conference with more experts and valuable information. Make sure you don’t miss out on our coming announcement for Ignite 2025.