Rangle has begun a rebrand that aims to show how an organization that began as a technical consultancy has the creative and strategic capabilities to help enterprises achieve digital transformation faster and more successfully.
Based in Toronto, Rangle launched several years ago specializing in helping businesses create mobile-first web sites and other digital challenges, with specialized expertise in modern Javascript and other areas. A few weeks ago, however, the company — which is regularly seen exhibiting at a wide range of conferences and events — introduced a simplified logo based solely around the “R” rather than its full name and a stark red colour that looks more like what you might expect from an ad agency or full-scale marketing firm.
“From a brand perspective, wanted it to appeal to CMOs and CEOs and have them trust our creative capabilities as well as the technologists who already appreciate it,” Rangle CEO NickVan Weerdenburg told B2B News Network. “This is not a tech company. This is something new, something different.”
Rangle has also revamped its web site to speak in a way that would resonate with strategic thinkers focus on innovation and transformation, Weerdenburg said.
Some of its work includes helping a major pharmaceutical company, for example, deliver more than 60 apps across its team and customers. For a large retailer, meanwhile, Weerdenburg said Rangle is helping develop a global e-commerce system that will run across 24 different countries in 12 different languages and four different brands.
Although everyone from traditional ad agencies to consultants like Deloitte and Accenture are repositioning themselves as technology firms, Weerdenburg said Rangle is almost taking the opposite approach — using its technical expertise as the foundation on which it is showcasing its ability to meet digital transformation objectives. Even though many banks and other large enterprises are creating their own innovation labs or in-house teams, meanwhile, he suggested their clock is ticking.
“Those innovation labs and teams are often adjacent to their core business operations. The unfortunate side effect is they think they’ve made progress but they’ve just delayed progress by a couple of years,” he said, adding that those who have set five or six-year DX horizons will likely find themselves scrambling to respond to competitive pressures within six to 18 months. “It’s the companies you haven’t heard about that are actually doing some of the most amazing work.”
In many organizations creative and technology teams aren’t really working together, Weerdenburg said — one hands off work to another. Traditional agencies, meanwhile, often assign work to more junior staff once they’ve won an account. Rangle’s rebrand will emphasize the difference in its approach, which is based on “lean” design principals and Agile processes. In fact, Weerdenburg said those same principals are being applied to the way the company is changing its marketing.
“There’s more work to come. The thought was that we can introduce a new element, test, refine and evolve it on an ongoing basis,” he said. “We want to go deeper — there’s so much that we do — it may take six to nine months to fill in the depth of the stories we can tell.”
