219. The Calendly rebrand 📅
See the before and after, and get into the positioning, purpose, and taglines of everyone's favorite scheduling tool
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Hi there 👋
When you’ve been using a software product for years, any changes to their brand feel personal — like someone redecorating your office without telling you. Fortunately, most software brands are really good at decorating! Trello had a hip brand refresh earlier this year, for instance. (And for those of you who have experienced my personal tech stack, you know I have a Trello board for everything). I’ve been eagerly awaiting the day that Calendly would evolve its brand, too. As you’ll see below, the day is here!
Got any stories from favorite brands of yours that underwent a makeover (good or bad)?
Wishing you a great week,
Kevan
Brand Spotlight: the all-new Calendly
👉 Kevan’s brand strategy playbook
One of the things I have always loved about Calendly is its simplicity.
The product is simple to use — it’s a scheduling assistant that helps people grab time on your calendar. The website is clean and minimal — extremely so; you might have even said that Calendly was devoid of a color palette, just all grays and whites.
So whenever the day came for a brand refresh, it was always going to be a balancing act between bringing the brand forward with color, style, and differentiation all while maintaining the simplicity that got Calendly this far.
How do you think they did?
Logo:
Homepage, before:
Homepage, after:
A quick note: If you’re looking for the new brand on your Calendly this week, it appears that they are slowly rolling it out to all users. You might have it now, or it might be coming. Also, it appears that there were some hiccups in the rollout. See the comments on their announcement tweet below. Also, it’s been hard to find any public mention of the rebrand other than an AdWeek article that is 404’ing.
The three P’s of branding
When I put together a brand strategy, I use the three P’s of branding:
Purpose
Positioning
Personality
For purpose, you’re attempting to answer the question of why? Why does your brand exist? Why does the world need you now? Ideally, you’re able to find a cultural tension that you can address with your product when it’s at its best.
In Calendly’s case, I imagine their Purpose might look something like this:
Put another way …
Calendly believes that the world would be a better place if we spent more time connecting and less time coordinating.
(I should probably add that I have no idea what Calendly actually thinks about any of this. It’s all just my guesses.)
Then with Positioning, I like to work from a template that addresses a product’s category, customers, alternatives, and differentiators. Here is what Calendly’s positioning statement could be:
On the positioning front — especially the “who it’s for” — Calendly is an interesting case study because its userbase is so broad. If you look at their new website, their top menu has links for Individuals, Teams, and Enterprise, which is pretty much … everyone.
For personality, I’d say that Calendly’s style is still baking. You can get a small taste of personality in their Twitter feed (tweets like this), but overall there’s nothing clear and obvious yet.
(As a contrast, check out Coda’s personality.)
Calendly’s new messaging: Easy Ahead
One of the main things you might notice when scrolling their site and experiencing the new branding is their commitment to the tagline Easy Ahead.
The H1 of their website is Easy Scheduling Ahead.
Their footer has an Easy Ahead stinger where you normally expect a company logo.
Their Twitter cover photo is Easy Ahead.
Their Instagram teases out the tagline with a Changes Ahead hashtag.
I think the messaging is solid, and like many other elements of the brand refresh, I’m curious how it will continue to play out. For instance, when you have a flexible tagline like this, it can be neat to use it in a variety of ways.
Easy scheduling ahead.
Easy meetings ahead.
Easy workday ahead.
Etc.
I would love to get inside their brains and find out why they went with “easy” rather than “easier” … I’m sure there was some psychological reason why. Also, the word “easy” is one that we wrestled with at Buffer because of the connotations it brings with it of a more basic, commoditized experience. Same with words like “simple.” One of the goals with the Calendly rebrand, according to their Chief Revenue Officer was to help Calendly move further upmarket and appeal to enterprise customers. They rolled out new enterprise features with the rebrand.
“As we have made the transition to being this larger company that is a part of the software ecosystem, we wanted to make sure that our brand reflected a prominence in the market,” Patrick Moran, chief revenue officer for Calendly, told Adweek. “More importantly, we wanted the brand to capture the essence of what we do for customers, which is make it easier to connect with each other.”
Does this Calendly rebrand do it for you?
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to reply with any feelings or 😍
About this newsletter …
Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. If you enjoy what’s in this newsletter, you can share some love by hitting the heart button at the top or bottom.💙
About Kevan
I’m a marketing exec who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Polly (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer and Vox.
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