This past summer, Patron Technology rebranded as Leap Event Technology. It was a major endeavor for all involved, but especially for Doug Lyons. As the company’s Senior Vice President, Marketing & Communications, he’s the man who most often has to answer questions like “Why?” and “How has it gone so far?”
Doug Lyons
So far, it has gone very well. As to the “why,” Lyons was quick to answer during a recent interview with this journalist: “The vision for the founding of Patron Technology was to bring together all the necessary tools for the live event industry and provide a ‘one stop shop’ for clients to get all the technologies they needed — ticketing, mobile apps, marketing and operations — from a single vendor. Having brought together a dozen independent companies, we realized that, in addition to integrating these disparate systems, we also needed to unify the brand and product name confusion that existed with our offering. Each of our product and service names and branding (colors, style) were very different, and this was perpetuating a ‘siloing’ effect — not only of our team structures, but of our overall company culture — not to mention undermining our message of a unified solution for the industry. We needed a new, unified brand to reflect who we were and what we offered.”
Hence the new company name Leap Event Technology. So, what has been the biggest challenge so far in the rebranding process? “Normally it would be finding the right name,” Lyons says. “But in our case, we had one platform, Ticketleap, that had real brand equity. We strongly desired to maintain that presence, but we also pride ourselves in being ‘more than just ticketing.’ So, we needed something that would not pigeonhole us to being just another ticketing company. We realized early on that the ‘leap’ part of Ticketleap could be leveraged to allow us to implement a consistent brand under that label for all our products, while still enabling us to continue to take advantage of the Ticketleap equity.”
He continues, “With that solved, the real challenge came with sequencing the rebranding process and synchronizing product, marketing, support and communications. This needed to be done over time as there were various business and logistical constraints. It ended up taking us longer than expected. But starting with the master company brand — going from Patron Technology to Leap Event Technology — we then mapped out and executed the rebranding at the product/service level over time. This allowed us to spread the work across the various teams in a manageable way, while continuing to push forward and celebrate the changes at every step and reinforcing the new Leap master brand.”
In the aftermath of the rebranding, Lyons and his colleagues realized a number of benefits. Some have even come as a surprise. “We were pleasantly surprised how the various teams from the previous independently named product groups quickly embraced the new brand and naming structure and began using it even before the full rebrand of each product was complete. There was genuine excitement for Leap, and the team — unasked — helped us actively adopt it internally. We expected a bit more headwinds on this front, but it was actually all a very positive process.”
Lyons went on to give credit to the company’s branding agency, which helped executive leadership work through different models for brand structures. Together, all concerned looked at other companies that had rebranded for inspiration and guidance. “But ours was a bit of a unique case as we wanted both Leap and Ticketleap to remain prevalent, but under a unified visual and structural model,” Lyons says. “The closest comparables that we used for framework purposes were Google and Apple. They maintain strong master brands while allowing some flexibility within their solution naming. In Google’s case, they separate their corporate master brand [Alphabet] from their consumer brands [Google], which loosely, but not exactly, equated to our Leap master brand and Ticketleap public brand.”
In Apple’s case, leadership showed how certain solutions can fit in a couple of buckets (iPhone vs. Apple Watch). “In our case, we have both Leap and Ticketleap solutions,” Lyons says. “Neither branding approach was an exact fit, but looking at them helped us think through options and potential impacts.”
Lyons and his colleagues are always assessing current market conditions and potential impacts. One of the biggest lingering challenges facing event organizers today is that their data remains “uncaptured” and spread across multiple platforms. Leap Event Technology can help in this regard. Lyons says, “Most ticketing organizations and partners have focused for years on ‘identifying all the attendees’ — i.e., one person buys four tickets, and you only have the purchaser’s personal information. Who are the other three? This is an important element that we continue to focus on. However, as we have deployed our engagement tools around mobile and on-site activations at the event, we realized two things.”
The first is the importance of deploying “incentive” engagement tools that get people to register each attendee in order for them to take advantage of things like gamification. “This helps us get each specific ticket holder’s user information we want,” Lyons says.
And the second realization? “We cannot only identify each attendee uniquely, but we can use the data gathered with these engagement tools to provide an elevated experience through content personalization and tailoring the experience to gather even more preference data for future sales and marketing initiatives. It’s a double win.”
As Leap Event Technology has gained more traction in the ticketing and live events industry, accolades have followed. The company was recently chosen by Inc. Business Media for its Power Partners Awards. Lyons says, “We are very thankful for being recognized by Inc. as a Power Partner. The live entertainment technology space has had many startups come and go over the years, and few reach the stage where they are viewed as a respected technology business leader. This award is a clear acknowledgement of that.”
Looking ahead to the new year, Lyons believes it will be full steam ahead in 2024 now that the rebranding process is complete. He is especially looking forward to a certain upcoming conference and exhibition in Las Vegas: “January marks the first year at the INTIX 45th Annual Conference and Exhibition for the Leap brand, and we are excited to be participating this year in Las Vegas. We are also busy launching additional marketing services, leveraging our newly developed data platform that allows us to provide clients with unique insights based on the extensive transactional and attendee engagement data we’ve been collecting. It also sets us up to begin offering more proactive event marketing services, using this data to more effectively target audiences and help our clients drive additional sales, revenue and customer understanding and thus grow our collective businesses. It will be a very exciting 2024!”
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