If you’re familiar with RapidMiner, you may have noticed we recently rolled out a new brand identity (logo, colors, design, etc). After a lot of behind-the-scenes work, we’re excited to show it off publicly and tell you why we did it and what it represents.
Rebrands can be self-serving, and it feels strange to give you deep insight into a marketing initiative as a data science company, but we’re proud of how we’ve evolved—and we hope you can learn something from it, too. (If you’re interested in learning what data science can do for marketing companies, check out how our creative agency client 160/90 leverages AI for consumer recall).
We might be biased, but we think our rebrand is a fun story, and we’re so thankful for the nearly 1 million users that are loyal to RapidMiner. This post is meant to show you who we’ve been, who we are now, and how our rebrand shows who we want to become.
Why a Rebrand? Why Now?
As a foundational brand in data science, we didn’t want to move away from what’s made us great and distance ourselves from our roots. But, the truth is, our organization isn’t what it was when we were founded—we’ve evolved to keep up with the fast-paced market. Our customer profiles have changed, our products have changed, and the people using our platform have changed. Our brand identity needed to reflect that.
Data science has come a long way since RapidMiner was founded. It’s no longer a lackluster experiment in the data center. It’s rapidly become one of the most important investment areas and one of the most important factors for competitiveness for businesses across the globe.
RapidMiner started as an academic platform, but as we’ve grown (in size, user count, and platform capabilities), we’ve evolved to help major enterprises re-shape their operations using data science and machine learning. As we navigate this evolving landscape, our new brand will not only better represent who we are and align with who we’ve become—it will also provide us with better guidelines for who RapidMiner aspires to be in the future.
The Science Behind the Brand
A rebrand isn’t just a project—it’s a complete transformation. We couldn’t do this lightheartedly or haphazardly because the final product had to be meaningful to us and to our loyal customers and users. It required a great deal of time, hundreds of interviews, and some analytical work as well.
First, our fantastic brand agency Mechanica interviewed the people that have made RapidMiner what it is today—staff, customers, academic users, professors, buyers, and partners. Then, we conducted a comprehensive sentiment analysis from the interview transcripts to identify commonly recurring ideas about how people described us and our product.
This gave us our brand drivers—the elements that were repeatedly mentioned in interviews about why people like using RapidMiner. Here’s what we came up with:
- Scales organizational know-how: We democratize complicated concepts
- Accelerates enterprise adoption: We make everyone want to participate
- Catalyzes transformation: We help produce measurable results on small and large scales
And, our brand personality traits—core values all of our people embody:
- Visionary, but grounded
- Brainy, yet approachable
- Energizing and empowering
If you view the brand drivers through the colored lens of our personality traits, you get the following governing brand idea:
People x Expertise x Data. Boom.
It’s simultaneously a fun, inspiring, and punchy line, as well as a differentiating statement and a promise to our customers. We help people amplify the collective impact of their people, expertise, and data. We’ve always been about delivering results and creating a competitive advantage with AI—that’s the boom.
The Design Magic
People x Expertise x Data. Boom. Our guiding beacon of brand, developed through word science. We needed design elements to match it—which is where the real magic comes in. Design generally speaks for itself, but here’s a peek into the magician’s cap…
We needed colors that were pleasing to the eye and aligned with our brand drivers and personality traits. We selected three primary colors, and we will sometimes use them to represent each of the key elements of our brand as well.
Previously, we relied on orange. A lot. Now, we’ve got a diverse spectrum of complementary colors to help make the orange stand out—similar to how our offerings help make aspiring data scientists stand out in a competitive market where data skills are in hot demand.
Our logo (once a reference to finding gold in a mineshaft) needed modernization. We rotated the view down the mineshaft and simplified the design to represent our three brand elements, scaling them up and out in order of scarcity within your typical enterprise. Most organizations have a shortage of analytics talent, plenty of valuable expertise in-house, and so much data they don’t know what to do with it.
As part of our rebrand, we’re trying to elevate people—they’re essential to what we and our customers do every day. We want to show off the faces of our wonderful customers, and our tremendously talented employees need to take center stage. People want to work with people—not a faceless brand. In a world that’s become somewhat digitally numb through social media and a global pandemic, this is true now more than ever. We want to show you who we are.
Finally, we built out our overall design style based on the geometric shapes and patterns inspired by Bauhaus, coming back to our German roots. These geometric shapes can be used as individual icons to reflect the key elements of our brand (as seen above), the stages of the data science life cycle, etc. They can also be combined with photography to create more complex designs that represent industries and larger concepts. All and all, this system is very flexible and allows us to keep our designs very clean and structured, but energetic at the same time.
How Does This Impact Our Customers?
The channels that you use to interact with RapidMiner today will be more fun, more engaging, more consistent, and will more emphatically bring out the most unique and valuable characteristics that make us who we are. Since the data science community is a big part of who we are, all these channels should better represent you as well.
To coordinate with our rebrand, we launched a new version of our website that captures the essence of our new brand and gives our users an easier, more intuitive way to interact with us.
Our products will have an evolved look and feel (with more capabilities coming soon!)—as of today, all the latest versions of our products reflect our new brand.
We also created a dedicated space for our loyal academic users to show our continued support for students, researchers, and professors.
Conclusion
We set on a path to rebrand our organization nearly 12 months ago with a vision for what we wanted our new brand to say about RapidMiner. At the end of the day, your brand boils down to what people think of you: your reputation, your morals, your personality, and the experience you provide. The facelift we’re describing is just a step along the path. Going forward, we as a team will continue to embody all the elements of our new brand promise.
If you have one takeaway from this post, we hope it’s this: RapidMiner has renewed our commitment to empowering enterprises and individuals to use their unique expertise and transform the world with data. BOOM.
If you haven’t already, we’d encourage you to explore the new site and learn about our new platform (currently in public beta). If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it at marketing@rapidminer.com!
