What could possibly go wrong?
In the early days of summer, our co-founder and CPMO, Lucien, invited Kristoffer, our Head of Design, and me, responsible for content and branding, into one of those meetings.
The kind you leave wanting a cigarette, if that is your thing, a beer, if it is late enough, or simply a room where you can lock yourself away with your co-conspirator and ask: “Right. Where do we even start?”
We were going to rebrand Naboo. In 3 months.
“It needs to be done by October.”
Rebranding is part of the life of a company that sticks around long enough.
People’s tastes change. Products evolve. New software appears every day. Revolutions increasingly feel less like historical eras and more like something included in your next subscription update.
But changing a company’s identity is a little more complicated than changing the colour of your jumper or accepting that it might finally be time to retire your skinny jeans.
You need a reason. A clear one. Especially when you are about to ask an entire company to change how it presents itself while everyone continues doing their actual job.
So I wanted to share what these three months looked like from my perspective. Hopefully, there is something useful here if you are about to go through the same process.
And if the ticking clock makes life at Naboo sound slightly like a Tom Cruise film, please allow me that small editorial pleasure.
This first episode starts with the question we needed to answer before anything else: why go through all of this in the first place?
Why do it again, and why now?
First, a little context.
Our website operates at a scale of millions of pages. Our software serves companies from North America to Singapore. Our brand lives across product interfaces, sales presentations, magazines, videos, client proposals, events, social accounts and all the small places you only remember once you have announced a launch date.
An email signature, for example, has an impressive ability to become a project. We will come back to that.
And we had already changed our identity roughly six months earlier.
Following our latest funding round, our US investors had pushed us to shed what I would call our “French skin”. We needed to present ourselves in a way that matched our international ambitions, particularly in the American market.
Being French was hardly something we needed to apologise for. But we could no longer rely on an identity shaped around our home market to communicate the scale of the company we were building.
That first update addressed an immediate need. It also meant people had only recently got used to the new assets when we started discussing changing them again.
The internet has an excellent memory for this sort of thing. Gap introduced a new logo in 2010, faced a public backlash and went back to its familiar blue box about a week later. An impressively efficient way to discover how much people liked what you already had.
We had no interest in creating our own contribution to the “rebrands that went wrong” slideshow.
So the question was fair: why take this on again, globally, on such a short timeline? What had changed enough to justify asking everyone to go through it twice?
The product had moved faster than the story around it.
The first update had helped us change how we showed up. Now we needed to go deeper into what people understood when they encountered us.
Depending on where you met Naboo, you could come away thinking we were a venue marketplace, an events agency or procurement software.
Each description captured something real. None explained the whole company particularly well.
Internally, we could explain how those pieces fitted together. Usually with enough time, several examples and someone saying, “Wait, let me show you.” Externally, we needed the brand to do more of that work.
There are much bigger examples of companies facing that question. Facebook becoming Meta was a very public declaration of the future its leadership wanted to build, beyond the social network that had given the company its name. Whether people believed in that future was another matter entirely. I know, we are not Meta… yet.
Closer to our world, TripActions became Navan in 2023 as it brought travel, corporate cards and expense management together in one app. The rebranding accompanied a broader proposition that customers needed to understand.
These changes make you ask a useful question: how much of the company does its existing identity still explain?
For us, answering that meant looking closely at the people we served.
One website, two ICPs: Solving the Paradox
Corporate events bring together people who need different things from the same experience. Organisers need speed, flexibility, good advice and someone who will pick up the phone when the plan changes. Procurement and Finance need visibility, compliance and a clearer understanding of what the company is spending.
Both expectations are entirely reasonable. Yet the industry has often made businesses choose which one to prioritise.
Naboo’s ambition is to serve both within one system.
That changes the story considerably. You are explaining how a global company can organise everything from a team dinner to an international conference, while giving Procurement and Finance a coherent view across those events.
And somewhere in that explanation, you still need people to feel that the dinner will actually be good.
This was the challenge: communicate the seriousness of Meetings & Events Spend Management without making the experience sound like an administrative procedure.
For content and branding, that becomes a very practical problem. What goes first on the homepage? What should the photography communicate? How do you explain the value to Procurement without making an organiser feel they have accidentally landed on accounting software?
In marketing terms: how do you make one website for two radically different ICPs with different priorities but a shared workflow?
You cannot give every argument the same space and hope the reader sorts it out.
An industry changing how it explains itself
We were also having these conversations in a market where other companies were changing how they presented their value.
BoomPop was putting AI prominently into its positioning, describing itself as an AI event planning platform while continuing to offer expert planners and full-service support. Technology was becoming part of the headline, with people still playing an important role in delivering the experience.
Cvent, meanwhile, unveiled a new identity in July 2026 with Wolff Olins. Its promise, “Expect More from Your Events”, focused on helping customers achieve and demonstrate better outcomes. Alongside the visual refresh, Cvent described a need to simplify how it explained its offering and modernise how it showed up.
My reading was that these were different responses to a shared challenge. Event companies were having to explain the relationship between their technology, their service and the business value they delivered.
That was also our question, although our answer had to come from the way Naboo actually worked.
AI added another layer. It plays an increasingly important role in how we operate, but asking clients to admire our technology is not the point. Its value is in what it makes possible: less repetitive work, faster responses and more time for our teams to provide advice and service.
Someone organising an event should be allowed to remain completely uninterested in how clever our infrastructure is.
The complexity should happen in the background. The quality of the experience should be obvious.
This is where Maxime, our CEO, and Lucien’s involvement mattered enormously. They pushed us to describe the company we were becoming, with a clear understanding of the business and a willingness to engage with the difficult questions that came with it.
That gave us a much more useful starting point than “make us look more premium”. It also answered the uncomfortable question of changing again so soon: we needed a shared way to explain the whole company, bringing together our products, our service and the different expectations of our clients.
But agreeing on the ambition still leaves quite a lot to decide.
How do you turn it into a brief? Who gets the final say when several perfectly reasonable people disagree? And how much are you willing to let an outside partner challenge the way you see your own company?
An agency can help you find clarity, but you have to give it something to work with, including the possibility that you do not already have all the answers.
We knew why we needed to change. Now we had to decide who to trust with the process, and how we would make decisions together.
October, meanwhile, had made no suggestion that it was willing to move.
Next up : Who do you trust with a decision everyone has an opinion on?