A Night & Day Story

The newly formed Dell Technologies has created a brand architecture that communicates the values of a family of businesses. JEREMY BURTON, chief marketing officer of Dell Technologies, can spin a tale, even if it is something as mundane as selling tech products or data protection suites or raising awareness around security threats. He was faced with an interesting challenge when the Dell EMC merger created Dell Technologies, and the mandate to create the brand story was assigned to him. In conversation with NOOR FATHIMA WARSIA, Burton shares how he approached the task at hand. Excerpts:

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Dell is as much a consumer facing brand as it is business facing. What did this mean for you while creating the overall brand architecture?

We see Dell Technologies as a family of businesses that provides essential infrastructure to organisations to build their digital future. We are not trying to communicate that through a single brand. Our approach is to have an overarching brand such as Dell Technologies to represent our top-most promise. And then, we have a series of underlying brands — Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream, and VMware — that explain to businesses and consumers how they deliver on their piece of that overall promise, while standing on their own as distinct, and in some cases very different, brands. This approach isn’t common in the IT industry, but it is in others. Take automotive for example. There are some car companies that have an overarching brand — Volkswagen/ Audi for instance — that represents a set of characteristics you want to convey to a market, but also fairly different sub-brands that stand on their own — such as Lamborghini. You can think of VW/Audi as Dell Technologies, and perhaps Pivotal — something way out of on the leading edge of engineering — as our Lamborghini.

And how did you manifest this in the visual appearances of these brands?