In April of 2012, Citrix acquired Podio – a social collaboration platform for work. Podio is a great product that enables teams to move their work into a centralized location in the cloud, and it’s flexible enough that those teams can adapt the tool to the processes and workflows they already have in place. Our Brand Experience team was tasked with providing perspective to the organization for how to best integrate the Podio brand into the Citrix portfolio. Our real challenge was to gain a better understanding for what that integration truly meant for the needs of Podio, of Citrix and the longer-term needs of the organization.

To begin, we conducted interviews with key stakeholders across the organization to gain a better understanding of how they viewed the Podio acquisition and what a successful brand integration meant to them. We quickly learned that for many people, brand integration meant simply aligning on a font, adding Citrix to a webpage or having a correct email signature. However there was a consistent desire for greater strategic clarity around how Podio fits into the Citrix story, how to talk about it effectively and deliver on the value implicit in the new acquisition.

As we continued our discovery process we interviewed key members of the Podio team and found that they actually have a very strong sense of their own brand. They were small enough that they were able to internalize this brand sense but had little in the form of documented expressions of that brand. Additionally, because they were a startup and moving quickly to grow, we noticed subtle inconsistencies in the ways their brand was being expressed in market specifically in areas like video cards, websites and the ways they related Podio’s functional integration with external tools like Google Docs and Dropbox. With this in mind we set out to find ways to help Podio be more consistent and ensure their brand value was being preserved now that they were part of a much larger organization.

We developed a series of design systems that gave Podio a consistent and clear way to express their different integrations with other products. These systems served the dual purpose of ensuring that Podio’s brand was preserved as it expressed its relationship with 3rd party apps and related a unique and branded quality when communicating a specific integration with a Citrix product like GoToMeeting. These simple systems helped Podio and Citrix have greater consistency and also meant that individual teams didn’t have to create one-off designs for every new deliverable or piece of content.

With an appropriate collection of new design assets and a considered approach to integration, Podio successfully transitioned into the Citrix family and continued to apply the majority of their focus on customers and product improvement. The brand integration process served as a key example to the organization for how a thoughtful approach to brand integration can yield greater strategic impact and results.