Relaunch!

Barbara Richardson

Executive Vice President
Amtrak
Washington, DC

Midway through a brand relaunch, things can get pretty tricky. You can't relax. We recently launched our first Acela Regional train, but we're staying in high gear for this summer's launch of Acela Express -- America's first 150-MPH train.

We've learned some valuable lessons while we've reengineered our brand. For one thing, simply creating a new product and repackaging it isn't enough. New names, new colors, or new advertising images won't make you competitive. We knew that we had to do this relaunch right: Acela potentially could gain us about 3 million additional customers in the Northeast alone. So we had to think at a much deeper level about what we wanted to convey. We would not only have to look different, we would have to act different.

Our solution? Redesign our whole way of doing business to create an across-the-board, consistent service strategy to provide a seamless travel experience. We researched each step that customers take, from when they begin planning a trip to when they arrive at their final destination. We made things such as ticket purchasing simpler, and we made our posted signs consistent from station to station.

Relaunching your brand means thinking beyond a new design or a new name. It means "going deeper." For Acela, going deeper means getting people to consider how they spend their time -- to consider their quality of life. We're not selling a train; we're selling a personalized travel experience.

Barbara Richardson oversees Amtrak's day-to-day management and leads all of its marketing, brand management, revenue management, and communications activities. She led the railroad's rebranding of most Amtrak trains along the Northeast corridor as "Acela," a high-speed rail service. The National Railroad Passenger Corp. (Amtrak) now has $1.06 billion in passenger revenue and 21.5 million customers.

Michael Zapata

Head Mouth (CEO)
LIPSinc
Cary, North Carolina

What do you do when a technology on which you've built your business fizzles? You could shut down your company, reimburse your investors, and call it a day. But, if you have a market-driven business (rather than one that's in love with its own technology), you've got a good chance at a successful relaunch.

Our company had an application that enabled "voice printing" as a means of identifying people, which is perfect for biometrics markets, and that synchronized human voices to animated characters, which is perfect for Hollywood-quality, Web-based character animation. But, after months of trying to move that technology from lab to marketplace, our engineers reached an unsettling conclusion: They couldn't evolve our core technology into a full commercial application.

Fortunately, we'd simultaneously developed applications for animation and rich-media markets -- and those markets were beginning to boom. So, in a matter of months, we merged two outside technologies with the one that we had already developed, and we created new products for rich media and for animation.

How did we make such a quick turnaround from biometrics markets to Web-based and Hollywood-animation markets? We didn't let our technology drive us. Our technology simply became a vehicle for developing salable products.

Michael Zapata (mz3@lipsinc.com) is a Kenan fellow at the Kenan Institute for Engineering, Technology, and Science and is a former director of the Technology Education and Commercialization Program at North Carolina State University. At the TEC program, he specialized in technology management, including entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial venture activities. LIPSinc was founded in early 1998. Last fall, it launched its first product, "Ventriloquist," which creates and delivers enhanced rich-media content that integrates facial-animation and lip-synchronization technologies.

Research assistance for this article provided by Christine Canabou.