National Instruments is now NI - Thoughts

[swatts]

Hello Change-embracers and deniers,

For those who don't know me, I'm not a loyal NI brand advocate. NI is a supplier to my company and they make some products that I really love (LabVIEW and cRIO are my current favourites). Over the years of running a business I've learnt that marketing is important and marketing to engineers is quite difficult. Marketing to engineers across the world is even harder! I'm therefore going to quickly summarise my opinions on the new look NI with the caveat that my opinions don't matter, I'm not the target audience here.

1) Logo--> It's OK and I'm glad they got rid of the eagle, it means it will difficult to convert into a mascot and that's great for me as I was always a bit scared of that bloody great eagle that haunted NIWeek.

2) Colour Scheme--> I like the green personally, but it's not going to affect any of my buying decisions in the future.

3) Website changes--> I think the front page looks great. Hopefully some of the budget will be spent on User Experience too.

4) Messaging--> to me this is the most important thing and something I'm actually enthused about.

Messaging

This article is not about repeating NIs messaging or marketing material, it's about how it made me feel.....

The simplest part first, I liked that they used NI staff and customers in the videos and presentations, rather than stock photos. It emphasised inclusiveness and that was nice.

What I took away from it was that NI recognised that collaboration with all stakeholders was the key direction for their business to go and this was an outward looking message. I liked that looking outward was so foundational to the messaging, because when NI does this it is an exceptional company to do business with.

In some ways I thought the target for this messaging was more for NI themselves than the rest of us.

It will be interesting to see how this develops in the future, marketing fluff or actual substance. I'm optimistic that there is real substance here.

Lots of Love