Brand architecture is an element of a marketer’s job that doesn’t always feel that important – until you realise you have a problem and it suddenly becomes critical. This is exactly what happened to video game company Team17 Group, leading it to rebrand to Everplay last week.
But first a history lesson.
Team17 is a UK-based game studio most famous for creating the Worms series in 1995 (where cute cartoon worms blow each other up with bazookas). The company grew throughout the 2000s and was eventually floated on the stock exchange in 2018. The holding company was named Team17 Group and consisted of Team17 and two more recent acquisitions – StoryToys and Astragon.
This was the structure CEO Steve Bell (the former CEO and co-founder of creative agency Iris) inherited in 2023 when he took charge of the business. It was clear to him there was a problem when it came to brand architecture. Equally, though, the business was aware of the brand equity tied up in the Team17 name and needed that to be protected through this process.
“The important thing within this is that we’re not changing the individual divisions,” Bell tells Marketing Week. “Team17 has decades and decades of heritage. To mess around with that name and change it would be changing something for the sake of it.”
Bell quickly discovered when talking with the teams that those within Team17 felt they had “lost their identity” because the holding company was also called Team17, so they felt a need to describe themselves as the “games label or digital team”, which they hadn’t had to do before.
Inversely, the two acquisitions that were made, Astragon in 2022 and StoryToys in 2021, felt as if they were “sitting to the side of the mothership” and not quite part of the group as they didn’t share the same branding. It also created confusion among investors who would only talk about the Team17 games label.
“So, it was a lack of ownership and identity within the business, a degree of confusion outside of the business by investors and a desire to futureproof the business should we want to make any more acquisitions,” explains Bell.
‘I don’t mind being polarising’: UKTV’s marketing boss on launching its U masterbrandTo bring this project together he enlisted the help of creative agency Aurora – whose co-founder Dawn Paine has plenty of experience within the games industry having served as marketing director at Nintendo – which was brought in to work on the brand strategy, creative identity, name and website redesign.
Paine acknowledges the “heritage” of the Team17 brand but suggests all “timeless, iconic brands” still need to be modern, fresh and relevant and “connect with the culture of today” if they are going to continue to be successful.
From this came the new name – Everplay – and a new positioning ‘Never Stop Playing’ to run alongside it. The brand’s logo also nods to its new name with two play symbols pointing at each other to create a sort of infinity loop. For Paine, the idea of play was something that was “rooted” at the heart of the business DNA for decades and the right thing for the holding group to champion.
The positioning, though, was more of a “eureka” moment for the project and came from a George Bernard Shaw quote: ‘We don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.’
The quote was “applied” to the business and from it, the Never Stop Playing positioning was born. “It’s much more than a cosmetic badging that will just sit on a wall,” she says. “It’s something that right across the business is going to live and breathe through every touch point within the company.”
Internal buy-in
With any form of brand architecture switch-up perhaps the most important part is how you sell the new structure to internal teams.
Bell says there was a “fine line” in letting the team know internally about the planned change because if the rebrand leaked then people would judge it on “just one word” and make their minds up instantly without understanding the rationale behind it.
Instead, the business conducted town halls, focus groups and consulted with hundreds of employees to ensure the change would land in the correct way and not come as too much of a surprise.
“It’s critical to do that work and I’ve seen it so many times where changes like these are almost a memo from the CEO. By the way, we’re now called this, but there’s no explanation or reasoning behind it,” Bell says. Working with Aurora, he says the business was “really careful that this needed to be sold and understood and bought into in the right way internally”.
Paine agrees it’s crucial to bring people “along on the journey” so they can become advocates for the change. “Nowhere is that better played out than in the games industry because if you get it wrong, your army of advocates can very quickly become an army of critics,” she adds.
‘We needed to simplify the story’: How one B2B business rebranded after multiple acquisitionsAs to the impact this change will have on the bottom line of the company, Bell understands that a name change in and of itself will not be the foundation of a growth strategy. But what it does do, he says, is make sense of the structure the business has and attract “skilled individuals” who want to work within the Everplay team.
It also brings the three individual businesses that it owns “much closer together” and creates a streamlined group function that allows for the right “checks and balances” and strategic guidelines.
“The brand is the final punctuation point in what is happening within the business in terms of making sure we’ve got that group function teed up in the right way,” he adds.
And while some may be concerned at the loss of equity that was associated with the Team17 Group name, Bell is more realistic about what the aims of Everplay are. He notes that Everplay will have relevance to investors, to the other CEOs of gaming companies and to anyone working within the group function of the business.
“Do I want Everplay to be as famous as Team17? Probably not, if I’m being brutally honest with you,” he says.
Instead, he’d rather that the players who buy their products continue to have that relationship with the individual brands underneath the holding group umbrella.
“I don’t expect millions of gamers to be talking about Everplay – but I do expect our people to understand the role it plays within our business and for investors to have the clarity they’ve been asking for, he concludes”
