Surpassing $1 billion in revenue, Citrix had grown beyond its old brand platform. As their branding partner, we shaped a new strategy and overhauled
the Citrix brand identity to be more confident, more professional and more mature.

Situation

As Citrix Systems passed the $1 billion revenue mark, it was time to re-think the corporate positioning, identity and design system. For years, Citrix had built its brand around access, and its industry-changing technology, Citrix Presentation Server. The access message, however, was potentially disingenuous to customers and partners. Citrix wasn’t an access company; Citrix was an infrastructure company.

Moreover, the Citrix identity was that of an aggressive, sassy start-up, with garish red dots and primary colors. Despite the company’s financial success, it wasn’t going to join the ranks of Cisco, IBM, Dell, Microsoft and HP with its childish corporate identity.

Solution

As Citrix’s branding partner, we helped reposition Citrix behind a central message of application delivery infrastructure. As part of this, we focused the brand on the key purchasing audiences — IT executives, network architects and applications administrators — and developed a new messaging framework.

With the strategy in place, we overhauled the Citrix brand identity. Our goal was to make the brand more confident, more professional and more mature without changing the logo. We did this by adopting a new color palette, typography system, imagery library and secondary graphic system. Throughout 2007 and 2008 we upgraded the company’s marketing materials and communications and helped developed materials and messaging for signature Citrix conferences and events.