It’s no small decision to rebrand your business. Your current brand will stand for something and will have its fans, regardless of its size.
And that’s certainly the case with Media Suite, our brand from the foundation of our business 22 years ago. It may not have been the biggest or most recognisable brand in Canterbury’s tech scene, but it was synonymous with the quality and transparency of the service experience we stand behind.
That made the decision to rename - and not just refresh - the brand, no easy decision.
Asking the Right Questions
When a business is thriving it can be incredibly difficult to stop and assess. That was the case for us, concentrating 100% on service delivery as we grew. But once we pulled ourselves away from our work and started reflecting on who we are, and how far we’d come, it was like opening a door that couldn’t be closed again.
We have evolved significantly over 22 years, including the way we prioritise our culture and values.
In 2023 we stand for authentic, thoughtful collaboration.
Our services are flexible, allowing us to be a mentor or vendor when needed, but our core motivation and passion for the way we work hasn’t changed. It’s just that now we have a much firmer idea of what drives us and what we care about. On reflection, we didn’t see that in our MediaSuite name.
We chose to work with Guy Pask and Josh Kelleher at StudioPask to help us collectively ask the right questions and come to a shared understanding of the answers.
The result, expertly framed by StudioPask, was that together, as a collective, we are all MadeCurious.
Curiosity is that hidden bedrock foundation under the house we built. We talk about authentic collaboration and building the right thing. That’s about a drive to always objectively find the best outcome for our partners and continuously learn from every engagement.
That’s what our partners see in our service experience.
But all of that, it's driven by our undying curiosity.
Therefore, we are MadeCurious.
New Horizons
When Creative Director Andrew Pitts founded the Media Suite name, it was for a marketing business. The name was designed to reflect the wrap-around marketing services that businesses in Blenheim could receive in the early noughties.
An entire suite of media expertise.
Since then, much has changed in our service offerings, but perhaps to an unexpectedly extreme degree. It’s not just that we’ve changed what we do. It’s that the work is now so diverse and so difficult to categorise, that naming us in just one business category or one sector feels like articulating just the last few centimetres at the top of a very large iceberg.
To confirm, we no longer offer marketing services or make marketing websites.
Over a decade ago, around the time of the Christchurch earthquakes, we pivoted from that end of the digital services spectrum all the way to the other.
We started building deeply intuitive portals and web platforms requiring intensely well-thought-out user experiences that catered for large, complex sets of end users, each with their own competing goals and roadblocks.
But that was only the beginning of the journey. Traffic management led to resource management, which led to digital solutions to all sorts of big knotty problems, mostly in the public sector.
Today, we shape our services in myriad ways. What we do is product design. But we also offer technical consulting services. And stakeholder engagement services. And let’s not forget the software development or UX design and analysis capabilities.
Communicating a service offering like that just through a brand is very difficult.
What was clearly recognised and pulled out by Guy and Josh, was the need for space in the brand. Room for the new brand to work with any shape of service and a contemporary feel that would make it a long-term companion to the business far into the future.
MediaSuite reflected our horizons in 2001. Today, and into the future, MadeCurious reflects that the sky's the limit.
What This Means For Our Partners
Our business is built on transparent partnerships. We make every effort to nurture the kind of strong relationships that allow us to collaborate with our partners to build high impact products.
That is never going to change.
In fact, a lot isn’t changing. Including our commitment to always building the right thing, offering more flexibility than our competitors, and staying tech agnostic so our partners are less boxed in by legacy decisions.
Our way of working hasn’t changed either. We’re agile… when practical. We believe in continuous improvement but will never let process get in the way of delivery.
But perhaps most importantly, our people, culture, and values haven’t changed.
We are still the same people dedicated to making an impact in the real world through digital innovation, and we’re still going to hire on mindset as well as skillset to grow our culture.
It’s just that now we have a name and a brand that better reflects all these things that were always there.
In other words, we were always MadeCurious.
