Behind the scenes of SiriusXM’s rebrand

One audio company is in the midst of a serious rebrand.

Last month, SiriusXM shared its plans for a brand refresh that includes new content, tech, partnerships, and an upgraded app that became available to users Thursday. To accompany the roll-out, the brand has crafted new marketing assets, including a new logo, mascot, and color palette, all of which will be on display in the new year when the company starts one of its biggest marketing pushes ever.

The goal of the new app and branding effort is to attract new, younger audiences in the face of increasing competition in the audio world, without completely abandoning SiriusXM’s brand roots, SVP and Chief Growth Officer Suzi Watford told Marketing Brew.

“When you’ve got this established brand where you’ve got that many subscribers who are experiencing it, particularly in the car on hardware, it’s not like you can change all of that overnight,” Watford said. “It’s really important to make sure that you maintain some brand consistency, and that it’s not a complete [about-face] and people don’t recognize who you are.”

Come closer

The reason for the rebrand wasn’t that SiriusXM wanted to raise brand awareness, Watford said. (The company has been around under its current name since 2008, when satellite radio companies Sirius and XM merged, and now has about 32 million subscribers.) Instead, the brand wanted consumers to “reassess the role that it can play amongst all of their other media consumption,” she said.

Nils Leonard, founder of Uncommon Creative Studio, the agency SiriusXM tapped to help with the rebrand, said his team was asked to figure out a way to help the company “matter to people again” and remind them that the brand can “bring something new to the table.”

After conducting research and having conversations with internal stakeholders, the team decided that the message SiriusXM should convey to listeners is a feeling of “proximity to the things they love,” Leonard said.

“It’s the antidote to [Spotify’s] Discover Weekly,” he said. “It’s not about loads more stuff. It’s like, if you fucking love Taylor Swift, we’ll get you closer to her songwriting, the songs that inspired her, her tour.” He said that the idea is based on how fans interact on social media with their favorite bands and artists. “We were like, ‘What if Sirius could be the most perfect example of that in sound and in streaming?’”

SiriusXM’s new brand platform, called “Closer,” is meant to highlight that approach, emphasizing the company’s focus on human curation in music, talk radio, and podcasts, Watford said.

Who let the dog out?

Since Sirius merged with XM, its logo has featured sound waves emanating from either side of the brand name. Since the Spotify logo also incorporates sound-wave imagery,SiriusXM wanted to focus on its star power, swapping sound waves for a star in the brand’s new logo was a “no-brainer,” Leonard said. The new sky-centric imagery is also a nod to the company’s roots as a satellite radio company.

The logo isn’t just any star. It’s Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, which is sometimes called the “dog star.” Before the merger, Sirius the company had a dog as its logo, and that dog was brought out of retirement (with a modernized rendering, Leonard said) to serve as SiriusXM’s mascot. The dog, named Stella, brings “fun and energy and youth” to the brand while also nodding to its history, Watford said.

Stella isn’t part of the official logo, but she will appear on SiriusXM merch and in the app, according to Watford. “She’s almost like what Mickey is to Disney,” Watford said. Uncommon is in the process of animating different versions of Stella wagging her tail, digging, or sleeping, Leonard said.

“Some people might not even notice that she exists through the experience, but having a mascot that speaks to the past, speaks to the star, just felt like a gift,” Leonard said. “You’ll see a bit more from Stella, I think, as the brand grows.”