Product marketing realities: From brown boxes to brand recognition

Gabriel: Welcome to this very special episode of the Brand Enabled podcast, live here from Washington DC at our 2025 Brand Enablers Summit. We’ve had a great first day here and I’m here with John Barger from ResMed and Paige Lutter from Logitech and we’re going to have a little chat here about our first day. Hey guys.

Paige: Hey.

John: How’s it going?

Gabriel: How are you? This is like Christmas day for brand leaders, right? Being here together.

Paige: Definitely.

John: Yeah, can’t wait. We’ve been evaluating fonts all day, ready to get into the guidelines.

Gabriel: It’s been a really productive day, right?

John: Yeah.

Gabriel: John, tell us about ResMed. Tell us about your role.

John: Yeah. So, hi everyone. My name is John Barger. I work at ResMed. At ResMed we help people sleep better, breathe better and receive care in their home. And I lead brand there.

And so I’m in charge of anything from the beautiful guidelines that we just had – we just relaunched our brand in March 2025. So brand guidelines, governance, all of that piece into campaigns and even our employer brand. So a lot of what we show up in and outside of the walls of ResMed is what I touch.

Gabriel: And Paige, I knew Logitech back from, you know, when I first started working mouse and keyboards, but it’s a lot more than that.

Paige: Yeah. So at Logitech our two main areas are in work and play. So that can range from your home desktop, which is what most people imagine, mice and keyboards, but also headsets and webcams to a conference room set up, you know, video conferencing. We really boomed… we were one of the lucky companies during COVID that our business really scaled. And then the last piece is gaming. We are the number one gaming peripherals company.

So we’re in really three key areas of business and they’ve all grown tremendously. COVID was a huge bonus to our business. And then those trends continue with the use of hybrid working. People need to have setups, not only in their homes, but at their businesses, being able to be mobile and take their peripheral equipment with them so they can work in a cafe or at someone else’s office. And then gaming, as we all know, is like the biggest stimulated business in the world right now. I mean, eSports alone is just dwarfing any other sports known to man and so being in the gaming business is really positive as well.

Gabriel: And we’re here for the Brand Enablers Summit, which is this very special community that we’re a part of. We meet monthly, virtually, but it’s always very special to actually connect and be here in person. Preach to me, what’s been the highlight of the day so far?

John: For me, I mean, honestly, it was Paige’s session on AI and Logitech and how they implement AI within their brand group to create this brand guru. So beyond kind of just thinking about their guidelines and having normal people interact with the brand, into content creation and how you’re using it to generate and stimulate ideas for storyboards and all of that, cutting down the number of assets that you need to create. I mean, that’s incredible. So kudos.

Paige: Well, thank you. And it was really fun putting that together. The big highlight for me is this is my very first time in person with the Brand Enablers. I’ve been meeting everyone virtually for the last several months, but it’s been so great to meet everyone in person and to feel like I’m not alone in this brand building business. Sometimes it’s a very lonely job because we typically are like the only team in the entire organization that does what we do.

And so to have peers that I can reach out to and ask questions and feel like, you know, no question is a dumb question – because when you’re internal, you feel like you have to know all the answers. Because people are coming to me to know what the right thing is to do. So it’s been just such a privilege to know that I have a team that I can reach out to now.

Gabriel: So you both work for product companies. What are some of the unique challenges of being a brand leader in a company that actually manufactures stuff?

Paige: So I think it’s a really hard thing to wrap your head around if you’ve never worked in a product that actually manufactures goods – if you’ve worked in a software or services company. One of the largest challenges that we have on a day-to-day basis from a brand perspective is packaging. And packaging is essentially the first interaction someone might actually have with our products on shelf.

At Logitech we ship over 3 million products a week. So we have packages upon packages upon packages. If you do a brand refresh, changing packaging across thousands of product lines takes a lot of time and energy, and it’s a huge cost initiative.

So from a brand refresh perspective… like we did a brand refresh last year. We’re now doing a packaging research study where we will start implementing a new packaging change in the next year. And we anticipate it will take anywhere from three to five years to implement all the package changes around the globe through the distribution systems and have it out in the marketplace.

So you have to have a long-term point of view because you know it’s not going to happen overnight. We can’t just flip a switch and every single package on the shelf changes. And then you also have to build that into the understanding across the organization.

Like, you know, we’re not going to have a new shelf next week. It’s going to take time and we want to do it right because changing packaging is one of the hardest and most costly things to do within an organization.

Gabriel: When you think about how many of your products maybe nowadays are sold online as opposed to your retail stores, has that had any impact on how you think about design or brand?

Paige: Yeah, so we have different packages depending on the distribution channel. So if we’re talking business-to-consumer on retail shelf, then we have our full, you know, most detailed package with the most features and the most information about sustainability or the features on the product or trying to make the imagery on the product look like actual size so that you can get a vision of that.

Versus if we’re selling business-to-consumer but online, we sell everything in a brown box with very limited feature sets on it. It costs less to produce that packaging because you’ve already ordered it, so all you need is the best open box experience to get your product going. And then for business-to-business, we typically are shipping things in multi-packs. So you have to think through all of those different levels.

Gabriel: John, what about you? You don’t necessarily have exactly the same amount of volume but you’ve got a more complex product. And you’ve just gone through a brand refresh right now. So how has that been taken into account with being a product company?

John: Yeah. So I think some similar things that Paige just talked about, but layer on another complexity of we manufacture medical products.

So we have regulatory bodies. Our products typically take 18 months from final delivery to actually landing in the market because of all of the different regulations and 510(k) approvals and things we have to submit for.

So, from a branding perspective, retooling a machine so that it has the new logo versus the old logo is going to be across a number of different SKUs that make up that one product. And then the packaging, as Paige was kind of talking about. And then to deliver that fully branded experience is going to take several years.

So some of the things that we talked to our leadership about was that we’re not going to invest in redoing every single thing that’s in the market today. It’s truly about making a conscious choice of any future product that is going to be launched in the next two years to submit it with the new brand – potentially with a new product name following the new brand architecture.

So we look at it in a couple of different ways, but that’s one of the first kind of instances that people will see and experience our brand – not just from a digital side, which they can see, and that’s really easy to change, but in a physical product that might be sitting on their nightstand or used in a doctor’s office.

Gabriel: And then as you think about the fact that we even updated the logo, what are some of the nuances that you had to think about around the development of this new visual identity and the logo as it relates to product?

John: Yeah. So with product, we had a test on a number of different surfaces. So we deal with a number of materials. So silicon is one of them, small plastics. And so if you think about a component in your phone or even on like a backpack – for instance, like a zipper, like super small, how does the logo scale to that? Can we apply it? And then can we implement the brand in that way?

And so previous branding challenges that we had with the old logo is like it was a big swoosh. And so you couldn’t implement that on a product, especially a small mask that would go on your face. Think of something that’s really minimal.

Paige: It’s a lot of space.

John: A lot of space. Yeah. And so we had to put it in the back, and you would never know.

And so what we did was we actually made small tweaks to it so that you can actually have it like stand on its own. And so you can put it on the front of a mask and still know that it’s a ResMed device by just having like that logo mark. Where previously we had a very big logo.

So solving for some of the challenges and then from an accessibility standpoint as well, like making sure that anything that we have from a digital perspective of how the logo shows up is adherent to some very strict guidelines for usability of our products.

Paige: We’ve had similar challenges that are interesting about how you implement on product. Most people don’t realize this, but Logitech is known around the world as Logitech, except for one country. And in one country we’re known as Logicool, that is in Japan. And that’s because Logitech was already trademarked by another competitor when we started the business there 40-ish years ago.

So in order to address… again, trying to be as cost-efficient in tooling and processing as possible… when I started on board, we were printing Logitech on every single product and then we’d have to have another set of tooling and print Logicool. And that whole inventory would also always have to be kept separated, different packaging. So several years ago we made the decision to just use “Logi” as kind of our Nike swoosh. It’s kind of our shortened version of the mark. And now we’re able to save costs for the company by just implementing that across every product line. And now it doesn’t matter. You can ship the same product globally without having to worry about the full trademark.

Gabriel: Over the last few years it’s been shortened to Logi, was that a discussion where you thought about changing the company name just to Logi? And are both still in existence?

Paige: Yeah, it’s quite a challenge and something we talk about internally often because we as employees and as a company, we refer to ourselves as Logi all the time – I work at Logi or Logi Cares is like our internal giving program. But then when we go out into the world and go to market, we’re always Logitech. And we’ve had many, many discussions, and I still continue to have discussions today about Logi versus Logitech.

But what we know is that Logitech is the corporate name and we are implementing Logi in different ways. So it’s on all of our products. So we’re building up brand recognition that way. And then in different events and environments, we might say, this is called Logi Launch, or this is we have another program called Logi Work. We have another program called Logi Play. So we’re trying to build a little bit of brand affinity for those, but then they still fall within the structure and strategy of Logitech.

I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the point… we’re not going to change the company because the cost of changing the company is dramatic. But we’re trying to build that brand recognition so that you know Logi and Logitech are essentially the same. And then we can use things interchangeably. But when you’re talking at the corporate level, we’re always Logitech.

Gabriel: One of the challenges that everyone’s facing as a product company over the last few years has been that everyone’s adding a software or interface layer. Which is causing, probably, for you as brand leaders a big challenge in terms of brand architecture, naming architecture, and especially in decentralized environments where everyone wants to go and name their own things. How do you keep those things connected, and influence them, and integrate it into your own strategy?

John: Yes, for us at ResMed, this is an area that we’re continuing to grow into. We have a whole software part of our business but, as you mentioned, our hardware products now have companion apps. And then they have enabling capabilities within those companion apps that are used across a number of different products. And so you don’t just want to name the app, you want to name that part of the app. So working really hand-in-hand with the product organization to educate them on our brand architecture and the naming strategy that we have within that. But we don’t have an answer.

It’s tough. A lot of challenges come up very quickly and product shifts a lot faster than the hardware piece. The lead time is a lot less. And so it’s something that we are definitely learning as an organization how to tackle.

Gabriel: How about you, Paige?

Paige: Well, I’d agree with John. There is definitely a different nuance when we’re talking about software. At Logitech we’ve always noted that software is a big piece of our hardware. You wouldn’t realize that, very similarly. But for every piece of hardware we make now, there is some type of software behind it – and always has been in some regard – but we just keep growing and expanding that.

We’re trying to get away from individual apps for individual products. So part of the brand strategy is that we’re trying to build ecosystem pieces of software so that all of our products work on one software platform – which wasn’t always the matter in the past. We’d have an app for this product line, and an app for that product line, and an app for that product line, and that’s not how consumers or businesses want to work. They just want whatever they’ve purchased from Logitech to have a singular type of interface, and so we’ve been doing a lot of work on that area.

Naming is always a challenge because everybody… just with any product team, they all have their ideas about how they want to do it. So building a strategy and a structure… similarly to how we went to a single Logi name on the products to avoid having to have multiple names across the globe for our two different brands, we take the same approach for software. Everything is “Logi something something”, because then that way we can have the same app cover all marketplaces. Again, it’s part of the brand strategy. You have to build it, and you have to think about it, and then you have to implement that with the specific teams.

I had a team just recently reach out to me and say we want to call the new piece of software “Logitech, this, this, this”. And I had to remind them, no, we already have a strategy, and so we’re going to change it, it’s going to be “Logi XYZ”, and that’s the process going forward.

Gabriel: Are you facing any similar challenges as it relates now to the AI layer? Because now everyone is adding an AI element, and they want to name their AI thing something special. How are you dealing with the addition of AI? Is it impacting you yet?

Paige: Yeah, it isn’t impacting me so much from a product level, because much of the AI… we’ve been using AI on our products, and it’s kind of built into the systems. For instance, our video conferencing systems utilize AI to understand how many people are sitting in a room to provide feedback to the IT user, the implementer.

Gabriel: So it’s just a feature, you don’t need to brand it.

Paige: It’s just a feature, we don’t call it out, we don’t need to brand it so much. But I’m sure there’s going to be instances in the future where we will, and we’re going to have to think through those things.

Gabriel: John, does it hit you yet?

John: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think with a number of products now implementing AI, they want to call that AI implementation something different across those products. But what I say is this is just status quo. You know, we don’t say we’re Wi-Fi calling, we just know that we’re using Wi-Fi. And, you know, so I think…

Gabriel: So it’s becoming… it’s a utility.

John: Yeah, it’s a utility.

Paige: I think it’s like Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, it’s an enabling technology that allows different systems to do different things, but having to name it a specific thing is not necessarily required.

John: Yeah, and some of that can be used for labeling purposes. Again, if it’s something that’s like, from a medical view of I’m looking at all of this patient data to then come to you with personalized results, then we can look at that. But it would be more towards the benefit-centric labeling versus the technology specifically that’s enabling that capability.

Paige: Or a feature. It could be a feature, and we would tackle it more as a feature name than a product name.

Gabriel: Now, a lot of times we talk about… sometimes we have it, sometimes we wish to have executive support as a way to support brand. You’ve both had it… we talked a lot about this today, and you’ve both had it in different ways.

You have it at the heart of your business strategy, maybe talk a bit about that, Paige. How that’s changed and enabled you, then, to be successful.

Paige: Yeah, so we had a new CEO come on, she’s about a year and a half in now. She came from brand being really a strong part of her background and what she believes is important. And that part of our corporate strategy that she implemented with help… which was one of the best things, she created a strategy when she came on board after six months, and then asked for all employees to help weigh in on the strategy so that we all felt like we all had a piece in it, and that we aligned to it. And there was some changes made based on the feedback from employees.

But one of the key things that came out of it, it’s at the center of the strategy, is that one of our goals is to be an iconic brand. And so that has enabled myself, my team, and most of us who work in the creative and design organization to really be able to spearhead efforts to achieve that – because it’s named as a corporate goal and not just like my department’s goal, right?

So it’s really being engaged and implemented across the organization. And people talk about it constantly now. You know, “How are we doing on becoming an iconic brand?” I’m like, “Well, it doesn’t happen overnight”

John: What! [laughing]

Paige: That’s the part that we all have to be patient about – it takes time and effort, and you have to put a lot of things into place. Good strategies, and good identities, and all of those things, and maybe a little bit of communication.

Gabriel: How has that changed your day to day? Because you’ve been there for 12 years?

Paige: Eleven.

Gabriel: Eleven. So is it fair to say that you were like… and then, all of a sudden, it’s kind of peaked like that? [indicates with his hand a steady progression and then a sudden peak]

Paige: Yeah.

Gabriel: How has that been manifested?

Paige: Well, it’s just, it’s great in that I feel empowered to do my job at a level that I wasn’t – I didn’t feel as empowered previously. It’s like I could put checks and balances on things and maybe say, you know, “This is a little off brand”, or “This isn’t quite on strategy”, but I always felt like I was doing it a little bit on an island.

Gabriel: So the role was limited as well.

Paige: And now it’s really kind of opened up the opportunities of the things that I think we should be doing as an organization. Getting more into things, like we were talking earlier, about employer brand, right? Because brand is not just a logo, as you said earlier, it’s not just a tagline, it encompasses so many things. It’s every interaction anyone has with your company.

And so I think having executive level buy-in and, you know, push to have everyone pay attention to the brand is just enabling us to do it better and more and have a bigger impact.

Gabriel: So patience is the lesson, right?

Paige: Patience is the lesson.

Gabriel: Patience is the lesson. You need to wait for that change.

How about you, John? How has that been manifested as part of your rebrand launch? To ensure that everyone understands the importance of this.

John: Yeah, our CEO, Mick, was involved from the very beginning. He was a huge champion, and I think became even more of a champion as we went through the process. He was very responsive to a lot of the feedback that we gave, or even just challenges that we had. And truly is like the biggest brand champion today.

We had, when we launched the brand, this video that he recorded that was truly embodying what we wanted to have within the rollout. And, you know, that really resonated with employees, it resonated internally with our investors, with our users. And so, you know, I think as we continue to bring the brand to life over the next few years, he is one of the biggest champions of that. He has empowered the rest of his leadership team to also, you know, really listen into how we’re showing up as a brand – What does that look like? What does that mean? From anyone… from a product leader to a people leader to, you know, somebody in finance or strategy.

And so it’s truly empowered our brand team to have the authority to speak into these different areas, but then also have them view us as collaborators across the org. So not as somebody who’s telling you exactly what to do, but somebody who can work with you to solve for the best solution. To allow people to rise to their highest potential.

Gabriel: Now I love the idea of like little hidden brand touchpoints. You had the idea of putting the brand on and giving out luggage tags. What was that story all about?

John: Yeah, it’s really just about, you know, we see people travel. Especially sales reps, like they see people travel in airports, and so they have this special bag that a lot of our products are in when they’re traveling. You know, being able to call that out – it’s a pretty medical looking bag, but we wanted to create kind of like this premiumness to it. So we created…

Gabriel: So this is someone who’s carrying their CPAP machine with them.

John: Through the airport, yeah, exactly. So you’ve got to check it through security and it’s this whole thing but, you know, you want to make sure that like you bring it because it’s lifesaving when you need it. But, you know, I wanted to have a reason why people can connect with that brand or with our machines and stuff. So we have a bunch of luggage tags that we are handing out to sales reps as they’re traveling around so they can give them away… and, you know, hear their story and understand kind of the impact that they make on a daily basis. So it’s a little bit of a better way to connect with our brand and tell them the story of the new logo and everything like that, if they maybe haven’t seen it, and truly kind of drive those magic moments, if you will, that we can embody in our brand.

Gabriel: That’s wonderful.

Paige: It’s a really authentic way for you to show up for a customer – to be there with them at that moment when they’re traveling with it and say, “How have we been able to help you? How can we help you better?” That opportunity to engage with a customer in that moment is so huge.

John: 100%, yeah.

Paige: No, that’s fantastic. I love it.

Gabriel: So Paige, this is your first in-person Brand Enablers Summit here with us in this community. Talk a little bit about why you joined this community. How have you enjoyed your first day and just all the interactions that we’ve had virtually as well? Are you glad you’re here? Talk a bit about this community and what it means to you.

Paige: Yeah, no, I’m just so glad to be part of the Brand Enablers. As you know… we talked about this for a couple of years before I was able to join… oftentimes as a head of brand, we’re kind of an insulated island in our corporate environments because we’re really the only people who do our job. And so having the ability to talk to others and hear the same pain points, know that you’re not alone.

But then also we’ve spent like the last couple hours just chatting about how are each of us solving a similar challenge within our organization. And, you know, I took down like 15 different ways that I can take back with me. So that’s always one of the most important things whenever I’m attending a conference or a thing.

Most of the time I’m lucky if I walk away with one at the end of the day, right? I’m sitting in some meeting room with 400 people and I’m like, okay, there’s one thing that I’m going to walk away. And I feel like today I really am going to come home with like a list of things.

And not only that. I have someone like John – I’ll just reach out to him next week and say, “Hey, we were talking about XYZ and you mentioned this. I want to dig into it a little bit deeper.” And that’s never going to happen with the person that I just met over the coffee at the thousand-person symposium.

So this is really, really meaningful and super helpful. To help me grow myself as a brand leader, to help me grow my team, to help implement better programs within the organization. It’s kind of life-changing, I guess, in some ways.

Gabriel: What about you, John?

John: I mean, it’s a great combination of part therapy… so we share the war stories… but it’s also just like such an area of growth.

As Paige mentioned, there’s nothing like getting in a room, talking with people, solving some of the problems, hearing different perspectives from a variety of industries. There’s so much value within that that you can’t get from listening to a podcast – no offense, I know we’re doing the podcast – but there’s a lot of nuggets there that you can tangibly take to your team.

Because that’s the true value of this, right? It’s not just about us. It’s about how we cascade it to the rest of our teams, to our organizations, and the way that it affects how we show up. So there’s a true amount of learning that goes into this. Monthly virtually is great, but there’s no power like in-person.

Paige: There’s nothing like in-person.

Gabriel: Hundred percent.

Paige: Coming from the person that makes cameras and your ability to actually have those hybrid interactions, it’s still never as good as when you’re in-person.

Gabriel: Well, we did a perfect combination today because we were in-person, but you brought in the team as well to one of the sessions.

Well, speaking of therapy, why don’t we stop here because we have our evening therapy session now that we need to get to.

Paige: Very important dinner session.

Gabriel: So thank you both so much for being here and for being part of this group and for this special live edition of the Brand Enabled podcast with the Brand Enablers.

See you next time.