PARK NOW

PARK NOW is part of the NOW family: a newly established joint venture founded by BMW Group and Daimler AG. The two companies are investing more than €1 billion to develop and align their offerings for car-sharing (SHARE NOW), ride-hailing (FREE NOW), parking (PARK NOW), charging (CHARGE NOW) and multimodal transport (REACH NOW). The new joint venture is an ‘industry first’.

PARK NOW incorporates the brands Parkmobile (NL, BE, UK), Park-line (NL), RingGo (UK) and ParkMobile (US, AU and NZ). The brand faced a complex alignment and transition process in a fast-growing international setting. VIM Group worked alongside the international marketing and branding teams of PARK NOW and helped manage the complex rebrand.

From the initiation of the new joint venture, VIM Group helped PARK NOW to audit the current brand portfolio within the Parking vertical, the definition of the brand transition approach and scenarios for change as well as managing the planning and execution of the rebranding process.

We started the rebranding process with a very thorough brand audit. Within this audit we looked at rebrand costs, business risks and marketing effort when changing all brands. In the first phase, we focused on the European brand. Following this, we executed a similar brand audit for the ParkMobile US organisation.

The audit gave PARK NOW and its shareholders the necessary information to decide brand strategy options and potential rebrand scenarios to input into the decision-making process. After finalising this step, rebrand experts from VIM Group set up the international brand development and brand transition programme, managing an international team of local project managers, the corporate marketing team and several key suppliers. After releasing the change budget, the programme officially started early 2019 and was completed on-time and on-budget at the end of 2019. Within that timeframe, our specialists worked alongside the international marketing and branding teams, resulting in a changed corporate brand, revised legal entities, rebranded offices and revised brands across multiple countries. To increase its brand awareness and market position, the marketing team developed and rolled out their first European marketing campaign.

VIM Group’s assistance with setting up and managing the design process of the new brand, along with internal design resources and external agencies, resulted in hundreds of new design assets, developed in the new branding. These ranged from small in-car window stickers via roof signs; interior branding elements; dozens of parking meter stickers; digital assets and advertisements; goodies and giveaways; and included parking apps, websites and portal updates. VIM managed the programme from design to final production, local implementation and budget control. Across different countries (BE, FR, CH, DE, AT and the UK), the old PARK NOW brand elements were removed, and new stickers were mounted. In total, thousands of parking meters were rebranded, bringing a fresh and appealing new look for street meters and parking garages. Corporate offices were de-branded and through the application of the new brand in a consistent way, in office interiors and for IT infrastructure and applications, employees now feel part of one company. In addition, VIM Group successfully implemented Templafy, which was a great help with the recent legal entity change and helped define the new PARK NOW Brand Voice: the new multi-channel tone of voice currently applied to emails, for all users.