This year's Cisco Marketing Velocity event in Barcelona touched on a number of important themes that I noted in a previous post, but still top-of-mind is the importance of providing personalized, meaningful experiences. The tricky balance is to not let personalization overshadow the intrinsic, and often neglected, role of a brand.

Did you know it takes at least five brand impressions before someone remembers your brand?  Companies need their brands to be clear, relevant, and consistent from top to bottom in order to gain, and deepen, customer trust. In a post-digital world, a strong brand is critical to help customers make buying decisions faster.

Cisco's brand is valued at$32 billion and ranks#16 on Interbrand's 2017 Best Global Brands list. In addition, our research shows that 40% of customers would pay a 35% premium to purchase from a Cisco partner, and perhaps even more.So how do we help our partners realize the full benefit of their association with us? One way we're making this happen is with a complete renovation of our partner logo system. The new logo system represents a whole new way to market yourself with Cisco, and it is available for you to usenowat www.cisco.com/go/partnerbranding.

Using the Cisco brand to connect partners with customers

Our complex market makes differentiation and relevance more important than ever. Customers and partners alike asked us to make it clear that a company is a Cisco partner first and foremost. Then, in certain situations, they might want to know a little more about the nature of our relationship with that partner.

The new partnership logo can be customized with a set credentials to help you be as relevant to your customer as possible in each interaction. Using up to three credentials, you can re-configure your partnership logo for each campaign or audience you target. You can also use the partnership logo on its own when all you need to say is "I'm a Cisco partner."

In addition, we've updated the ingredient logos that our Cloud and Managed Service Partners and Solution Partners can use to identify their Cisco validated offers.

Build your new partnership logo

We are making the transition to the new logo system smooth with the Partnership Logo Builder tool.

The tool takes the guess work out of things. You'll log in with your Cisco.com username and password, and the tool knows which credentials your company is eligible to use and automatically loads them for you. Once you select the credentials you'd like to use, your logo will be generated. No need to worry about spacing between the credentials, specific colors, and other details that typically require a graphic designer's expertise to get right. You'll download a ZIP file that contains what you need for print, web, or video with all of correct colors and spacing.

Using your new partnership logo

Transforming Cisco's partner logo system is not only important for our partners to communicate with their customers, but also in helping partners find other partners within the Cisco Partner Ecosystem to facilitate multi-partner deals that require certain skills. The Cisco Partner Ecosystem is stronger and better when they work together, and we hope that this helps simplify building your relationships.

I'm excited to see how our new logo system can drive more meaningful connections between customers and our partners.

We'd love to see your feedback and how you are using the new logos! Show us @CiscoPartners on Facebook and Twitter.