There is a moment, right before walking into a big meeting, when most of us stop. We breathe in, gather ourselves mentally and physically, and breathe out. And then we step into the room.

At Navigate, we are obsessed with this moment.

More precisely, we are obsessed with how different it can feel depending on what you’ve done in the days and weeks leading up to it. Nerves are natural, but we all know the feeling when we could have done more to prepare. We all know what it’s like to have doubt, to have trepidation, to simply hope it will go okay. It’s miserable.

Our purpose as a company – and the North Star guiding our evolution over the past 14 years – has been to provide our clients with clarity and confidence in this moment. Whether it’s a presentation, a pitch, or a negotiation, when our clients stop, take a breath, and gather themselves, we want them to think, “I have the data. I have the insights. I have the answers.”

And then, when they take that next step and walk into the room, we want them to feel invincible.

OUR EVOLUTION

Navigate Marketing – our original name – was too broad. Navigate Research – our recent name – was too restrictive. That’s why we’re dropping the latter and simplifying.

We are Navigate.

To be clear, research is still a core part of who we are and what we do. We were founded 14 years ago with the vision of making sports and entertainment the smartest and most sophisticated industry in the world. We’ve worked toward that goal by bringing best-in-class data and analytics to an industry that has traditionally relied too much on gut instincts and golf-course deals. That focus on business intelligence hasn’t changed, but it has evolved.

While we found tremendous success in our first decade, we felt our impact could be even greater if we took our foundation of research and built a consultative layer on top of it. That’s why we created our Client Strategy team over 4 years ago.

Since then, we have built deeper, longer relationships with our clients and worked on some of the biggest questions and decisions for a who’s who of our industry. (Many of those case studies are highlighted on our new website). But every now and then, we will still talk to an old client, or someone who has never been a client, and we realize they still see the Navigate of 2010, not the Navigate of 2020.

We have evolved into an agency guiding major strategies and decisions with some of the top executives in sports and entertainment, but our brand hasn’t evolved with us. That is the impetus for our rebrand.

OUR LOGO

Beyond becoming simply “Navigate”, our new logo is a meant to reflect the value we bring to our clients.

At the start of any engagement, there are always disparate pieces of data and information available. Sometimes these pieces are all we need; often, we create and gather more. This process is crucial – in an era of big data, it’s imperative that you select the right data for your objectives – and we have always excelled at our approach. But the praise we hear from executives in recent years is as much about what comes next.

We spend an inordinate amount of time pulling together everything we’ve compiled, pulling out the most important insights, and synthesizing those into reporting and recommendations that are tailored for each key stakeholder, especially at the C-suite level.

To share a tangible result from our dedication to perfecting this approach, we had a presentation to the SEC and its athletic directors within the past year, after which COO, Charlie Hussey, and I were downloading on the phone. “Navigate is excellent at taking a complex set of data and turning it into something digestible and clear,” he said.

I told him I would have to quote him on that, and now I am, because it encapsulates what we want the world to know, and what our logo stands for: Many pieces coming together to form something unified, clear and powerful.

OUR URL

Many years ago, well before we were founded, somebody out there had the foresight to buy navigate.com. Now, all these years later, and despite how many companies have surely tried to acquire it, that domain remains a tribute to malevolent cybersquatting.

With our preferred option off the table, we fell back on a timeless cliché: When life gives you lemons, choose the shortest domain possible. Thus, NVGT.com was born.

We like to think it’s a tribute to our efficiency – we’re so efficient, we don’t even need vowels! – but the truth is it’s 12 letters shorter than our old domain, which saves everyone precious time when typing out our website or email addresses. We hope those additional seconds add up because you’re in touch so often.

OUR BRAND IN 2020 AND BEYOND

There are other agencies that specialize in research. There are other agencies that specialize in consulting. When you hire Navigate, you get two agencies in one, and nobody else delivers on the intersection of research and consulting quite like us.

The result for our clients – clarity and confidence when they make a big decision.

That, in its purest form, is what we stand for. When you see Navigate’s name and when you see our logo, two words should come to mind: clarity and confidence.

If that sounds appealing – and you have something important on the horizon – we can’t wait to work with you.

Sincerely,

Jeff Nelson
President, Navigate