Strategic Brand Management

Creating Awareness; Achieving Advocacy.

Starting from Scratch

An engineering company developed an in-house software that was gaining traction in the industry due to its simplicity, familiar user-interface and speed. As a result, they decided to carve out the team and software, develop a new company, and sell the software directly to competitors. The new company was labeled a startup and was in need of new brand. We were able to build the brand completely from scratch by evaluating archetypes, competitors, differentiators, and existing user feedback. Although we started with a completely blank canvas, we delivered the completed logo, mission/vision, brand promise, look and feel, website, digital strategy, and client engagement strategy within 4 months and immediately saw an impact on the industry.

Rebranding & a Vertical Jump

An organization that had built its business on managing data related to personal health information including workers’ compensation and disability saw an opportunity to develop a SaaS offering to manage FMLA-related absences. To effectively move into this market, the company needed to both rebrand (to drop its legacy reputation for WC/Disability) as well as jump from a risk management market to a human resources, benefits-oriented market. To complete the rebrand, we hired an external marketing agency and carefully reviewed brand archetypes, setting on the “Sage” archetype. Following the Sage archetype, our brand look and feel quickly fell into place and our rollout strategy relied heavily on thought leadership and industry influencer relationships.

Creating business units

A software company had a services division that was responsible for 50% of the overall revenue; but most potential clients didn’t understand that the services were available due to the company’s software-centric name. In an effort to grow the services business, we developed a public-facing business unit with its own name, logo, brand, sales structure and marketing. While developing the new brand, we evaluated the current brand architecture to simplify the logos and brands already in place, conducted extensive market research to build out personas, and strategically rolled out the change over the course of several months, including launching a industry event hosted by the new unit.

Establishing Brand advocates

In every marketing strategy, there is a clear need to tie marketing efforts to lead generation and sales revenue. However, it is also critical to nurture and develop the relationships with your existing clients to ensure recurring revenue, cross-sell, and create advocacy. Our marketing strategy for the startup included thoughtful and intentional customer communications — from support ticket responses through key account management. Building up your existing clients to allow them to become advocates, speak on your behalf and encourage others to work with you will result in far greater return than the investment.