How letting go of a name fueled business growth

CASE STUDY:

Tech

Task Summary:

Technology moves at the speed of light. Every day, there’s a new feature, product, or service–so much so it can be hard to keep up. We partnered with a family-owned office supply and tech company that understood the impact that this pace has on people and organizations. Branded with the family name, the two owners felt intense pressure to protect their legacy. They needed to dissociate with a similarly named company, and at the same time, try to promote new services. Their goal was to help people and companies improve their information security, cloud services, and IT health. Our goal was to help them do it –better!

Before partnering with Boldthink, our client was at a crossroads. Should they continue with the family name or rebrand with their innovative IT service? Together we led ideation workshops, audience research, and a comprehensive audit of their communications, competitors, and market opportunity. The results were crystal clear: a rename and rebrand were necessary and critical to moving the company forward.

Goals

• Deepen knowledge of the customer experience and journey

• Identify market opportunity within business goals, competitive audit, and communications review

• Decide on brand trajectory: keep the family name or focus rename on new service

• Uncover and amplify the brand’s USP (unique selling proposition)

• Define a brand mission to guide future company decisions

• Expand existing brand design to match a new company name and mission

• Develop a transition plan to retire former company name

• Establish the new brand online through a website redesign

Approach

• Discovery session with employees and executive leadership

• Brand research deep dive including market, competitive, communications, and keyword research to identify potential barriers, opportunities and draw inspiration from other industry-leading brands

• Employee, client, and agency phone interviews to learn about their experiences, goals, and frustrations to create audience personas for the brand

• Creative rebrand which included a name change, URL and trademark research, visual

Services

• Ideation session workshops

• Market research

• Competitive audit

• Communications audit

• Audience research design and insights analysis

• Company name research and strategy including a transition plan, trademark, and URL

• Communications and website design

• Marketing strategy to promote rebrand with prospects, customers, and new markets

Results

1) Transition plan for new brand name gave peace of mind to owners and maintained customer happiness

2) Increased employee satisfaction, retention, and engagement (and creating brand advocates)

3) Sales increased due to more straightforward explanation of services both in-person and online

4) The client could better compete with the competition, allowing them to expand to new sales territories

5) Community workshops and marketing collateral helped owners share their family’s legacy and technology expertise