A brand is much more than the company logo and color scheme. An effective brand tells the world who you are, what you do and how you do it, while at the same time establishing your relevance to and credibility with your prospective customers. There are many elements to a successful brand including clear and consistent positioning, a strong brand promise, your identity elements, and how the market perceives the value you deliver. A strong brand leads to increased opportunities from prospects who already understand what you can do for them. A weak or incomplete brand leaves you sitting on the sidelines while you competitors win the business.

Brand Extension | a fortune 100 telecom company

 

A business unit of a Fortune 100 company was in the process of extending its offerings to include a new product segment. For over 20 years, the unit led the embedded computing market as a supplier of board-level products. Technology trends and a shift in market economics enabled the company to offer both sub-assembly and fully integrated computing platform products to their customers. This would save their customers development and integration time, improving time-to-market and lowering costs.

Brand ExtensionInitial sales results for the new products were not meeting sales targets. The problem was that even though it was a leader in the industry, the company had been a board-level supplier for so long that it was not being invited to bid with its new higher-level solutions. A brand extension was required to build awareness of the business unit as a systems supplier.

A comprehensive brand extension project was setup to create both awareness and understanding for the new products. The project included redefining product segments and working with industry analysts to include the new structure in the papers; the creation of a new category name along with trends/drivers of the new category; industry outreach (media, conference speaking, articles, white papers, articles) to broadly publicize the new category; sales training and new collateral and a major website update; the creation of industry sponsorship organization to promote the new category.

The end result was not only seen in sales success, but also in being named the leader in the new segment within 18 months of the start of the program.

Customer Systems

Positioning StrategyThe challenge in today’s market is to make it easier for companies to do business any way they want – anytime, anywhere, any place. With over 75 years of combined experience, CSI provides a variety of sales, marketing, customer service, and wireless solutions that provide their customers with virtually unlimited flexibility in realm of customer relationship management.

Although their client list was impressive and they worked with all of the major software developers in the CRM arena, Customers Systems had a weak internal and external identity. Their product offering was disorganized and adhoc. Brand repositioning was required to build awareness of the company as a solution provider and developer among the users proprietary CRM software.

A comprehensive brand repositioning project was setup to create both awareness and understanding for the new solution offerings. The project included redefining product segments and providing examples of their software integrations within each product line; sales training and a new style guide to effectively communicate and maintain the new direction.

The end result was not only seen in sales success, but also in helping to redefine their niche in the CRM market.