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Rebranding a global business community
Situation
For a global partnership of like-minded employee benefits consultants, I helped them establish a voice, visual identity, and digital marketing program that would:
Unite its far-flung stakeholder community under a single brand identity that every Partner could speak to.
Let them be heard, and be more widely respected as a strong, global presence, by mid-market multinational employers.
The goal was to showcase the partnership’s distinguishing shared service values and expertise in advising multinational organizations on employee benefits. These strengths allowed the Partners to compete against much larger and more well-known benefits consultancies.
Strategy
I kicked off the brand project in Paris by holding a half-day brand workshop at the partnership’s annual meeting. Informed by our market research conducted beforehand, along with my global marketing team, we led stakeholders through a myriad of brand development exercises and one-on-one interviews, which then defined positioning, target audience, personality, and key differentiators. From there the messaging framework, logo, and visual style were developed. Throughout the process, I continually engaged the partnership’s stakeholders from multiple countries to ensure brand decisions would reflect the combined perspectives of this B2B community.
Result
Today the partnership is clearly a global brand proudly differentiated from its much larger competitors. The community’s retooled brand story helped recruit 15 new country partner firms in 24 months compared to a historic average of two or three a year.
A digital marketing program quickly followed the brand work. This resulted in a fully redeveloped website and digital marketing strategy, which now includes hundreds of original content posts on the partnership’s website, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts. In the first 18 months, direct search to the partnership’s site increased by 45 percent organic search by 26 percent, and traffic from social doubled. Cold inquiries for global services jumped by 20 percent.
