Opening express lanes to quality mobile video experience
Vantrix brings its vision and commitment to multi-screen content distribution
Looking beyond the challenge to the opportunity that laid ahead, Vantrix, a company born out of the alliance of two leading Canadian industry innovators in optimization technologies, saw how the customer experience in the mobile video arena was falling short of its full potential. Technology hurdles stood in the way of optimized content – mobile TV, video on demand, multimedia alerts and messaging, user-generated content and video share – being delivered in a seamless fashion to audiences everywhere and on every mobile devices.
Vantrix’s vision: change the paradigm by developing software that would enable content owners and service operators to optimize their media processing operations and give their customers the highest-quality media experiences on any device, at the lowest possible cost. Major corporations including ABC News, Orange, T-Mobile and The Weather Channel were ready for a solution.
The beginning of a new era in telecom
Vantrix was looking for a powerful way to signal its arrival and express the transformative nature of what the company was bringing the marketplace. Working with the executive leadership team and the organization’s investors, Tenet Partners repositioned Vantrix around its industry-leading technology and its ability to take something complex and reshape it into something simple. And this is where the Vantrix brand idea took root, in a simple yet almost revolutionary phrase: “We make mobile video work.”
A vision for everyone to see
Next, our design strategists explored a number of conceptual directions to support Vantrix’s future-focused strategy. The team quickly narrowed in on the human eye as a metaphor for what Vantrix delivered. The logo represents the impressive structure and function of the human eye. It alludes to both the end-user experience and the integrated, seamless way Vantrix works with its customers.
Launched at the CTIA Wireless Conference in San Francisco, the new brand helped Vantrix capture imaginations and mindshare. It set the stage for them to define how multimedia content should be processed and exchanged over wireless networks. Today, Vantrix’s technology is part of everyday life for millions of mobile content consumers, worldwide, a testament to its ability to continue to “shape how the world experiences media”.
How data and analytics measure the pulse of brand health
When you have a brand with as rich a history as Transamerica, the 100-year old private holding company for various life insurance companies and investment firms, maintaining and building value for that brand is vital. Reliable data on a brand’s performance relative to its industry, and over time, is essential for guiding sound investment decisions. For over a decade, Transamerica has turned to us as a trusted partner to help provide that data.
Transamerica counts on consistent measurement of brand health to assess the impact of current advertising campaigns, such as “Transform Tomorrow,” while ensuring that long-term brand and communication investments stay on course.
An audience that provides unique perspective and continuous benchmarking
Transamerica is able to continuously track brand health metrics for an audience aligned with its major consumer segments, utilizing our research panel of business leaders, affluent consumers, retail investors and opinion influencers. With our current actionable insights, Transamerica can identify trends, such as brand momentum, and consider investing to create additional brand value, when that opportunity matters. Similarly, Transamerica can keep a watchful eye on key competitors to identify disruptive forces and shifts in their competitive landscape.
Transamerica uses our BrandPower benchmarking database to gain a broad view of the financial services landscape, while keeping a bird’s-eye view on their direct competitors in their Life Insurance sector.
An accurate historical view provides vital intelligence for future decision making
To guide important decisions during both a healthy economic climate with growth opportunities, as well as during turbulent times, Transamerica can count on our reliable set of historical data to inform future decisions. For example, a clear understanding of past financial crises, and their impact on long-term brand health, helps Transamerica gauge the risk of disruptive trends that may surface at any time.
During a financial crisis, insurance industry leaders show greater brand resilience, while industry followers’ brand health suffers severely.
Understanding past financial crisis and time to recover provides valuable insights for current and future decisions
The data revealed that the perception of insurance companies, and their favorability – a key indicator of brand health – declined sharply both before and during the last crisis. As a whole, the insurance industry has yet to recognize a full recovery to brand health metrics, such as reputation.
Learning from the past – prepared for the future
Always aware, Transamerica is able to anticipate new opportunities and risks sooner so that their team can be prepared to safeguard its cherished brand for the next 100 years.
The Thermos® 360° commuter mug features a lid solution designed by the Verv team more than 10 years ago. And it’s still a hot item on the shelves at Target, Amazon and Walmart in several configurations. What is this innovation and why has it remained a category leader for over a decade?
Getting a Grip on the Problem
Thermos® challenged us by asking, “What’s next in our category?” It was a category that had seen little innovation beyond styling. No one had looked at the opportunities to truly delight users. But we did. After traveling to work with more than a dozen commuters, our consumer visits uncovered these three challenges:
Locking Down the Solution
Our design thinking approach engaged designers with users to surface this initial concept early in the program. And it was a winner. A rotating lid that has three settings:
Locked down
Venting
360° drinking
Problems Solved
The sunken cavity drinks like a cup… but never spills.
The “open” position allows the user to pick it up and drink any which way. Great for keeping eyes on the road!
The “vent” settings let the beverage cool a bit before the first sip.
The Road to Success
This innovation has profitably endured and proliferated for years. Here’s why:
We were quick to identify the problems and define what we were solving for in a user-centric way.
We leveraged users to inspire rather than direct iterative-concept ideation.
We designed a single, efficient, intuitive and elegant solution that solved a bunch of real-life problems.
As a modular unit, the lid could be grafted onto any cup body to transform it visually and functionally.
LG was seeking to gain share in the refrigerator category with a next generation 3-door offering that would surface and address unrecognized needs. Solutions involved features and functionality that would be intuitive to use and highly visible on showroom floors.
Methodology
Design thinking tools engaged target consumers with our design innovators and the client team to uncover fresh insights and inspire real-time preliminary sketched concepts. Our methodology included in-home observation and ideation, iterative concept generation sessions and interactive concept refinement.
Insights
“The stuff I need always migrates to the back of the fridge…lost or forgotten.”
“My kids just stand there with the door open letting all the cold air out.”
“I hate having to hunt for those everyday, go-to items.”
“I’d like my kids to know what’s off limits and what’s up for grabs.”
Impact
This work provided LG with several in-market innovations including Door-in-DoorTM feature, the Blast-ChillerTM Beverage Cooler, Tall Ice & Water Dispensing Bay, and LED Showcase Lighting, among several others.
Delivering a consistent story to investors around the world
Equity investing has changed radically in recent years. Active portfolio management isn’t what it used to be, thanks to instant access to information and analysis, fee pressures and the rising popularity of passive investing. Increasingly, institutions and individuals have turned to “barbell” portfolio strategies: using low-fee, passive solutions for most assets under management, while placing the remainder in higher-risk and presumably higher return investments as a way to beat the market. That trend has caused a great deal of capital to flow into vehicles that require no management at all.
As a result, active portfolio managers are feeling more pressure. Even with the markets at all-time highs and a long bull run, the same supply of active managers must now compete for fewer actively managed assets. And yet, the underlying idea of active management remains as valid as ever. What’s needed is a way to tell a compelling and understandable story that makes the value-add clear in what can be a highly technical field.
A unique firm calls for a unique value proposition
Intech is a specialized asset management firm serving institutional investors worldwide. With more than $52 billon in assets under management and a 30-year track record, it is a well-established and respected presence in the marketplace. Like its peers, Intech had been experiencing the adverse impact of changing perceptions about portfolio construction. It was time to sharpen the firm’s value proposition and brand communications to emphasize the value it brings to clients’ portfolios. Intech’s management and sales team knew there was an opportunity to bring more attention to the firm—its distinctive portfolio management approach. This methodology, based on Stochastic Portfolio Theory originally developed by the company’s founder, captures excess returns by rebalancing volatility in a given portfolio on an ongoing basis. Yet, the firm’s leadership was having difficulty consistently communicating its value-add on a global basis; the key points of differentiation were getting lost. The major challenge was the method’s highly technical nature. Intech had found it very difficult to convey the advantages in simple ways that clients’ pension consultants could readily understand. Complicating this was inconsistent messaging around the world; global clients might hear one part of the methodology emphasized in Japan, but a different one in Australia.
Finding a new path to differentiation
Intech management decided to do a reset—a robust global rebranding program that would help identify its strengths, discover new ways to overcome potential weaknesses, and refresh the look and feel of the brand.
Taking the time to formulate a new brand strategy would also provide a valuable opportunity to reach out to dozens of constituents—clients, consultants, employees and sales representatives—and gain actionable insights on existing perceptions and expectations for the future.
Intech called on Tenet to lay the strategic groundwork for a repositioning of the brand, by developing a comprehensive understanding of how clients, consultants and employees viewed the company. Tenet’s extensive program of stakeholder interviews yielded critical insight into perceptions and the brand experience from every perspective.
Strategic insight shapes the brand
The research uncovered proof of the perceived technical expertise and steady, client-centric engagement that had made Intech successful, as well as confusion about what truly differentiated the firm. Through attribute-sorting exercises that forced prioritization, core strengths were revealed. The attributes that were seen by clients as most valued and distinctive when thinking of the Intech brand rose to the top:
Mathematical
Consistent
Volatility experts
Rebalancing
Armed with a deep understanding of Intech’s expertise, culture, clients and the marketplace, Tenet and Intech teamed up to build a global communications platform for its new brand. Consensus around the brand attributes set the stage for a refreshed value proposition and gave direction for new content, crafted to convey the Intech story more clearly in markets around the world.
Tenet’s research findings also surfaced in the form of a new tagline, “Harness volatility.” That simple phrase goes straight to the heart of the Intech advantage, by speaking to how the firm uses stock price volatility to generate positive returns for clients.
During development of the visual brand identity, Tenet’s strategy, content and design teams worked closely together, leveraging the strategy work to capture the essence of Intech’s value proposition. The visual elements of the logo and design system work to convey key ideas, evoking the forward and upward growth Intech is known to deliver to clients thanks to their tested and proven mathematical formulas. That visual presence complements the content approach, communicating in multiple ways to drive home the value proposition more clearly.
In the end, it’s about capitalizing on existing strengths
Refreshing the Intech brand gave the company an opportunity to reestablish itself as an industry leader with a clear vision for the future. But equally important, it showed that Intech has always been on a positive, well-thought-out path. Casting its key strength—a proven ability to harness volatility and deliver value—in a new way is enabling Intech to move forward and meet the challenges of an evolving investment landscape with renewed confidence.
How repositioning a legal services pioneer created new understanding in the marketplace – and inside the company
A pioneer and leader in the legal services and technology solutions space, Epiq recognized that their growing and complex array of business offerings was creating a challenge. After years of strong opportunistic growth, the company found itself presenting a fragmented, product-based image to the marketplace. In effect, the company’s successful expansion strategy had diluted the impact of its brand.
Epiq began taking strategic steps to reposition the company and Tenet Partners was called on to help. The goal: to transition the brand from a technology-based document review company to a value-added service partner known for handling a wide range of highly complex legal challenges for corporations, law firms, financial institutions and government agencies.
A new focus on what makes Epiq unique
We began by refining Epiq’s purpose statement and core values to embody the principles and aspirations of the organization. The values were constructed to be meaningful and actionable across the company.
Recasting the company’s purpose and values was key to powering internal change. Complementing that shift and telegraphing it to the marketplace called for a new visual identity, inspired by the differentiating nature of Epiq’s global scale, high-quality staff and service. Tenet contemporized the Epiq logo and developed new design elements, including a color palette, imagery style, typography and distinctive graphic elements, which brought together the company’s many and diverse business lines in a fresh, unique visual expression.
Reconstructing the website to meet the needs of many
Moving the Epiq brand away from its product-based image met a key competitive need. When law firms, corporations, financial institutions and government agencies search for a partner, they are looking for the one who can ease their burden, a partner who understands what they need, has the right expertise and can deliver the outcomes fast. Accordingly, Epiq’s online presence needed to communicate more powerfully.
A central goal of Epiq’s new website was to allow users in different market segments to easily discover information and navigate the company’s complex offerings in a highly efficient and compelling way. To do this, Tenet conducted an interactive work session with managers across all business lines and functions to discover what the site should deliver to visitors. The task was challenging due to audience diversity: law firms and corporations using eDiscovery and document review services, law firms using bankruptcy case management software, and administrative services and trustees managing large-scale class action claims administration.
With this insight in hand, Tenet created an information architecture based on solutions organized to align with user’s needs in different market segments. A library of visual icons was created to help differentiate product and service offerings, helping users to find information at a glance.
Investment in the brand that drives results Epiq’s new positioning, coupled with the visual identity system and website, elevated the brand’s stature and enabled its designers and communicators around the globe to present a cohesive brand expression whether in the U.S., Europe or Asia.
More importantly, the changes provided a strong platform that helped make Epiq an attractive acquisition opportunity for private equity firms. In 2016 Harvest Partners and OMERS took action resulting in the combination of Epiq with DTI Global to create the first billion-dollar global legal process outsourcing company just eleven months after the brand refresh was launched.
Samsung asked us to identify unmet needs and pet peeves among washer buyers then exploit them with new features.
Methodology
Our design thinking approach uncovered the struggle and inconveniences consumers face in needing to wash different garments separately. They worry about maintaining their fabrics but often don’t have time to run extra loads.
Insights
“Too many loads, not enough time…”
“Most washers all look the same at the showroom… you really have to do your research to know what you’re looking at.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever looked at the owners manual…”
“Some items need super-scrubbing, others need a gentle touch…or they get destroyed!”
“All too often separate loads have to wait…or I end up just throwing it all in together.”
Impact
Provided Samsung with a distinctive offering that defies format convention and delivers on a truly desired consumer wish.
Recognition
2017 International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) Gold Winner
In a highly competitive children’s thermometer category, with new and diverse technologies continually expanding the field of play, Microlife sought to better understand the needs and concerns of parents, identify high priority attributes, and create kid friendly product solutions ideal for family use.
Methodology
Working collaboratively with target parents and client stakeholders, our innovation team utilized consumer sessions to empathically surface emotional and functional concerns and wishes. Roleplaying and forced association exercises, among others, inspired the creation of desired attributes and features visualized with live sketching for immediate directional validation and iterative refinement.
Insights
“When they’re sick my kids are cranky and they don’t want to cooperate.”
“Thermometers look serious and can be intimidating.”
“I worry that germs will spread (when shared) and then everyone gets sick!”
“Thermometers are hard to clean…but they need to be sanitary.”
Impact
Licensed by American Red Cross this unique category entry with detachable, washable tips successfully delivered on mitigating the widely held concern about cross-contamination and recontamination through transferring germs from “sick child to well child”. A distinctive and unintimidating soft and friendly design aesthetic was applied to alleviate the stress and tension often experienced between parent and child at temperature taking time.
Today marks the official launch of Tenet Partners, a brand innovation and marketing consultancy, which represents the combined entity of two established firms that joined forces earlier this year — Brandlogic and CoreBrand.
Yes, we are now presenting ourselves as one with a new name, logo, go-to-market strategy, brand voice and look and feel. We are expressing ourselves via a new personality through a verbal and visual expression that externally brings credibility and energy to our customer-centered growth strategies. But before any of this could even begin to take place, we had to take the time to evaluate the key internal components of the two separate entities that comprise what is oftentimes referred to as “the back room” or back operations of the firm and determine how to launch a successful integration process.
Any acquisition or merger regardless of how big or small requires that the daily operations continue to run seamlessly while, at the same time, a core team evaluates all operations closely to determine the best practices that will provide clients with an experience they not only expect, but deserve.
We know that how we are viewed externally is contingent upon how we operate internally. From our phone system to our email address and signature, from scoping, estimating and managing projects to billing and invoicing individually and collectively reflect upon what it is like to work with us every day. With four primary office locations from east to west that needed to be synchronized, we took a close look at a range of touchpoints that impact customer experience:
Finance, including financial software, budgeting, forecasting, financial reporting, billing, and AP/AR to ensure compliance, accuracy, responsiveness and flexibility. We have successfully simplified the process for both our team and our clients.
HR resources and competitive employee benefits/policies to ensure we retain and attract the best talent
Facilities and technology such as office locations, phone, IT and CRM integration to enable constant connectivity among and between locations to successfully service clients around the globe
Project management, tracking and scheduling to keep our team and our clients on track, on budget and on time
Talent and areas of expertise to instill confidence that we can deliver against our value props and customer-centered positioning. This included assessing our talent across disciplines and identifying growth opportunities.
Shaking up our corporate structure, transitioning from a “flat” structure to one that incorporates various levels of talent and career growth, providing our clients with expertise from vast backgrounds and branding experiences. Our new org chart fosters an interdisciplinary environment that supports a range of possibilities to help uncover unique opportunities for clients.
Go-to-market strategy–ensuring that our own marketing and digital content and how it applies to messaging through our pitches, website, social media, blogs, books and white papers, public relations and speaking engagements instill confidence in our staff, clients and prospects that our knowledge, experience, know-how and innovative approach will result in solutions that will help make our clients think differently about their businesses.
All of this needed to be accomplished within a set time frame, while taking into consideration how to best blend two cultures. Our emphasis is on our first applying our customer-centered business strategy with our own customers–our team members. Achieving a successful balance between what we need to do in order to be effective day in and day out by putting our team at the center of our thought processes helped to ground us in many of our decisions. The key was communicating often, and there is no such thing as communicating too often when it comes to staff. While for many of us the acquisition brought feelings of excitement, optimism, renewed energy, career growth opportunities and endless possibilities, for others there were feelings of anxiety, fear and apprehension. Recognizing and balancing the two sets of emotions was critical to our achieving success in launching our new brand.
Being new to M+As, no one could have prepared me for how integral and challenging this process would be. It is after experiencing a company integration firsthand, that I have now come to understand and appreciate the core attributes for M+A success – optimism, patience, understanding, time (allow for double the amount of time you think will be required), realistic expectations, a dedicated and committed team with a “can do” attitude and making sure that you put one of your key principles for growth at the center of all you do – your employees. While the daily operations and processes that have been identified will help our firm run smoothly, we know that our team is a unique point-of-difference and makes Tenet Partners stand out from all others.
To say that we have all of this 100 percent figured out would not be 100 percent true; it is still evolving every day. What I do know is that we are confident that we’ve built a strong brand and marketing consultancy that is running smoothly and is comprised of a team of experts who work really well together and are ready to help our clients uncover and develop customer-centered growth strategies.
Digital is having a profound impact on business strategy, branding and customer experience. It’s clear that organizations need to take a fresh look at how to embrace the shift. But how to innovate successfully in this highly connected environment requires more focus than ever before.
Over the past two years, I have been steeped in a broad-based management program at Harvard Business School that focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship. The experience has left a permanent imprint on my thinking about how to drive success in a rapidly changing business landscape. The primary theme is focused on making choices. The argument, achieving strategic and executional clarity requires many tradeoffs. In the works of Michael Porter and Earl Sasser, the takeaway can be summarized in one thought. ‘Business strategy’ is about choosing what you won’t do and ‘service excellence’ is about choosing what you won’t do well. It took me a bit of time to grapple with that one, but once I wrapped my head around the idea, it’s a powerful way of thinking. And, let’s face it, making choices is the toughest part of business.
So, how do leaders build better business strategies and deliver powerful customer experiences? I believe the answer is brand-led innovation.
For our firm, brand embodies key elements of business strategy, especially the articulation of competitive advantage. Every business has a strategy, whether planned or unplanned, that which at its core is a set of attributes and activities that you have decided to pursue to create distinctive value in the market. If you understand what those activities are, you have made the first step to understanding how to achieve differentiation with your brand. If you understand why customers choose you and how they think of you, you have made the second step to building and managing brand perceptions around your competitive advantage. Unfortunately, and all too often, companies are unclear about their business strategy, their brand, and how to deliver a great customer experience to the right customer. Usually, no one has stopped to look at the big picture and to do the hard job of making choices.
A central theme of innovation is how to incrementally improve or create new products or services, business processes or new employee behaviors. Increasingly, innovations come through new ways of connecting and communicating with customers using digital and related technologies. For example, something as simple as a mobile app for travelers is using a suite of digital and technology elements to redefine the customer experience. This can have a big impact on the bottom line or fall flat due to a lack of alignment to your strategy and brand.
If the innovation does not create value for the customer, it will surely be a miss. Again, more often than not, companies pursue innovations for the sake of chasing a fad, and as a result are having a hard time finding the return on those investments. The outcomes don’t produce as much value as possible because the innovations are not intrinsically or extrinsically aligned.
Enter brand-led innovation. Leaders can create strategic clarity and enhance value by creating alignment with a comprehensive branding program. Brands help people see what a company stands for, their unique capabilities and how they deliver value to customers. Most importantly, an organization gains a better understanding of what customers want, need and value through the branding process. Developing and managing a brand requires companies to look at their business strategy, study their competition and dive deep into the needs of customers. That journey ultimately involves making choices that inform strategy, defines the brand, identifies opportunities for real innovations, and drives value creation. Powerful stuff.
Organizations that are crystal clear about their strategy, their brand and their customer have the basis to ignite growth.
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