Putting the umbrella back where it belongs

Travelers Insurance recaptures the essence of a beloved symbol

A simple red umbrella is one of the most recognizable and iconic images in the world. For decades, it has personified Travelers Insurance, a company with a rich history and more than 30,000 employees. A Travelers executive, quoted in the New York Times in 1964, said it best: “It illustrates the concept of protection, it is friendly, it is warm, and it is very merchandisable.”

Hard to believe, then, that for several years Travelers was unable to use the symbol so closely linked to the firm. A saga of mergers and spinoffs left Travelers in this awkward position. In the late 1990s, Citicorp and Travelers merged and continued to use the red umbrella. Just a few years later, Citi and Travelers went their separate ways – with Citi getting the iconic umbrella in the “separation agreement”.

What followed was a nine-year odyssey that ended when Travelers repurchased its beloved symbol. The price was never disclosed, but it was worth it. Market research showed that even after all that time, the red umbrella was still associated with Travelers – such was its enduring power. For marketers, this is a powerful lesson in how brand serves as a tool to create recall and association with consumers.

Using the umbrella to reclaim Travelers’ heritage

Travelers understood the umbrella’s importance and its potential to revitalize the company’s presence in the market. With the help of Tenet Partners, Travelers seized the opportunity to make a splash and infuse the evocative shape throughout its brand. From the digital space to signs and printed pieces, the gentle arc of the umbrella reminds people that Travelers is always by their side, at every turn.

The new visual system offers great creative range. That is important for a company like Travelers with a broad range of businesses reaching out to varied audiences. Travelers now has a connected way to touch everyone… from everyday drivers looking for auto insurance to global enterprises in need of a risk management partner.

Maintaining the integrity of the Travelers brand

For a company as old and well-respected as Travelers, it is vitally important to represent the brand consistently at every touch point. With tens of thousands of employees and operations that span international borders, that can be a challenge.

Travelers took advantage of Tenet Partners Brand Ensemble to help its employees deploy the new visual system and bring the brand to life, as well as maintain high standards of quality across the company. Brand Ensemble gave Travelers a gathering place for all things brand-related: guidelines, images and templates. It is now easier than ever to keep the Travelers umbrella where it belongs – at top-of-mind for consumers and investors, everywhere.

A pioneer prepares for next stage of growth

Prior to 2010, the government agency that would become NJPA was a service cooperative providing financial and buying support for educational and non-profit entities in five rural counties in Minnesota. But a change in Minnesota statutes in 2010 opened up a new opportunity for the government agency to transform itself and become one of the nation’s largest government purchasing cooperatives. It could now offer innovative cooperative purchasing agreements to 50,000 members across the U.S. including governments, educational and non-profit entities.

To signify its reach to broader national audiences, the Minnesota municipal agency changed its name to NJPA, which stood for National Joint Powers Alliance. Once word of the member savings began to spread across other government entities, NJPA’s purchasing volume more than doubled in just five years to more than $3 billion dollars in national contract volume.

Breaking out from the pack

However, concurrent with NJPA’s growth, a multitude of new competitors had entered the field, many with similar acronym names and stars-and-stripes brand identities. NJPA’s leadership recognized the difficulty of differentiating its brand in the crowded cooperative purchasing marketplace. What’s more, the new national name and identity was causing confusion among its long-standing regional business that provided educational services and community support in Minnesota’s rural Region 5.

To help resolve the branding issues, NJPA turned to Tenet Partners to conduct a brand assessment that would determine the best path forward to position the organization for future success in both national cooperative purchasing and its Minnesota regional services.

Tenet conducted research with NJPA’s membership, vendor partners and senior leadership to gain sharper views of its national and regional audiences. While the two different units of the agency operated separately and provided different services to each of their memberships, NJPA was excited to learn there was more that united, than divided, its two divisions. They recognized and embraced the opportunity for a new brand and name that could be a platform for growth, uniting and inspiring its entire employee base around one purpose-driven brand promise.

Creating a powerful brand expression

Tenet led a highly collaborative process with a large NJPA task force of marketers, business leaders, sales force and Board members. The goal? Explore new territory for an aspirational name and brand promise built on the common threads of the business units and reflecting leadership’s vision for the future.

We developed a new name that was distinct and meaningful across businesses and could support future anticipated areas of growth. NJPA would become Sourcewell. The name speaks to both what the agency does—sourcing—and offers a double-entendre with the word “well,” alluding to both the expertise of how well the agency worked and the wise choice of its members for “sourcing well” through the agency.

The new logo and dynamic visual system graphically represented an abstract interpretation of a map of the diverse towns, cities and municipalities that Sourcewell serves, as well as the unique ability of the organization to drive tangible and positive change in those communities.

Bold, energetic and modern, the brand expression extended across the entire organization, uniting the two divisions and paving the way for future growth opportunities. Wildly differentiating in the category, the new brand received rave reviews from associates, partners and vendors alike.

A brand launch consistent with Sourcewell’s brand values

During the brand development process, NJPA provided periodic updates on the project to its entire employee base through regular town hall meetings. Before rolling out the new brand to the public, a special brand celebration for employees revealed the new name and identity, while providing training on how employees could embody the brand through their job responsibilities on a daily basis. “In terms of employee engagement, the transformation has been phenomenal. Employees loved our old image, but our organization is behind us, and they’re excited about the new brand.” – Sarah Speer, Sourcewell Marketing & PR Manager.

In the spirit of partnership, NJPA’s national sales team kept their vendor council apprised of the progress and timeline, managing their expectations at every turn. NJPA’s vendor partners, including top brands such as Staples and John Deere, welcomed the change and recognized the positive impact a new brand would have for NJPA and, by extension, for their businesses as well. Vendors recognized that NJPA went out of its way to provide information and tools, such as new logo artwork, approved contract seal artwork and co-branding guidance, to ensure a seamless transition for its vendors with no disruption to their business.

A gathering place for innovators

Opening the envelope for Mastercard Labs

When you’re the global leader in payments and you need a place to conceptualize, test and help bring to market powerful new payments systems to make it easier for customer transactions, where do you go?

If you’re Mastercard, you head down the hall to Mastercard Labs.

With a history of innovative products like Mastercard^® PayPass^™, MasterPass^™ and Mastercard In Control^™, Mastercard has demonstrated its consumer-led mission to drive brand affection and preference by creating solutions that meet the needs of consumers, merchants, issuers and government.

Mastercard Labs was created in 2010 to focus solely on global research and development, dedicated to bringing innovation to market with greater speed than ever before.

As a new initiative for the organization, Mastercard Labs’ charter was to concentrate on the front-end user experience. One senior executive described Mastercard Labs as “a playground where we can let things happen in a standalone environment, test them quickly and bring them to market quickly.”

So when Mastercard asked our team to create a visual identity for Mastercard Labs, we knew it had to be as innovative as the group it represented. The optimal identity strategy for this “futurist” R&D team of payment experts and technologists had to position the group’s mission as a distinct strategic pillar supporting the overall Mastercard value proposition: creating, exploring and developing ideas; turning ideas into something that works.

Our first explorations hewed close to the existing Mastercard brand architecture, but we quickly realized that we had to push the envelope. Mastercard Labs needed a logo that stood apart from what was already in place and signaled the unlimited potential and breakthrough spirit of the group.

After exploring and evaluating a wide range of concepts, the idea came to us like the embodiment of an idea in a cartoon: the classic thought bubble. The new Mastercard Labs logo evokes all the thought and imagination that lead to the excitement of the “Eureka” moment. But it also maintains the corporate typeface and recognizable red and yellow brand colors that establishes the right level of connection to the corporate identity, strengthening the parent brand’s reputation for innovation.

Setting the standard for ethics in the world of finance

How CFA Institute™ empowers the people behind the numbers

CFA Institute is the largest association of investment professionals in the world, well known for its Chartered Financial Analyst credential. It’s also deeply involved in professional standards development, reporting, student mentoring and education. The organization plays an important role through its focus on shaping policies that strengthen investor confidence and market integrity.

Today, more than 120,000 financial professionals in 150 countries from Mongolia to Mauritius have passed the CFA Program rigorous exams, proudly adding the most respected and recognized investment distinction in the world to their names. That pride is justified. Being a CFA charterholder is a position of real responsibility, setting the standard for integrity in their profession.

Stakeholders for CFA Institute are, undeniably, a varied group: professionals seeking knowledge, students entering the world of finance, regulators, investors and corporations. CFA Institute needs to clearly communicate its principles, vision and thought leadership in a way that resonates with everyone.

Connections that matter

For a membership organization, getting the message out means being relevant to the needs of the audience. Like most professionals, regardless of sectors and geographies, CFA Institute stakeholders have come to expect to get their information online and, increasingly, through mobile devices. CFA Institute saw a real opportunity to raise its profile through digital communication.

Working with the team of brand specialists at Tenet Partners, CFA Institute successfully made the transition from a paper-based culture to one that more closely aligns with the needs of its members. The result: an online annual report and uniquely user-friendly way of presenting its financial statements. The team has been working together ever since, steadily raising the bar with dynamic, responsive-design reports that make the most of mobile devices.

CFA Institute now has the means to better engage with its stakeholders and deliver on its mission – highlight the importance of financial standards and ethics.

Putting a human face on finance

The world of finance is often thought of as impersonal – facts and figures, rules and regulations. The human side sometimes gets overlooked. As the CFA Institute 50th anniversary approached, Tenet saw an opportunity to make the landmark celebration something memorable and focus on what makes the organization truly special: the charterholders.

CFA Institute worked closely with our multi-disciplinary team of brand experts – strategists, designers, digital specialists, content developers – to tell a quintessentially human story. Making full use of the web as a great virtual meeting place, the soul of the organization came to life through 50 curated stories about individual CFA Institute members. More than just bios, these stories came to life in video, audio, letters and articles.

Using videos, recordings, personal letters and much more, this unique story-telling gave a glimpse of the person behind the professional: what motivates them, their life aspirations, their toil and successes and, most of all, the sense of integrity they bring to their work.

A demonstration of its worldwide presence, Tenet helped CFA Institute mark the milestone anniversary by becoming the only organization to date to have members and staff mark their respective stock exchange’s opening or closing literally around the world in one 24-hour period.

Strength and clarity through consistency

With regional offices in Hong Kong, Brazil, London and the U.S. to manage its Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific communications, it is critical for CFA Institute to ensure consistency in the expression of its global brand. The same clear message of integrity and excellence needs to carry through across languages and cultures.

The online brand center for CFA Institute uses Tenet’s proprietary content management system, Brand Ensemble™, to provide unprecedented flexibility in managing brand assets and communicating its guidelines around the world. CFA Institute is now equipped with the right tools to enable everyone, across the organization, to play their role in building the brand with the same discipline their members bring to their work.

Taking the seat at the head of the culinary table

How ICE appeals to those looking for their culinary “voice.”

The Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) alumni are award-winning executive chefs, personal chefs and restaurant owners, the world around. They are running test kitchens. They are food writers. They are professionals who have taken their rightful place in the culinary world.

One of the oldest cooking schools in America, ICE has earned one of the best reputations among industry leaders. It appeared, however, that its reputation did not carry over to prospective students. Led by their passionate founder/owner, Rick Smilow, the school decided that it was time to give the School a brand that reflected its stature and mission and that better aligned with the needs and aspirations of the new student demographics.

Unfazed by stiff competition, a leader moves forward

Like most things in New York, the culinary education landscape is a crowded field with major league players like International Culinary Center (formerly known as The French Culinary Institute) and the Culinary Institute of America a few miles north of the city. It was important to build differentiation that would be ownable, believable and compelling. After extensive research with alumni, students and industry partners, carried out by the team of brand strategists at Tenet Partners, it became evident that ICE’s vision for culinary education – combining rigorous study with a more flexible, creative approach to learning – made it truly different from its peers.

Injecting new ingredients into the brand

The outcome of our strategy work was a clear focus on the customer. Everything at ICE is about the students: their aspirations, their needs, their life schedules, their future. With Tenet’s guidance, ICE has repositioned itself around a bold promise: Find your culinary voice. The tagline Tenet created is a clear signal of the Institute’s unique relevance to students.

The new positioning comes to life with an engaging brand identity that focuses on the inner workings of today’s modern kitchens. The visual identity uses weaving strands of color that recall the fresh ingredients that go into quality culinary art, along with black and white photography that mirrors state-of-the-art, stainless steel kitchens.

Benefitting from Tenet’s full suite of brand services, ICE worked with our team of strategists to communicate its value proposition to target audiences where they live and interact…the digital space. The website we built has become the go-to-place for students and employers alike, extending ICE’s reach into the marketplace.

The transformation continues

The new brand continues to fuel the business forward. ICE is poised for great things ahead as it serves up a whole menu of learning experiences in their new state-of-the-art facilities. According to ICE: “This exciting and extraordinary investment in culinary education is an opportunity for thousands of future students to learn in a world-class, vibrant culinary facility – an invitation to find their own, individual culinary voice.”

From “California cool” to a global presence in real estate

Green Street Advisors creates a customer experience that delivers on its reputation for insight

Real estate investors are always looking for an edge – a way to get into the market at the right time, with the right strategy. That takes real skill, as demonstrated by Green Street Advisors. Founded in 1985, this pioneering firm has earned a reputation for delivering results. The unmatched depth and quality of Green Street’s perspective on the U.S. real estate market and the objectivity of their insights and analysis has made them the dominant voice in the industry.

From inward confidence to customer-centered value

The company had a confident, “California cool” personality that served it well as it grew. But with ambitions to capture a bigger share of the growing global market for in-depth research, Green Street knew it had to offer a customer experience that delivers the well-established quality of the company’s information and insights.

So began the brand-building process that involved key stakeholders across the organization and Green Street’s customer base. Tenet Partners conducted intensive research to gain a full understanding of the company’s vision and values. That informed recommendations for a new brand strategy that emphasizes how clients rely on Green Street’s expertise to make smarter investment choices. That brand promise is captured in the tagline that shows what customers are able to accomplish by working with Green Street: Enabling better decisions through better research. This acknowledged what Green Street was known for, while making a subtle shift from internal focus (better research) to customer value (better decisions).

Adding value to the customer experience

Tenet designers captured the new brand promise and personality in a logo and design system that evokes precision and accuracy, coupled with enterprising drive. It was a departure from the previous “cool” image that communicated forward-looking change – a clear movement onto the world stage.

The next step was to recraft the customer experience itself. Working together with Green Street’s analysts and IT group, Tenet’s strategy, design and digital teams created a new user experience for the firm’s clients that drove the core idea of the brand through to product and information design.

The company delivers research to analysis to its clients through emailed reports and an online portal. These are the heart of the customer experience, and they needed to pay off on the concept of decision enablement like never before. That meant a redesign that was more than skin-deep: it had to create a direct, clear path to Green Street’s actionable insight. The combined team revisited the architecture, navigation and format for the research portal and electronic report templates. This made it easier for clients to find, view and compare different kinds of information.

Entering the world stage

Green Street’s new positioning, identity and customer experience gave the firm what it was looking for: a launching point for strategic entry onto the world stage. Green Street wanted to make a splash with its first foray into Europe, and it did. The firm opened its new London trading desk on the same day that the brand was launched.

Since that day in 2008, Green Street has thrived, successfully weathering the real estate crisis. Today, it’s the preeminent independent research, analytics, trading and consulting firm to the commercial real estate market in North America and Europe.

The proof of performance

2015 marks Green Street’s 30th anniversary and the numbers show just how successful its strategy has been. Over the last decade Green Street’s recommendations generated annualized total returns of 25%. A high rate of return by any measure, and doubly impressive given that the overall real estate investment trust market achieved just over 11%.^*

^* Returns based on the FTSE NAREIT All Equity index. Source: REITs and Real Estate: Complementary through good times and bad. TIAA-CREF Asset Management, Fall 2014.

If it plugs in, if it turns on, it’s covered

Bringing equipment insurance direct to homeowners

Advancing client conversations every day

Conduent sales people connect with clients through refreshed conversation decks

Managing an iconic brand on a global scale:

How Xerox tamed the process

Xerox is in many ways the epitome of a global brand. The century-old company holds more than 12,000 active patents, operates in 180 countries and has a workforce of more than 140,000 professionals. It’s also ranked as one of the top 100 brands, year after year.

Maintaining that prominent status demands unwavering vigilance, brand stewardship and empowering employees with the right tools. When it’s done right, the company builds brand value and gets its message out clearly and uniformly all around the world.

Understanding Xerox from the inside

Xerox turned to Tenet Partners to help improve the consistency and quality of its brand communications. Our strategists partnered with Xerox to analyze the interaction between employees and the brand team, from creating communications all the way through approval and release.

Every aspect was examined: from how guidelines get created, updated and distributed to where photos are housed and how the review process works. Along the way, the team gained deep insight into Xerox’s culture and goals – knowledge that helped shape Tenet’s technology solution. Our strong, ongoing relationship also enabled Xerox and Tenet to collaboratively strengthen Xerox’s brand management practices.

The team uncovered realities not uncommon in an organization with the size and stature of Xerox: guidelines, templates, photos and illustrations scattered across geographies and systems, and an inefficient approval process. These issues kept the company from achieving the nimbleness to which it aspired.

A platform for seamless content creation

Xerox employees in the field faced a fundamental resource issue when it came to crafting branded communications. There was no single, trusted source of information.

The digital asset manager built into Tenet Brand Ensemble™ gives everyone at Xerox access to a central repository of guidelines, brand assets and images. For the first time, Xerox has one, reliable “version of the truth” for every part of the business, worldwide. When changes are made, updated guidelines are available instantly to everyone, everywhere.

The impact is significant. Consistency and quality are both improved through use of the most up-to-date guidelines and templates. The task of creating top-notch communications is streamlined. Projects are less likely to require rework and are now routinely approved on the first pass.

Simplifying brand governance

In the past, the Xerox brand team relied on email to receive requests and traffic projects, the beginning of a slower review process. Now, users around the world submit work through an easy-to-use online portal built on the Tenet Brand Ensemble Brand Review platform. Each piece is automatically routed to the appropriate reviewer for prompt action, while a simple dashboard shows the project’s status at every step. The result: an approval and revision process that’s more transparent, efficient and collaborative than ever before.

Xerox is also able to use insights from the tool to manage the brand program proactively. Comprehensive reports identify top issues preventing quick approval, average turnaround time, number of revisions and much more. Trends are identified and training provided to correct – and prevent – problems.

The mark of success: ongoing improvement

Thousands of users visit The Xerox brand center every month – a great indicator of its effectiveness. When people find a resource useful and easy to work with, they’ll keep coming back, time and again.

The bottom line: Xerox is now able to get its message out faster, at lower cost, and with the quality for which this major enterprise is well known.

Opening the door to the world

How CIEE pursues its mission of changing the world through international education

Changing the world, one life at the time, is by all measures no small task, one that requires vision and commitment. It is the journey that CIEE: Council for International Educational Exchange started in 1947. And one that continues today.

The times, they are a changing

Where once upon a time, studying abroad was seen as a luxury for those with the means to go out into the world, today’s interconnected marketplace demands graduates with global perspective and awareness of other cultures.

With an alumni network of over 300,000 participants, CIEE is going strong. But with the proliferation of for-profit study and work abroad vendors, the organization needs to raise its profile and foster a better understanding of the value it brings to students worldwide if it is to compete. This is further complicated by the fact that CIEE serves a broad set of constituents with a portfolio that sometimes lacks homogeneity and dynamic businesses that often go to market alone.

The new CEO, Jim Pellow, has a mission, one that will position CIEE as the uncontested leader in experiential education with whom students, faculty, employers all want to associate.

In support of a vision

CIEE needed a partner who could help bring cohesion to their rich portfolio, infusing strength into the brand by unifying the business behind a shared expression.

Enter Tenet Partners and our multi-disciplinary team of designers, content experts and digital specialists. To anchor our strategy properly, we started with a comprehensive tour of the organization, talking to all business units to understand the common ground, as well as the nuances of the individual programs.

Inspired by the passion and commitment of everyone at CIEE, our team went to work creating the building blocks of an identity that would support the promise of quality that CIEE makes to every one of its participants: impactful design that brings the experience to life, clarity of messaging to promote the transformative benefits of international exchange, and a digital execution to reach students in the manner in which they want to be engaged.

The devil is in the execution

Leaving nothing to chance or personal interpretation, CIEE decided to educate its worldwide base of employees and asked Tenet to develop a series of brand training workshops and a brand center that could constantly evolve to stay in step with the brand as it matured. A series of tools, including guidelines and easy-to-use templates, were created and housed in the brand center to ensure across-the-board adoption and the brand consistency that had been missing.

No physical touchpoint was left unattended – marketing materials, conference themes, posters, holiday gifts, conference signage, etc. At the same time, everyone knew that, to ensure success, it was essential to extend the new brand where the target audience lives, learns and interacts: the digital world.

The social power of technology

Tenet worked closely with the CIEE digital team to bring the brand expression to the digital environment with the same discipline and consistency as was happening elsewhere in the ecosystem of communications. Mindful of the limited budgets and resources typical of non-profit organizations, we helped develop templates that could be implemented across the 29 CIEE websites. The same singular approach was adopted for emails, promoting consistency and efficiency.

While CIEE businesses were already active in social media, there was a clear lack of strategy to harness the power of social media and support the CIEE mission of bringing life-changing experiences to more people. Together, CIEE and Tenet explored best practices both in the industry and also of leading companies focused on the same audiences. The outcome was a set of foundational guidelines and a clear understanding of the fact that social media is no longer an elective but rather an imperative to win the hearts and minds of millenials and Gen Zers.

Fast-forward to the future

Today, CIEE’s brand is stronger than ever, disciplined yet flexible enough to make room for sub-brands to target specific markets. Confident in its leadership role, CIEE is setting its sight on the future. Its mission: to help bring the experience of study abroad to 600,000 students by 2020. Double what the number is today. With their unwavering commitment, there is little doubt on the success of this mission.