Your brand is your company’s control center, or what we like at TREW to call “the brain”. It is the collective set of experiences over many years that shape who your company is and its unique value proposition. In marketing terms, your brand is personified both visually – through your company logo and branding styleguide – and contextually – through words, such as your mission, vision, and positioning statements; core company and product-level messaging; and company and campaign taglines.

With a smart, creative approach, TREW Marketing brings years of experience helping companies shape their brand and identity with a service we call the Branding Brain. Below are elements illustrating our approach and Branding Brain success with three client examples – The Hogg Foundation, Starmount Systems, and Alfamation.

To Develop the Brain, First Know the Heart

To position a company, both visually and contextually, it’s important to first know about the company’s heart. What is the company and its team uniquely passionate about and capable of delivering that no other company can? This requires a lot of listening – in person, via research, and persistent studying.

For The Hogg Foundation, TREW conducted an in-depth market research project, focused on internal leadership and staff, as well as external groups of stakeholders and consumers.

Market research included:

• 21 hours of qualitative in-person interviews with all staff
• Over 800 external quantitative online surveys
• Research analysis and findings

Following this market research, TREW Marketing gained honest stakeholder insights that led to recommendations for branding, messaging, and communications.

Starmount, a retail software solutions provider was undergoing an entire brand redesign, and partnered with TREW to develop core branding elements, including mission, vision and positioning statements; tagline concepts; and company and product-level core messaging. The TREW team worked closely with company business, technical and marketing leadership and conducted qualitative competitive analysis over several months to understand Starmount’s unique value proposition in a highly competitive retail software marketplace.

Alfamation, a test and measurement solutions provider, selected TREW to manage their rebranding efforts by crafting their “brain,” including company logo and brand guidelines; product logo creation; creative guidance for software, hardware packaging; core company and product level positioning and messaging; and mission statement and tagline. TREW began this process by interviewing company business and sales leaders and key partners as well as studying the competitive landscape and market opportunities.

Listen Actively and Patiently

Choosing words in branding statements is a slow, methodical, creative and patient process. For the Hogg Foundation, through our deliberate process, a key vision crystallized – to move from speaking about mental illness or recovery, to the more progressive, all-encompassing term, mental wellness. It was also important to emphasize their mission’s focus in the state of Texas, while being mindful of their strong awareness and influence nationally.

Through much research and group discussions, TREW developed the following mission and vision statements for the foundation:

Mission: The Hogg Foundation for Mental Health advances mental wellness of the people of Texas as an impactful grantmaker and catalyst for change

Vision: The Hogg Foundation for Mental Health will invest our knowledge and resources to move Texas forward in achieving mental wellness

Although Starmount serves a completely different market place of retail Chief Information Officers (CIO) and Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) at large retailers such as Urban Outfitters or Home Depot, getting to their unique value proposition and company positioning followed a similar process: rolling up our sleeves, listening and asking many, many questions, to ultimately get to the Starmount heart.

Out of this process and a collective understanding of Starmount’s unique software products and services and very talented and experienced team of retail software developers, we were then able to develop the brain, including the following mission and vision statements:

Mission: “Starmount software brings the power of online retail to create relevant, engaging in-store shopping experiences”

Vision: “To transform the in-person shopping experience and make retail stores relevant”

For Alfamation, the TREW team sought to capture their passion and scientific knowledge for creating out-of-the-box products and services for design, test, and manufacturing engineers and managers in the automotive, consumer electronics, telecom, and medical industries. It was important for the mission, tagline, and logo to convey their innovative culture and present the company’s broad family of software and hardware products to customers globally. Through our same deliberative process, we developed their brain, including these elements:

Mission: “We leverage our scientific passion and knowledge to imagine and create new ways to engineer functional test systems”

Tagline: “Imagine a better test solution”

Live Your Brand – Everyday. Everyway.

Building off the core ”brain” elements, The Hogg Foundation and TREW created and prioritized organizational goals, core values, and made their branding elements visible at all touch points in the organization through activities that included:

• 4 organizational goals and detailed recommendations
• Re-designed website with robust content management system and clear navigation
• E-newsletter template extending the web design brand experience
• Established core values embraced by The Hogg Foundation’s internal and external audiences

Starmount’s “brain” came to life with a custom, integrated 12 –month marketing strategy and activity plan, resulting in:

• Communications Brain used as messaging guide for primary company and product communication
• Consistency and efficiency gains by using Brain vs. reinventing messaging with each new activity
• Scalable and integrated mix of low- and high-cost media investments to generate demand

Once Alfamation’s core elements of the “brain” were developed, TREW integrated their branding across all marketing disciplines with a 12-month marketing plan, including:

• Website re-design which resulted in 100% increase of pages viewed from previous site

• Leveraging the company and product level positioning and messaging “brain” with the design and production of Alfamation’s booth at NI Week; developing their promotional strategy; and creating technical product brochures

• Compelling email marketing campaign that extended their trade show success, and generated a response rate 2.6 times greater than the industry average

With TREW Marketing’s full-service approach over these past years, we have a number of examples of our work, results and client testimonials.

Client projects include websites, from full-on, comprehensive site redesigns to smaller, targeted microsites. We develop content across all media from print and web to flash and video. We spend a great deal of time helping customers with their messaging and positioning, at a company level and/or for key products and services (we call this our “brain work”) to short, hard-hitting ad, email and call-to-action headlines. We also have a strong focus in search marketing, both with pay-per-click as well as SEO (aka, natural search).

And clients are sharing their comments on the results and experiences with TREW:

And we are proud to not only execute on projects, but deliver results. Here are some highlights from those we work with in test and measurement:

Hot off the press - bustec.com website redesign, messaging, content development done by TREW Marketing.

Back-to-school microsite targeting controls professors in N. America.

Interior page of microsite where professors could find labs, curriculum based on engineering discipline.

2. Search engine marketing – driving 800% growth in clicks to drive traffic

3. Marketing strategy – helping companies evolve their marketing from activity-based “putting out fires” to strategic planning…you can actually make your marketing dollars go much furhter this way, you know!

Example of marketing strategy work TREW does with clients.

4. “Brain” messaging and positioning – finding the most succinct, differentiated word-set to tell your company, products and services story

(view the full flash video here)

Product-level positioning for interactive kiosk software.

Company-level positioning for TREW client Starmount Systems.

Company identity, including logo and mark, as well as mission statement and tagline created for TREW client Alfamation.

5. Flash design – video to illustrate important product feature of interchangeability between VXI and LXI

Visit bustec.com/products to watch the flash interchangeability video.

6. Content development – content is king, for keeping your site fresh, providing means to gather leads, and building credibility with technical audiences

Examples of product flyers for various TREW clients in bioprocess, high-speed vibration and video test applications.

You can view more project examples and details results in a short slide presentation or visit our website to read our case studies.

Since the founding of TREW Marketing, our focus has been on serving engineering and scientific organizations with smart, collaborative, and measured marketing services. While serving this uniquely defined niche, we offer a broad array of marketing services.

#1 – Exceeding expectations: To start, how about some data?

43% 3.9x 156%

Q: What do 43%, 3.9x and 156% all have in common?

A: They are all results that exceeded expectations for our clients in 2010:

• 43% = Open rate for trade show followup compared to industry standard of 15-18%

Alfamation’s email marketing response rate was 2.6 times greater than industry average.

The Alfa team taking care of customers and visitors to the booth during NIWeek 2010.

And no matter the project, our customers want to see results up and to the right. In 2010, we did just that:

• Exceeding expectations on individual activities, which led to…
• Customers growing their business with TREW, which led to…
• TREW growing as a team and company

• 3.9x = How many dollars over goal quoted for back-to-school campaign targeting control engineering professors as result of specialized microsite and database marketing efforts

• 156% = Growth in web traffic to Wineman Technologies’ website following our work on the company’s website redesign and search-engine-marketing campaign. In addition to quantitative traffic growth, we heard about a recent success story that speaks to the quality of traffic from this web and search marketing investment:

“One of our recent web leads went from new prospect to booking a PO for $250k within 3 weeks! Thanks TREW Marketing for driving qualified visitors to our website through search marketing.” – Darryn La Zar, VP of Sales and Marketing, Wineman Technologies

The Wineman team gave TREW Crew members Wendy and Irene a tour around company headquarters, including R&D and manufacturing.