Instant Credibility

Achieve Brand Integrity
2007

By bringing Brand Integrity's process and services to life in the award winning book Achieve Brand Integrity, we helped establish unprecedented credibility for author, Gregg Lederman, his company, their services.

A notable challenge for any service company is to find ways to demonstrate value so potential clients "get it." We all know insipid brochures get thrown away, and cold calls get ignored, but a well-produced book demands attention and helps establish immediate credibility.

Our performance criteria set out to create a book that:
1. Belongs on the shelf next to Built to Last among others.
2. Brings the information to life
3. Makes it easier on the reader

The book has proven to be a significant benefit to Brand Integrity's new business efforts. Externally the book gets attention, further demonstrates their expertise, and demands respect that warms up sales calls. Internally the book is a source of content that increases the efficiency of creating subsequent marketing communications.

Achieve Brand Integrity is also getting acclaim of it's own; in March 2008, it was awarded Gold at the 2008 Axiom Business Books Awards, and continues to receive rave reviews on amazon.com.

Simplicity and the Power of Demonstrating Value

Modern Marketing Concepts
2007

By creating a simple and quick way for customers to preview their return on investment, we helped MMC create a more effective selling tool and efficient sales cycle.

Our work focused on creating a simple model that demonstrated expected ROI to potential customers achievable with MMC's Channel 80/20 solution.

Our performance criteria cut to the chase:
1. demonstrate return on investment simply and self-evidently
2. illustrate MMC's offering as a unique solution to a typical challenge

The implementation of this demonstrative tool has helped MMC secure new business opportunities in new markets, created efficiencies within their sales cycle, and gave them the ability to leverage successes across disparate vertical markets.

This external sales model success also drove internal alignment into a more effective, efficient and potent offering.

Delivery of What's Already Been Promised

ESL Federal Credit Union
2006-2007

By outfitting employees with more useful information more easily, we created significant improvement to ESL's intranet. Renamed "ESLtoday," we evolved the credit union's intranet from a repository of policies and procedures into an internal communication tool that engages employees daily and helps them deliver better customer experiences.

Through research focused on determining information usefulness and impact on customers, we created a system for organizing all 650+ pages.

Our system's performance criteria was profoundly simple:
1. decrease the time employees had to spend finding information
2. increase the quality of information to better inform and engage employees on a daily basis

When surveyed just three months after its launch, ESL employees reported notable increases in all key metrics including:
• Quality of information
• Ease of use
• Look and feel
• Overall satisfaction

Credibility for Fueling Growth

Montana Mills Bread Co.
1998-1999

Bringing Montana Mills' strategy to life established a consistent and meaningful in-store experience that helped Montana Mills' fulfill their rapid expansion goals.

We translated their strategy into an "in-store experience kit." This kit was based on insight gained while posing as in-store bread slicers, the first point of customer contact. Our interactions with customers gave us access to what they were really thinking, which helped us understand some product misperceptions that hindered sales.

Our comprehensive look and feel solution focused on meeting the following performance criteria:
1. increase Montana Mills' credibility with customers and investors
2. increase customer understanding of unique product experience
3. maintain or decrease advertising spend

The creation of the "in-store experience kit" increased Montana Mills' relevance with customers and their credibility with investors. This fueled their expansion from 3 to 22 locations between 1999-2001. Such achievement helped launch a successful IPO in 2002 and a $40 million acquisition by KrispyKreme in 2003.