Brand new

Educate your employees.
First of all, we went through an extensive six-month process within our organization to help everybody understand what our vision was, how they fit in to the vision and what we were going to be doing and how that would make us different.

We had a booklet made up. We told them how we were changing our name, told them how we were branding ourselves going forward, and what the expected and the desired results of those were.

If employees don’t understand how we’re different and why we’re different, then it’s hard for them to envision how they play in to that, and everybody has to play in to it.

When I talk about our employees, I’m talking about every employee in our organization and how they have to understand.

We had a multidisciplined team that went down throughout the organization. We tried to seek input with every level of the organization to not only confirm we were on the right track but to gauge what their understanding level was and try to get a feeling of how they were going to be able to understand it and take it to the marketplace.

Your people have to understand the vision and the process thoroughly before you can take it to the market.

Inform the marketplace.
I’m a strong believer in core competency, and the way we define core competency is being able to do something that nobody else in the market can do. There may be others that say they can do it, but they can’t. And then taking that core competency, branding it and taking it to the market so that the marketplace knows how you’re different and why you’re different.

The significance is as an example: When we went out and researched the marketplace, the marketplace thought of us as an office furniture dealership. We already knew we were much more than that.

If we had all of this and we were trying to accomplish a certain thing in the marketplace but the marketplace only viewed us as an office furniture dealership, then we would have to do something to tell the marketplace how we were different, why were different, why we were better.

As we went through this whole rebranding process, we first of all ran two advertising campaigns. We went out and told the marketplace how we were different, which was basically expounding upon our core competencies.

After the first year of advertising, then we went into another campaign that basically said, ‘We’ve been telling you how we were different. Here are the results of that.’ We had customer testimonials, we had projects that we did and customers commented on.

HOW TO REACH: Color Art Integrated Interiors Inc., (314) 432-3000 or www.color-art.com