Knowing your customer well and communicating the right message about your brand to them is a key component of building a smart brand strategy.

We recently worked with Centurion Systems, who provides eLearning solutions to Tier 1 retailers like Starbucks, Tiffany's, and Godiva, to help them better build their brand in the mind of their customers.  I asked one of the principals, Corey Leverette, to share some of his thoughts on what he learned through the process and what results they saw from the work.

Craig: Where was your business when it first came to Matchstic.

Corey: For the last 17 years Centurion has been uniquely focused on serving the Tier 1 retail space by providing custom, branded eLearning solutions and services.  We have a very specific target market.  We know Who they are, Where to reach them, Why they need us and in many cases What they need.  We have been modestly successful and over the years we have formed very deep and lasting partnerships with our customers.  In 2010 we felt like there was a great opportunity to grow our business and to truly dominate our market.  But we felt like we just didn’t know How to best tactically market our solutions to have the greatest impact on and penetration into our target market.  We came to Matchstic with the specific intent of walking away with a detailed tactical marketing plan to reach our growth goals.

Craig: What did you learn about your customer?

Corey: We learned that even though we know Who they are, Where to reach them and Why they need us, we were not effectively communicating our unique capabilities, and in some cases, communicating the wrong message to the right person, or communicating the right message to the wrong person.  We even discovered that some of our existing customers had misconceptions about our true capabilities and a fundamental misunderstanding of the services we provide.  This really highlighted our problem, poor messaging.  We were not effectively communicating our true brand.

Craig: How did that change the way you approached new customers?

Corey: The process that we stepped through with Matchstic really helped us link the message we wanted to communicate with the right person each time inside our customer.  It crystallized our message and molded it into a tight, concise, accurate message that resonates with the customer.

Craig: What is the result of this new way of thinking?

Corey: The results were immediate.  Even before we completed our initial engagement with Matchstic we began to reach out to prospects that we had been unsuccessful working with in the past.  Our refined message hit home and we now have a brand new retail partner.  This work has also allowed us to reconnect with customers that we had not effectively communicated our full service capabilities to, even though we were already developing successful learning programs to their associates.

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