| It was a sad day for all when the Genie was freed from the lamp and the world said goodbye to the great Robin Williams. |
| Mo’ne Davis not only made history by being the first girl to pitch a shutout in the Little League World Series, she also became the first Little League player ever to be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. |
| Devaney & Associates gave new life to EVAPCO, using our branding expertise to create a new positioning statement that captured their global audience and illustrated the company’s knack for innovation. |
Devaney & Associates Turns Up the Heat on the EVAPCO Brand in Summer 2014
What happens when your organization is totally awesome—but your target audience doesn’t know it? That was the problem EVAPCO faced when it turned to Devaney & Associates for help in the summer of 2014.
For more than a decade, EVAPCO has been the heat transfer industry’s dominant innovator. Their scientific advances in commercial HVAC and industrial refrigeration have been awarded dozens of patents, and their constant influx of new technologies has left the competition scrambling to keep up.
But years of marketing their brand around multiple taglines and dry, tech-heavy communications had created an identity crisis inside and outside of the company. Engineers and contractors—and even EVAPCO’s own employees—weren’t sure what EVAPCO stood for.
‘Your brand is so much more than a name and a logo,” says Diane Devaney, founder and president of Devaney & Associates. “Humans make decisions with their emotions first, so you have to create an emotional connection and be able to deliver on some sort of emotional promise to your customers.”
To really figure out what your brand is, you need a positioning statement: a summary of what makes you different from your competition and what emotional need you fulfill for your customer. A strong positioning statement is critical to generating brand awareness, which translates to increased sales, stronger customer loyalty, and free word-of-mouth advertising.
At Devaney & Associates, we have perfected a process for positioning a company to establish a strong brand that connects to an audience emotionally. We start on the inside, holding a discovery workshop with key company stakeholders to uncover the organization’s true strengths, as well as the team’s vision and passion—their ‘reasons for getting up in the morning.’
“Almost every client brand that we’ve ever developed comes from some kernel of truth that we uncovered during the discovery workshop,” says Devaney. “It could be something that the client said or something that already existed in a brochure but was buried. They already know it on some level, it just takes our process to unbury it and bring it to the surface.”
After the discovery workshop, we conduct extensive market research into the industry, the competition, how the competition positions themselves, and, most importantly, the audience.
“We take all of this information and find a hole in the market where our client can stake their claim,” says Devaney. “There is always a message that hasn’t been said, a niche that hasn’t been filled, or an opportunity to deliver on a promise that hasn’t been made.”
For EVAPCO, our brand discovery process revealed three core truths:
- Their target audience—contractors and engineers—live and die by loyalty. Responsible for the success of multi-million dollar projects, they want to know that they “have a guy” that they can turn to who will never disappoint. They want to be able to depend on someone for life.
- As an employee-owned company, EVAPCO has a fiercely loyal culture as well. Team members take pride in their work, and go the extra mile in many ways the competition doesn’t in order to deliver the best possible products every day.
- The industry seemed to have forgotten about the people they ultimately build their products for. Across the industry, marketing focused on product features and technical specs, with zero sense of humanity.
Based on these insights, Devaney & Associates developed a new, award-winning brand position for the company: EVAPCO for Life. The positioning shows that, through its culture of constant innovation, EVAPCO is the loyal team that engineers and contractors can always count on to make everyday life easier and more reliable for them and the end users that they serve.
“EVAPCO immediately embraced the positioning from the top down,” says Devaney. “The president stressed to the entire multinational team how it was critical that every office around the globe adapt this brand. We built a complete marketing plan around it and rolled it out into every communication we developed for them after that. It’s baked into everything they do. They’re a great example of how you can really get the brand to resonate out to your audience if you internally embrace it and make it your mission to push the brand out.”
“A lot of our clients come to us because of our positioning services,” she adds. “If you’re committed to marketing and the branding process, you’ll come out with so much more than the advertisement or press release you thought you needed: you’ll have a brand that’s been completely redesigned to connect to your audience in a memorable and meaningful way—a brand that will ultimately translate into stronger bottom-line growth for your organization.”
In honor of our 25th anniversary, we are travelling back to an important company milestone each month. Be sure to stay tuned for next month’s look back!
