Enter a price war? Or fight the brand battle?
“Apart from giving us a strong, consistent and differentiated look and feel, that’s bursting with personality, 300million’s work made a major difference internally. It fueled a powerful sense of pride and sent messages throughout the business that we need to always seek to improve our game, and keep focused.
The aligned business and brand strategies really helped us develop relationships with existing and new customers. And, as the project has moved more into a delivery phase, 300million have proved essential when it comes to advising and making the most of our owned, bought and earned media channels.”
Jill Martin
Marketing Manager
Access Self Storage
Question
Access Self Storage is one of the top three leading ‘self storage’ brands in the UK.
It has ambitions to continue growth in a price competitive market where customers don’t
see an obvious difference in choice.
As margins continued to reduce, with one competitor
price offer being bettered by another, Access realized
they needed to focus more attention to their brand.
If customers began to feel a qualitative
difference in the options they had, it could give them a crucial
edge over their rivals.
With such a transactional offer, selling empty, secure spaces
so seemingly identical to everyone else, where was this difference
going to come from? And, how was it going to be expressed?
Answer
Through researching the customer journey and details of the
purchasing process, we discovered that Access was overcomplicating the customer experience.
There was also inconsistency; a mixture of friendliness, authority
and rigid security.
We audited existing brand marketing and found that their business
plan had no link to their marketing plan; tactical campaigns were
simply hit or miss, often just reactive to a competitor offer.
To simultaneously tackle these issues and hone a point of difference, we proposed
that we worked with the management to define a core idea that could then
act as a guide to align everything they would do in the future.
We distilled the notion of making everything ‘easy’.
This led to a massive simplification of procedures.
The approachability of staff
and openness of the company culture was brought out.
Paperwork was reduced. The brand identity was developed to support a marketing strategy
based on easiness and simplicity, including a clear, unequivocal writing style that still retained charm.
Impact
Internally, the work galvanized staff at all levels. With the management
fundamental to the solution and the customer-facing workforce encouraged to focus on
approachability — confidence and motivation developed a spirited cohesion.
Simplified procedures had an immediate business effect. This tied in with linking
the business growth to a sustained, pointed marketing strategy. Now, Access is
able to build a story and get customers to understand the appealing difference
it offers.
The work improved all customer touch points from the snappy words on the storage
boxes, the clear graphic style on signage and even the design and experience
outside and inside the warehouses.
Download the Access Self Storage case study as a printable PDF
