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Company ReBrand

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
The company, SSA Graphics, needed to evolve. with the next generation of owners, the marketing company and large format printer, that has served many retail franchise chains needed to refocus its value proposition and its brand in order to stay relevant and cost-effective.

The project was to develop a new strategy for a marketing company, focusing on their strengths and capabilities and creating a new business model, focused on a unique but familiar target market. Redesign branding around this new strategy to increase awareness of the new focused value proposition.

USER
Marketing Company in San Antonio. Their user: Marketing departments for multi-unit franchise retail chains that use in-store POP for regular marketing promotions throughout the year.

CHALLANGE
SSA Graphics wanted to focus its product and service offerings to better differentiate it’self in the marketing graphics, collateral, and point of purchase retail space.

Having specific and focused expertise with franchise retail chains, SSA wanted to shed some of its less-focused offerings and define an easily understood set of products for this market. Focusing these offerings would allow them to communicate this to the market more quickly.

Will this new strategy defined, a complete re-brand of the company would be needed to communicate the value of the company to this market. New trade shows and conferences would be attended and this new branding would need to be simpler, more colorful and more rememberable.

RESEARCH
In addition, we found a lot of great resources in industry trade groups that serviced the client the company needed to target. Groups like IFA (International Franchise Association) and the Franchise Marketing Leadership Conference, that both serve as a resource to the company’s client target had a lot of data to help define how the company needed to craft its branding and communication plan.

We involved the company’s internal partners (team members). Laying out the current state of the company and some transition challenges, we brainstormed some of the pros and cons and conducted a SWOT analysis of the different aspects of the new strategy.

Once we had some internal information, we then decided to conduct a brainstorming session with some business leaders we had some access to, both from the marketing world and from the retail and restaurant space. We conducted a mini-sprint, mapping about the issue, sketching solutions, idea voting and general discussion on the best ideas of the day.

Some takeaways from both of these sessions:

• Concentric circles – There are things that we say we do, things we actually can do and things that we do NOT do.
• The suggestion was made to include “Franchise” in the name because we are currently focused on servicing multi-unit, quick-serve restaurants that are typically franchises.
• With a last name like “Brand”, it seems like a given that we would include it in our company name because we are working with companies to increase awareness for their brand through the printing of P.O.P kits.
• Should we have “P.O.P.”  in the name?  Does everyone know what P.O.P is if we have it in the name?  Does it mean the same thing to everyone?
• Feedback was given that we have a great product/service and we should not have a problem growing the company. 
• The Brand Group is our LLC umbrella company and a suggestion was made to use that as our dba to replace SSA Graphics.
• Taglines were discussed to work with a Company name, i.e. The Brand Group..the POP experts.
• BrandPOP was suggested as a name and received positive feedback.

SOLUTION
Create a new set of symbols to represent the primary method of purchasing (512) beer and highlight and remind the customer that this is integrated into their philosophy.

Lessons Learned
The partners know a lot about the client. The phase where we involved the company partners in the lead up to the strategy rebrand was crucial going into the brainstorming with the business leaders. They had great insight into what the current clients’ perception of the company was and where we needed to improve in order to differentiate ourselves.

The Client’s Industry’s research. While doing research, the client’s trade organization provided a lot of data around what the client is thinking about and their needs. How the client reaches out to its own community gave us insight into how they thought about the company’s area of expertise and how we could best serve them.

My Role

• Account Manager
• Customer Research
• Strategy and Brainstorming
• Content Creation
• Marketing Strategy
• Branding Strategy
• Graphic Design

(512) Brewing Branding

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
(512) Brewing Company was an 8 year old, independent craft brewer of unique beers, using organic ingredients and sustainable methods of production and distribution, who needed to leverage its position and cement its connection with its base.

The project was to create new branding for company collateral, signage and digital to reflect the grain-to-glass, keg-only distribution model.

USER
Internal company sales and marketing department. (512) Brewing is a craft brewery located in Austin, TX.

CHALLANGE
(512) Brewing is the largest self-distributed, keg-only craft brewery in the country. The idea of the small packaging (cans and bottles) contributes greatly to waste, they wanted to embrace a keg to glass distribution of the product and create some branding that reflects this philosophy.

Their customers are sensitive and responsive to the low consumer waste concept of the (512) products and the company wanted to integrate this more into their day-to-day branding.

SOLUTION
Create a new set of symbols to represent the primary method of purchasing (512) beer and highlight and remind the customer that this is integrated into their philosophy.

My Role

• Account Manager
• Customer Research
• Strategy and Brainstorming
• Graphic Design

Unit Specification Project

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
In a franchised retail chain, individual retail locations can have different physical specifications. Many of these differences impact how we design and produce advertising materials that need to be displayed in the store. Some are physical characteristics such as door sizes, front window sizes, how much space is available on the countertop. Others are logistical characteristics such as building codes, strip center rules, egress patterns, etc. Some stores can receive packages at the store, some cannot. Some stores serve lunch and dinner, some close at 3 pm. In addition to these specs, other data can be matched up to stores for other projects like menu pricing models.

USER
Internal marketing department, area managers and franchisees

CHALLANGE
As we developed, designed, packed and shipped promotional advertising materials, taking into account all of this data on the locations can alter the actual kit that is sent, creating versions of the kit. This “Versioning” process is critical to a system-wide rollout of POP so that all stores’ unique specs can be taken care of.

SOLUTION
Create a custom database of store specifications, collect data vis user surveys and during promotion rollouts. Once data is collected and verified, this data can be used in POP fulfillment documents. Merging this specs database with design files, pack-out documents used in the collation and ship-prep of the kits.

When producing new menu panels or any other collateral that contained price points, we merged this section of the database to the design files as part of the Menu Production Portal Project.

NOTE: As we compiled this database, it became the single source of the most accurate store characteristics database for the client.

My Role

• Account Manager
• Customer Research
• Strategy and Brainstorming
• Design of collection tools
• Database design

Menu Production Portal

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Wingstop, a hot wing, fast-casual restaurant chain, needed an efficient, fast and cost-effective way to collect pricing data, format in-store menus and deliver those menus in a relatively short amount of time.

Each store had a unique set of prices but used the same menu template. Several logistics and supply-chain events required a quick turnaround release and implementation of new pricing models.

USER
Managers and franchisees of store locations. These users had limited time to enter this data and proof the information as they are fairly busy running their restaurants.

CHALLANGE
With a tight turnaround for production, we needed to be able to collect all prices from 600 individual stores, get the price content into the menu files and produce 600 final, proofed and approved menus and get them into production. Critical to the success of the project is collecting the data quickly, having the deciding stakeholder approve the proof and creating the final print files of the menus.

Franchisors are not allowed to dictate pricing to their franchisees. They can make suggestions based on current localized sales metrics and trends. We integrated these suggestions into the system, making it easier for the franchisees to determine pricing, although they still all needed to go through the process of entering the prices on their own.

Our challenge was to create a system that was easy-to-use, simple in interface and comprehensive to the collection of the data and would require minimal time from the busy schedule of them running their restaurants.

SOLUTION
I created a form on our website, complete with graphics instructions, menu panel art and field for all of their prices. Franchisees or managers were asked to log in, answer some store specification characteristics (used in cross-over Unit Specification Project), their menu dimensions and then all of their current pricing for each menu item.

Once this information was captured, the database of prices was merged into variable data fields in the design file for the menu boards. Production artists could call up the current store in production, dial in their price model and populate variables in the design file in order to create a proof. Connection of the database to the live design file enabled us to populate the file with live data and create a proof in a short amount of time, creating efficiencies in the process that we had not had previously.

Lessons Learned
Market pricing buy-in. After a couple of rounds, though the evaluation of the data that was coming in, we noticed most DMAs were following similar pricing models. In subsequent versions, we implemented “suggested pricing models” within markets, pre-populating pricing fields with company-approved models. This reduced the users time significantly, speeding up production and time-to-market of future menus

My Role

• Account Manager
• Customer Research
• Strategy and Brainstorming
• Database Design
• Graphic Design

Interactive Infographic

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Create an animated, interactive infographic for a new Rackspace cloud eCommerce platform for use in web ads and online presentations.

USER
Internal Rackspace sales and marketing department. Their User: Online merchants that want to take advantage of an open commerce platform that leverages the worldwide developer community.

CHALLANGE
Rackspace Open Cloud needed of a set of digital image slides to illustrate a webinar presentation for an X.commerce eCommerce platform. The client outlined the presentation and needed approximately 30 images to illustrate the content in the presentation that will run in an animated infographic format. The slide files need to be delivered in a digital web-friendly format that can easily be imported into a presentation tool such as PowerPoint or Acrobat and also is easily displayed in the web browser.

RESEARCH
Previously, the client had used Flash animation technology for this type of interactive infographic but wanted to use a more updated technology that would run on mobile devices easily.

SOLUTION
We proposed that we develop the project in HTML 5.0 as this would be available to more device types, mobile, etc. and make the presentation for access to the user and create a better overall user experience.

My Role

• Account Manager
• Customer Research
• Strategy and Brainstorming
• UX Producer
• Graphic Design

Educational Software

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Using existing educational content from print products, produce animated, interactive, multimedia educational software products that both supplement current product offering and expand the product line into the digital space.

USER
Students with special needs, learning disabilities, and special education educators.

CHALLANGE
PCI Educational Publishing was known for it’s original, supplemental materials for special education and learning disabilities – specifically products that teach life skills. Using content from the most popular products, we needed to create an interactive, multimedia presentation of the material. The user needed to be able to go between the print material and the digital presentation, experiencing similar illustrations, characters, and activities, as their computer time could be limited.

SOLUTION
Design a series of modules that mirror the chaptered content from the exiting material, introducing the illustrations in an animated format and designing interactive games and activities for each module. The illustrations were mostly vector graphics, so using Adobe Flash was the logical choice at the time. This allowed us to repurpose existing and familiar content across most of the modules.

Lessons Learned
Circling back with the client. When working with a lot of structured educational content, we needed to make sure we presenting ideas to the authors in a well-organized, lesson-based fashion. At this time, these software modules would serve as a supplement to current lessons. Therefore, breaking them down into module chunks that both made sense to the overall lesson but also made the best use of the user’s computer time was critical. After several rounds of adjusting this scope per module, we were able to define what those chunks should be.

Previsualization saves time. A form of prototyping, we wireframed animated sequences for authors to comments on and approve. For animation, we had always done some form of previs for all animated sequences. As we went forward, we found the more we increased this phase, the shorter the production time of this content overall.

My Role

• Strategy and Brainstorming
• UX Producer
• Activity Designer
• Animation Designer
• Install/Delivery Production

Customer Franchise Portal

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Create an online customer portal to give contextual access to products and services for clients franchisees.

USER
Retail chain franchisees and franchisor company marketing operations.

CHALLENGE
As an added value to clients, we wanted to create an online portal for client’s franchisees to use for the ordering of marketing materials, services. messaging and other features used to bring the franchise community together.

This system needs to make it easy for franchisees to place orders for materials, pay for them, receive current news and information, get marketing support and communicate with the company and along with other franchisees.

SOLUTION
Design a user experience that combines a customized web-store for existing materials with a needs-based custom material design process and wrap, add messaging, news, file directory and other features, all in a custom-branded experience.

The franchisee would see their store’s specification (see unit specification project) and follow support and marketing services based on this contextual information. The company would be able to manage orders, view usage reporting, manage compliances strategy issues, support the franchisees using various online features.

My Role

• Account Manager
• UX Designer
• Customer Research
• Strategy and Brainstorming
• UI Design

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Video Design and Editing