The work is completed - and Renaissance Adventure Guides is now enjoying their new brand!

The final package included a basic marketing plan, tag line, logo, stationery, company brochure, billboards, and Web site.

We will be checking with Max and Lyle over at Renaissance over the next year to bring you updates on how the brand is working for them.

We thank our sponsors, Print Colorado, Outdoor Promotions, and seOverflow, for their dedicated contributions to the contest and look forward to the 2009 Making the Brand contest.

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After the intensive marketing and business brainstorming session with Max and Lyle from RAG, Beth got to work on the marketing plan, researching and planning strategies for reaching Renaissance Adventure Guide’s (RAG) target markets. The marketing plan for RAG was a little different and more complex than your typical small biz marketing plan, because Lyle and Max are intent on growing fairly aggressively, and they have 3 distinct markets they’re trying to reach. So that means their marketing plan will have 3 channels, each of which has a unique set of goals, tactics and collateral, all of which have to establish their own identity without contradicting or undermining RAG’s corporate brand.

For example, if RAG wants to establish a family friendly identity to attract tourists to their rafting trips, but also wants to capture, young, male locals who snowboard to the kayaking trips, they’ll need 2 distinct sets of materials. These 2 sets of materials will be targeted to 2 totally different audiences, so they’ll have different content and imagery, will aim for a different call to action, and will be distributed differently. And at the same time, both of these campaigns must reinforce the company identity.

A similar example: several years ago Disney had an opportunity to establish a cable channel in Europe, but their partners in the venture wanted to also show, on the same channel but during different dayparts, films with some adult content. This would have been a completely different audience (obviously), but the ads for the adult content would have appeared with the Disney logo, and other branding. This is a case where the new product brand contradicted and may even have damaged the company brand – in this case, so seriously that it’s hard to imagine what it would have looked like or how it would have succeeded. And the Disney folks must have felt the same way, because they ultimately decided not to take the plunge.

In the case of RAG, the stakes are not quite the same. We need to establish an image that is attractive and empowering to families, while emphasizing that some of the products on offer are tailor made for rough and tumble thrill seekers. Reaching such different audiences effectively has made this a more complicated than usual marketing plan, and I’m glad it’s Beth’s job to sort it all out rather than mine.

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As you might know if you’ve been following along, we’ve begun work on Making the Brand’s winning company, Renaissance Adventure Guides‘ new brand. In addition to the Grand Prize, we awarded 2 runners up (Gift Basket Junction, and M&D Kitting Solutions) Brand Navigation Systems (BNS).

The BNS is a good alternative for a company that isn’t sure they’re ready to go whole hog with a branding or rebranding project, but still wants their current brand and marketing collateral evaluated, would like some suggestions on what to do next, and would like to keep their options open when it comes to working with other marketers, designers and writers.

A BNS starts out somewhat similarly to the heavy duty business and marketing brainstorming session that any branding process should begin with. Beth and her giant sticky notes lead us through the process of establishing a profile of the client which you can read about in a bit more detail at the first link above. Then, rather than Beth getting to work on the marketing plan, Kandra hitting the drafting table and Travitt chaining himself to the typewriting machine, the 3 of us sit down and draft a Brand Navigation System for the client that summarizes the meeting and our thoughts on their brand.

Besides a summary of the meeting, based on Beth’s, and Kandra’s notes and Travitt’s doodlings, the BNS includes an overall assessment of the client’s current brand (based on our examination of any current collateral), Kandra’s thoughts regarding the logo, typography, color choices and layout options if appropriate, Travitt’s on the current messaging, and Beth’s on the marketing. The BNS may include logo, color and typeface suggestions, core message, slogan, and name suggestions if requested by the client, possible budget and timelines – in short the BNS is a creative brief that we can use to craft a great brand for that client, or that they can take to another team to slap together a slightly less great brand.

Whether or not a client continues with us, goes to another branding team, or decides to abandon the project altogether, it’s a valuable exercise. Closely examining your brand (or correctly branding a start up), is a process that provides a type of business focus that you don’t get in any other way. It ties together all the thinking that might have gone into your business and marketing plans, guides your hiring practices and helps you qualify clients, and forces you to make vitally important choices regarding how you want your business to be perceived in the marketplace.

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About 2 weeks ago, Lyle and Max of winning company Renaissance Adventure Guides (RAG) sat down with us for the first step of their rebranding: an intensive brainstorming session where we grilled them for 4 hours about their business’ past, plans, and hopes for the future. The branding purpose of this session was to establish the identities and habits of RAG’s target market(s), its competition, its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and internal and external threats to its success, and where and what the company will be in 1, 3 and 5 years.

Under Beth’s direction, and using no enhanced interrogation techniques, we were able to glean valuable information that’ll help Beth create an effective brand strategy, Kandra to design a logo that embodies the sense of professionalism, safety and trust necessary for RAG’s target market to feel comfortable hiring them, and Travitt to craft a persuasive slogan that will lodge itself in the brains of everyone who sees or hears it.

Really, what it all comes down to is this: to effectively brand a client, we need to figure out what the business and marketing needs of that client are. The brainstorming session allows us to figure that out, while also giving us a sense of that client’s business culture, how the people who own and work for the company think about and speak to each other about it, and more generally, what their aspirations for the brand are.

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A Brand is Reborn:

The Presenters and Sponsors of Denver’s Making the Brand 2008 have announced a winner. Denver’s Making the Brand 2008 is an annual contest designed to re-brand one small, independent, metro Denver-based company, and to educate Denver’s small business community about the importance of branding to their continued success. Renaissance Adventure Guides (www.raguides.com), a Denver-based adventure travel firm, has been selected as recipient of the $20,000 brand and marketing package offered as the Grand Prize in the first annual contest.

“I was so excited when we made our decision,” says Beth Boen, owner of CreativeXchange Marketing (www.creativexchangemarketing.com), who is presenting the contest along with Phases Design Studio (www.designfiles.net), a local graphic design company, and The Write Stuff (www.travitthamilton.com), a copywriting company. “Renaissance Adventure Guides is exactly the kind of business we were hoping to award the Grand Prize to. They are a small, local company on the verge of great things, and they have a real commitment to making our community and the world a better place.”

The official announcement was made to the public Tuesday morning on 9News Mornings during an interview with Renaissance Adventure Guides’ owner, Max Young. According to Young, “We’re really fired up about this, because it’s something we’ve known we’ve needed to do for a while now, but weren’t sure how to really get the ball rolling. We’ve been doing our own marketing for a few years, and really didn’t have a firm grasp on our branding. It just seemed like the time had come to step up. And then we heard about the contest, so the timing and everything has been just perfect.”

Kandra Churchwell, Creative Director of Phases Design Studio says, “Max and Lyle (Phetteplace, co-owner of Renaissance Adventure Guides) are exactly the kind of business owners we want to work with in general, but especially for the contest. They’re excited about the process, open to trying of new ideas, and willing to go through the whole thing in front of the entire metro Denver small business community. We think this is going be powerful experience for Renaissance Adventure Guides and the small business community alike!”

The two runners up were also announced today:

Gift Basket Junction (www.giftbasketjunction.com), and M&D Kitting Solutions (www.mdkittingsolutions.com), a mail order fulfillment company. The runners up will receive a branding assessment (valued at $795) provided by the Contest Presenters.

The Grand Prize Package includes marketing research and a marketing plan, a full custom design package (website, collateral, stationery, business cards), as well as brand and marketing messaging (tagline or slogan, web copy and brochure copy). The package will also include printing, SEO services and, if determined necessary by the Presenters, web video, product photography, and billboard advertising.

“All three of the finalists are great companies with a lot of potential,” says Travitt Hamilton, owner of copywriting company The Write Stuff. “So it was really tough to pick just one. All of them met the requirements of the contest and they all stand for a lot of the same things that we believe the contest is all about. In the end, it was a choice between three really worthy companies, which made the process exciting, but really challenging!”

Renaissance Adventure Guides’ new brand will be presented in June.

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