SGS & Co. – Challenge
A supplier of product management, packaging and pre-press services to Fortune 500 companies needed to make sense of the 100+ products and services they created and acquired through acquisitions. In the process, they also needed to advance a newly-updated brand against consolidating competition.
In our initial discussions, it was clear that SGS&Co. need help on three fronts:
Opportunity Assessment
Identifying competitive opportunity areas, and the most advantageous architecture and organizational structure to exploit them
Brand Architecture Build
Desperately needed help uniting service offerings around themes bring clarity to the organization and clients, and are compelling to the industry
Brand Evolution
Because all of this change could not happen at once, I needed to chart a evolutionary course for the brand rollout over time
Opportunity Assessment
To bring clarity and direction to the assignment, interviews with internal & client stakeholders and a thorough SWOT analysis were a first step. I addition, I educated the org on brand architecture models, to build a shared understanding ad open discussion of options.:
As a team we were able to plot the differences in competitor positioning
Recommend a brand architecture model and organizational structure
Chart white-space opportunity areas
All discovery elements
Full competitive landscape
Hybrid brands
Hybrid and House of Brands models
Architecture and organizing structure
Architecture models explained
Org structures and client-focus spectrum
Continuum of client focus
SGS&Co. white space: away from “deliverables” – what they made – to the client challenges they help solve across many service areas
Brand Architecture Build
Using insights gained through research, I then moved into a second phase:
Aligning the team around the most opportunistic brand architecture option and organizational structure
Creating new product/service segments – with recommended graphic direction – within the new (overall) architecture
Showing how services “map” within recommended new segments
Recommended architecture model - Hybrid - and organizing structure/position
Architecture and organizing structure help SGS&Co. achieve critical goals
New segments/segment names for SGS&Co. services, separated by naming scheme options
Mapping services to new segment naming conventions
Recommended segment naming conventions, graphic direction, and brand story statement iterations
Brand position graphic
Brand Evolution
Moving a large, international organization takes time. For this I charted an evolutionary course, which focused on laying out scenarios for branding and brand positioning evolution. In the end. the senior leadership team adopted all my recommendations, with implementation begun in 2024.
Scenarios for planned brand migration of the master brand, based on shifting to Brand Impact Group
Governance of guidelines were critical to secure people would adopt and use the new branding scheme
A phased rollout for the new architecture