For our September luncheon, we hosted three experts on branding:
Scot Crocker of Crocker and Crocker, Chelsea Minor of Raley’s, and Keith Parker of Greater Sacramento Economic Council (GSEC). They had a lot of great advice, and one thing they all agreed on….
Sometimes you just need to reposition
Consulting with a range of small to medium-sized business, startups, and government programs, Scot Crocker has seen branding challenges of all types. One thing he’s observed: “Sometimes you aren’t going to change the name or logo, you just need to reposition the company.” That means knowing where your equity is. If your brand has existed for a century, you may be a fool to do a full rebrand.
But what does that mean? Chelsea Minor from Raley’s understands it very well. They have maintained the core Raley’s brand while repositioning it to be more health and wellness oriented. “For instance,” Chelsea says, “when we’ve done live events, for decades we’ve given away chips, but are now giving fruits and vegetables.” That’s just one example of their positioning strategy, which also includes creating sub-brands, such as Market 515, which allows them to completely reinvent the way they do business.
Keith Parker continually repositions GSEC. The brand used to be trying to do too much, but through a discovery process, they realized that what they were really about was attracting talent-driven organizations. Even though the brand rests on that now, the organization continually adjusts to suit the dynamic Sacramento environment. “You can make adjustments to positioning based on the marketplace or something as targeted as website A/B testing,” says Keith. “We evolve the Greater Sacramento brand to the changing conditions and everything we have going on as an organization.”
Check out our upcoming luncheons for more opportunities for industry expert feedback, visit our Events page here.
Author Information
Tom Hinds is the Director of Communications at U.C. Davis and a VP at Large for the AMASV. Connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhinds/
