Brand fitness and the bottom line

Smart technology captivates us. Wearables monitor our vital signs. Digital entertainment systems learn our preferences and deliver songs, games and movies on demand. Smart homes provide an ambient environment and save energy. Popular brand names – FitBit, PlayStation and Nest – spring easily to mind.

But what’s under the hood? Some amazing System-on-Chip (SoC) technology. The hidden power that monitors, senses, calculates, communicates, and remembers. The engineers who build this technology are crazy smart. The marketers who promote it, also smart. They have to be. We see the shiny new gadget, not the internal wizardry that entices us to buy it.

One company that understands this challenge is Sigma Designs. The company cut its teeth on SoCs for set-top boxes and then broadened its portfolio and evolved into a key player in the Internet of Things (IoT). But prospective partners and investors, unaware of its technology advances, began to see the company as a niche player.

Then we got a call from Sigma Designs: could we help them bring market perception in line with the innovative realities of their technology brand?

“Today, our website says who we are, what we’ve accomplished and how we’re moving the industry forward. We have succeeded in revitalizing our brand and increasing loyalty. The whole package, anchored by our website, has opened the market’s eyes.”

– Mary Miller, Corporate Marketing, Sigma Designs

Four things told us that Sigma Designs would be a great fit for our agency:

1. Reputable company and products
2. Recognition of unmet marketing need
3. Desire for an agency partner with creative and technical know-how
4. Commitment to build a strong brand and marketing best practices

Our brand discovery process and resulting creative brief helped Sigma Designs confirm their brand vision and get buy-in from their key stakeholders. The corporate website was in need of a greenfield design and development effort, and we tackled it from all sides.

• Revitalized visual brand identity and high-level storytelling
• Improved web and mobile user experience
• Eased publishing and curation of branded content
• Empowered staff with web best practices

The results? An improved brand alignment and increased brand affinity among customers, partners and investors. A better equipped marketing team that’s more self-sufficient when it comes to web content strategy. And our client told us that their share price has been up significantly since the rebrand and the new website launch, adding that perhaps there’s “a direct correlation” between the two (wink).