When it comes to branding and promoting a new company launch, amazing things can happen in relatively short sprints — especially when the right teams are working together in synergy.
EverVet Partners is a new firm entering the competitive industry of veterinary practice acquisition. However, they have a strong entry position due to their team’s deep experience, their focus on supportive long-term relationships and growth strategies, and the unique ownership opportunities they offer to their partner practices. As a result, the company planned to hit the ground running with help of a carefully selected collection of custom strategies and branding tools.
When we met with the founding members of EverVet, the firm was looking ahead to its official launch and in need of a branding agency partner who could support them on several fronts. Working on a compressed timeline, our teams came together quickly to work collaboratively on several immediate design, strategy, and digital launch needs, and then lay the groundwork for secondary phases of support down the line.
To get underway with an immediately impactful start, we conducted in-depth interviews with select stakeholders and prospective sellers to better understand their respective goals, priorities, and preferences and to uncover the nuances involved in the project. A two-part virtual workshop with EverVet’s core team helped us dive deeper and align on brand positioning, drawing from their vision and experience. In the first session — a brand landscape exercise — we explored topics related to their audiences, opportunities, assets, and threats. In the second, we focused on brand discovery, discussing and evaluating their core brand attributes and the effectiveness of other key market players.
Using a variety of tools, we also conducted an internal competitive analysis to identify where other firms are excelling — or falling short — in serving similar audiences locally and nationwide in order to inform next steps, recommendations, and content strategy in a way that leverages important and timely opportunities.
Based on our findings, we crafted a series of suggested actions that EverVet could undertake to refine its brand, create differentiation, and increase the general effectiveness of positioning and communications efforts surrounding their launch as a new company. We provided their team with a brand positioning brief that gave them an overview of the brand landscape, audience definitions and needs, value proposition, brand assets, and differentiators; as well as an integrated brand messaging guide offering direction on primary and audience messaging components, including the brand promise and refined mission, vision, and core values statements. In addition, we defined key tone and personality attributes and created messaging assets to make sure current and future team members will align when speaking about the brand. One of the tenets that came out of this process is the firm’s guiding “for vets, by vets” philosophy, which helps to establish their authenticity and credibility with practice owners, even in the early stages of business development.
With teams working in tandem, we created several design framework options that aligned with the new brand positioning in a way that is flexible enough to work across different contexts yet consistent enough to be recognized as an integrated family. Presented via mood boards, each framework included related fonts, colors, iconography, typography, patterns, and imagery examples. Once their team selected an approved identity, we provided contextually sized applications they would need for web and social media use.
In creating a WordPress website for this new entity, our goal was to not only serve their immediate needs for a fully responsive designed digital brochure that allows prospects to learn more about them easily via any device, but also to provide a landing point for outbound marketing efforts and organic traffic — as well as to address their future needs as they look to expand the site’s content, navigation, and functionality down the line. Drawing on the brand positioning and messaging brief, we adapted and applied various copy points to the site in a way that ties their messaging together cohesively with clear calls to action integrated into every page, encouraging interested partnership prospects to get in touch and begin a conversation.
Using our signature digital-first design approach, we carried through the look and feel of the site to a suite of brand collateral that includes business cards, letterhead, a PowerPoint template, sales brochure, and brand assets for the team’s use on LinkedIn.
Looking ahead, we’ll be helping EverVet with a rollout of proposed post-launch services, digital campaigns, and assets to support them as they move into a more active growth phase as a new company. On an ongoing basis, we’ll work with their team to create direct mailers for prospective partner practices, digital display ads, presentation materials, and more.
