Does your marketing pay? Find out with a marketing audit.

Request audit »

Marketing Case Study / Gradwell

Brand Refresh 

Client Gradwell | www.gradwell.com
Objective Develop a visual identity and tone of voice to appeal to a wider target audience
Quick Facts
  • Successfully applied across web, product literature, event graphics, merchandise, internal comms and CRM generated materials
  • Positive customer feedback and increasing sales from new audience

Gradwell is an internet services company, providing internet telephony, hosting, broadband and email services to small and micro businesses in the UK. Established by Peter Gradwell in his second year at university, the company has achieved year-on-year organic growth for the last 10 years.

When this project commenced, marketing activity had been ad-hoc and growth had been achieved mainly through word of mouth amongst the technology enthusiast community. To enable continued growth, Gradwell needed to appeal beyond this market, to a wider small business community. They approached Clear Thought to undertake lead generation activity.

Following an audit of the sales funnel and research into the target audience, Clear Thought found that the visual identity and tone of voice was alienating the audience segment with the most growth potential.

Problems with the existing brand:

Old Gradwel logoGradwell's brand appealed almost exclusively to a techie audience, and was difficult to engage with if you were less technically literate. With growth potential sitting amongst small businesses without technology specialisms, this was a barrier to growth. The key issues were:

The brand we delivered:

New Gradwell logoClear Thought pulled together a freelance team with specific expertise in business-to-business marketing and IT to work on the new brand.

Making extensive use of the detailed customer research and market messaging project, we delivered the following:

One year on, Gradwell conducted an staff survey in which 95% of employees agreed that the brand was important to the company as a whole. Peter Gradwell, MD, comments, “it was a really tough decision to spend money on something that wouldn’t directly generate leads, it was about building the foundations. But, I’m absolutely sure that it was the right thing to do. It has had huge benefits across everything we do, but to give a tangible example, we were recently approached by HP to appear as a pretty high profile case study, and I’m sure they wouldn’t have shared a stage with us if we hadn’t looked as credible and polished as we now do.”

This project was undertaken as part of a 12-month marketing transformation programme for Gradwell. Hear Peter Gradwell, MD, talk about his experiences in this 3-minute video »

LIKE IT? SHARE IT.

 

 

the client

We're delighted with the new brand. It gets across who we are much more accurately - real people working hard to help other small businesses make the most of the internet. What was great is that Clear Thought didn't just hand over guidelines documents and expect us to change overnight, they've worked with us to create templates we can all use and to bring the whole team along. It's a brand that I am now really proud of.

Peter Gradwell, MD

Gradwell

www.gradwell.com »

Find out how we created over 100 professional pieces of marketing collateral for Gradwell using powerful PowerPoint templates.

Find out more » »
Feedback Form