Tech Branding
Case Study: Sense
Sense turns high-resolution waveform data in modern smart meters into real-time insights, accessible through an app. Giving consumers unprecedented visibility into the power grid, it revolutionizes home energy.
This complex product and service demanded an inviting identity to attract investors, energy providers and consumers. Here's the process through which I created that identity.
1: Creative Organizing Concept
A creative organizing concept helps a company understand what they’re all about. It strengthens and focuses people, providing identity and mission.
Process: Meeting with founders, discussing the product with executives and engineers, I gained a full understanding of the Sense process, technology and mission. Studying Sense business strategy and growth plans, I realized their projected market and product expansion. Researching competitors, I analyzed various brand positioning, then matched this against marketplace messaging and consumer conversations in social media. Through this process, I came to understand Sense and their landscape.
I distilled that understanding into the Sense creative organizing concept: Great Energy.
Bright, positively disruptive and innovative, Great Energy articulates the optimistic vibrancy of Sense. While other players in the space shaded their messaging with the doom/gloom of climate crisis, Great Energy presented the positive, proactive energy of Sense.
Great Energy works both internally and externally, inspiring employees and establishing corporate tone. That fresh, exciting voice is attractive to seed investors and tech talent. In the traditional space of energy providers, it introduces Sense as an inspiring new partner producing positive change. With Great Energy as the resonant tone for messaging and art direction, consumers are drawn into an exciting process that revolutionizes home energy use.
Shining through the troubling clouds of global warming, Sense provides Great Energy.
Company Advantage:
Great Energy provides a rallying point for all aspects of organization and outreach. Through a mantra that inspires everything from in-house meetings to industry messaging, Great Energy articulates and simplifies the mission and vision of Sense. Helping to define and inspire process, product and partnerships, this creative organizing concept gives Sense the positioning and focus to expand with confidence.
2: The Sense Archetype
Blending Brand Voice and Tone into a crafted, compelling Character and Identity.
Realized through art and words, Great Energy evolved into a brand identity. Establishing Voice and Tone, I strengthened their presence through classic storytelling craft. That craft expands traditional brand values of Voice and Tone into a dynamic, market archetype.
Drafting detailed profiles of personality, I crafted Sense into a player within the larger market narrative. Refining that personality to adjust for interactions with investors, energy partners and consumers, I created a responsive presence that adapted for different relationships.
Refined as an active archetype, Sense doesn't just broadcast messaging within certain value tones. It inspires conversations and established relationships along defined archetype values.
Recognized instantly, touching classic storytelling tropes, Sense performs as a living brand. Establishing this personality archetype, defining it through an intuitive playbook, I inspire creative partners to breathe life into Sense.
Company Advantage:
With the Sense personality established and mapped, messaging requires less executive oversight. Creative guides and defined values liberated founders and Chief Officers from time-intensive reviews of communications.
These communications became vibrant and consistent, establishing brand identity through multiple channels. Outside marketing partners aren’t trying to invent the Sense presence; they are invited to interpret it creatively. Supplied with clearly inspiring guidelines, their messaging becomes consistent and attractive, energized with the Sense archetype.
That archetype resonates with business partners and consumers, who learn to understand Sense as a compelling, consistent character in the rapidly evolving cleantech space.
3: Consumer Messaging
Tag line and creative concept for the marketplace
Established internally as Great Energy, then crafted into a compelling market archetype, Sense required consumer-facing creative to attract attention and invite exploration.
This was accomplished with the concept/creative: Bright Homes for Smarter Living.
With this friendly, inviting phrase, I set Sense apart from the market jargon of “smart homes”. By transforming impersonal “smart homes” into warmly inviting Bright Homes, I humanized a complex technology within aspirational terms…. while articulating the promise of Great Energy.
Sharing the warmth and intelligence of Sense, this concept plugs directly into the smart home market while lighting it anew. Inventive and inviting, modular and flexible for various positioning needs, Bright Homes is a creative promise for positive, powerful change. That change is personal and planetary, promising personal advantages and global change.
Remaining friendly and approachable while redefining the smart home space, Bright Homes for Smarter Living presents an intriguing attribute that attracts exploration.
Company Advantage:
Articulating the Sense brand promise in a highly attractive concept and phrase, Bright Homes separates Sense from competitors. Humanizing technology through high level messaging, Sense implies brand value that promises an intelligently designed, superior experience.
Expanding into mission, Bright Homes build the bright world that Sense users collectively create with this innovative product and service.
That shared, bright world is the ongoing mission of Sense. Matched internally with the Sense business plan, Bright Homes faithfully represents their future expansion plans into additional technology enhancements and projected growth.
Total Brand Advantage:
Major brand equity available to discerning, high-value startups.
Most startups head straight to marketing. They let outsiders define their brand. Different partners will define that brand differently, diluting identity and creating confusion.
Through my discerning methodology, brands define themselves with definitive, flexible presence. That presence implies value and creates stability.
Through these advantages, branded startups enjoy the versatility of innovation while referencing the attraction of heritage.
This is the way major brands achieve their resonating presence. My method synthesizes decades of personal experience with global brands. Startups who activate my method enjoy the same power to rise within their markets and define them.
Appreciated by investors, inviting to talent, and highly attractive to consumers, well-branded technology startups surpass their competition in cluttered markets.
Within the proliferation and velocity of those markets, brand advantages provide critical insurance for success.
That brand success requires the right blend of timing and energy. Depending on your business, ambitions, marketplace and resources, branding might perfectly enhance your emerging—or established-- venture.
Let’s connect and discuss whether branding is right for you.
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