Rebrand to reposition the retail experience experts and engage employees across Europe.

Alrec is a global retail brand display organisation with over 60 years of experience behind them. They approached Valiant to help reposition them as modern-day industry leaders and engage and unify employees across Europe to become One Alrec.

The company designs and delivers exciting retail experiences that enable global brands to attract and engage customers.  But while their solutions are both contemporary and inventive, their corporate branding was showing its age. Following extensive internal engagement processes Valiant re-engineered their branding, created new visual assets and designed and delivered an internal lauch to engage internally. This was supported externally through a powerful new website, to position the company as Experts in Experience.

Alrec was undergoing a strategic change in its global operations. To better service their clients they wanted to unify their international offices and streamline their proposition as a single “One Alrec”. To help communicate the new strategy we worked with them to to review their current brand identity and assess it’s relevance to their new approach. Outcomes from these sessions led us to define the deliverables.

It was essential to deliver a brand image that positioned the company as modern-day experts in a fast-changing industry. And secondly, to give the company a new contemporary website that would provide a solid foundation for future marketing activity.

How do you really get under the skin of an organisation? In our workshops we explore their expertise, why clients engage them, their differentiators and review the competitor landscape. Only then are we able to begin to develop the creative ideas to communicate the 60+ years of experience that has attracted a portfolio of global clients.

There’s often a level of fear in transitioning away from an existing logo. What is its value, or at least perceived value? We took Alrec on a journey to test how far we could evolve their existing identity.  By demonstrating how we could change brand assets, colour palette, typefaces and imagery we showed a much more contemporary, and relevant, image.

The existing logo was confined in a dark blue box. We evolved the logo (which you can see in the animation lower down) so that it was freed from the box, softened and updated whilst still feeling like the Alrec clients knew and loved. With an updated toolkit of visual assets, Alrec’s presence was a far more relevant and appropriate representation of its positioning in the global market.

And now for the website

Your website is most likley to be your single most powerful marketing tool. Therefore it has to be right. Our thorough process began with surveying clients and Alrec employees to ascertain what they actually engaged with online. We asked what helped clients (and prospects) make the decision to engage Alrec. Our strategic discovery stage considered all user journeys before we created the site map; this then guides the design and development of the project.  Resulting in a powerful, modular WordPress website – designed for focused lead generation activity –  all built inhouse at Valiant.

Both the branding and website were launched internally and externally with great success.

All of Alrec’s global teams have engaged positively to the repositioning as Experts in Experience. As importantly the new website has engaged existing clients, enabled reconnection with some lapsed clients and already delivered as a lead generation tool.

The marketing collateral we have since rolled out, including thought leadership content, industry reports and an interactive touchscreen display for large expo events, have elevated the perception of the business completely. It has attracted global clients and opened up more opportunities within the USA.

On surveying clients and employees on whether the website and branding was a better representation of Alrec’s values and their positioning as Experts in Experience – the results had increased by 177%.