Fresh

Sterling Communications is a technology services provider located in Portland, Oregon with a national customer base. They specialize in VoIP business phone systems, colocation, and hosting.  Sterling came to eROI this year looking for a complete strategic overhaul of their website, which had grown stale over the years and didn’t reflect what they truly had to offer their customers. Take a look at the home page before we got started:

Sterling wanted a solid working relationship with a trustworthy, local agency. After having been through several agencies in the past, they were looking to work with someone new to give them a fresh perspective on their website, company branding, and marketing materials.

Our first step in developing this relationship was to familiarize ourselves with the Sterling Communications brand and find out what specifically sets them apart from their competition. How could we help them break out from the noise of their competitive landscape?  We conducted a positioning study which turned out to be the backbone of the entire project; this helped us create a strong road map for a successful website project.

When Sterling came to us, they had already done their homework and provided us with much of the information we needed to get started. They had already done some internal exercises to get a pulse on their employees’ perspectives on the company culture, the value Sterling offers its clients, and what sets them apart from their competitors.

The underlying thread that we kept noticing was how focused they were on the helping their clients to succeed. They wanted their clients to look good, perform well, and support them in the ways that they could. The emphasis was always on the client and never on themselves. After delving into this concept a bit further, we explored ways to help Sterling portray their clients as their heroes.

“How do we show this on the website?” was a question that we started to ask ourselves during the initial phases of the website project. We discovered that showcasing their clients and the clients’ success through photography and video was a smart way to bring this creative concept to the forefront of the website. Emphasizing the clients — the heroes — and letting them tell Sterling’s story, is something that’s echoed throughout the website through its photography, video, and copy.

We wrote, drew, brainstormed, laughed and cried (okay, we didn’t cry) to discover and communicate Sterling Communications’ brand personality. Some of the specific exercises we conducted are below.

Keywords

First, we outlined keywords and phrases that described the personality direction we wanted to take the brand in.  Some of the terms we used for the final list were those that the client had mentioned before.

Characters/Personas

Associations to memorable characters can really help solidify the brand message you want to communicate. Using the keywords as a guide, we brainstormed characters from pop culture to communicate the new brand. We thought of Spock from Star Trek, Alfred the Butler, Yoda, and more. We dubbed the outcome, “The Sage/Supporter Persona”.

Mood Boards

Mood boards are a great way to gauge a client’s visual preferences before getting started with the website designs. We started out by creating one that was a safe bet in terms of delivering something that we thought they’d be comfortable with, and one that we thought might stretch them beyond their aesthetic comfort level. After the mood board presentation, we had a discussion about the boards and learned exactly what visual direction we should head in for the website.

Of course, after the positioning phase there was still a lot of work to do. We designed and developed, coordinated video and photo shoots, and tested, tested, tested. Keeping what we learned in the positioning study in mind throughout the creative process made it easy to stay focused and on-point with our end objective.  Check out the new and improved home page, which features a Sterling Communication client, or shall we say hero, in the forefront.

The site includes an entire section called “Our Heroes” which focuses entirely on Sterling’s clients:

To see the entire site in action, go visit Sterling.net.