The ZS brand was not aligned with the company’s expanded focus and new technologies, competitors were challenging the company in its core product and service areas, and the company’s aggressive growth had created cultural challenges.
ZS
A brand strategy for future success – helping a global consulting powerhouse reach the next level of growth.
What began as an academic collaboration in the early 1970s between two PhDs at Carnegie Mellon University creating mathematical models for sales force sizing and resource allocation grew into what is today one of the world’s largest and most successful consulting and outsourcing firms specializing in sales and marketing.
The two students, Andy Zoltners and Prabha Sinha, founded ZS – the company that bears their surname initials – to apply the science of sales model and territory alignment to industries that are marketing and sales intensive.
It began with pharma, an industry in which ZS’s ability to commercial drugs quickly found an appreciative client base, and over time extended to energy, high-tech, insurance and medical products.
Growth created its own problems. By 2015, the two-person consultancy had grown to be a global company with 21 offices serving 1,200 companies in more than 70 countries. But in spite of the success there was a feeling at executive team level that the company had lost something. The ZS brand was not aligned with the company’s expanded focus and new technologies, competitors were challenging the company in its core product and service areas, and the company’s aggressive growth had created cultural challenges.
As part of what was termed Vision 20/20, Managing Director Chris Wright and the executive team decided review the company’s brand strategy ahead of the next phase of growth as a global company, in terms of both revenue and recruitment.
With a vision of being a recognized as a leading global brand in consulting and outsourcing, ZS leadership sought to undertake a wholesale review of its brand positioning and reputation and to assess its potential to enter new markets and related services.
Through our proprietary evidence-based research methodology, BrandingBusiness was able to uncover the best path forward for the brand, while empowering the company’s management with the strategic clarity and conviction required to support this new direction.
ZS was not as well-known as some of the rival global consulting firms and was experiencing issues in converting prospects into clients because of the perceived high costs of its solutions. However, our research confirmed that ZS’s focused ability to bring integrated sales and marketing solutions to the marketplace and to make impact where it really mattered was not only a substantial point of differentiation, it was essential in empowering companies to meet their sales and revenue challenges with confidence and precision.
Also, targeted companies recognized ZS as providing unprecedented value, and as a smart, agile company that worked in a very collaborative, practical manner—another differentiator. Taken together, these factors represented a critically important brand opportunity.
With evidence-based research, an inspiring vision and a compelling value proposition in hand, BrandingBusiness worked with ZS leadership to develop a new brand positioning platform—one that reflected the company’s true value in the marketplace.
The new brand line, ‘Impact Where it Matters,’ conveys an internal and external brand promise to deliver customer value, brand preference, and internal empowerment.
The brand strategy was brought to life with a new visual identity system that unified the company worldwide, a verbal lexicon and an internal training programs designed to build momentum and acceptance.
