Just because you build robots doesn’t mean you have to talk like one.
PennAir’s service-based approach has always been its differentiator, but PennAir needed a brand presence that communicated the company’s essence. PennAir’s history is rich, but its brand felt fragmented due to ongoing growth. Merit used competitive research and employee experience to truly understand what differentiated PennAir in its market. This provided PennAir with a brand that accurately represents it as a market challenger.
Market Reality
PennAir’s customers have complex needs that require more than an off-the-shelf solution. They require a partner that can act as a part of their team and provide an unmatched level of service.
Market Opportunity
Talking with anyone from PennAir, it’s easy to see why customers choose to work with the company. Merit helped PennAir hone in on the traits that define its customer experience and communicate this experience through a unified identity and powerful brand expressions.
Invention Strategy
Merit recognized that PennAir’s ability to think ahead, ask meaningful questions, and consistently exceed what is expected truly separates the company from the “me too” brands that crowd its market. By creating a brand story founded in these attributes and an identity that speaks to the innovation and purpose behind its business, PennAir has carved out a clear space for itself that the competition can’t touch.
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INSIGHTS
What is Market Invention?
It's the new era of marketing.
Market Invention is the process of creating and maintaining market dominance by leveraging insight, purpose, position, and experience to establish, grow, and maintain customer and company value.
COVID-19 CEO Survey
Back when COVID-19 was in its diabolical toddlerhood, circa May 2020, Merit asked CEOs from a diverse pool of sectors about their perceptions of COVID-19, and how they were tangibly handling its impact. These were not P&G, Google, General Motors CEOs, but CEOs of arguably the most important strata in the U.S. economy: small to medium-sized.
CEO Influenza?
If our CEO survey is any indication, the “can-do” spirit is still alive and well. As cultural Venn diagrams representing now and the near future collide – COVID, FLU, ELECTION, BLM – resiliency seems to be many CEO’s medicine du jour.
The Confidence Market
Thanks to COVID-19, we're all relearning how to do the things we were once experts at. We’re relearning our relationships and how we interact. We’re relearning how to be a customer, teacher, CEO, marketer, sales executive, investor, ect. And with everything happening so fast, the relearning curve is extra steep.
COGNITIVELY COVID: The CEO Guide to Fear
What might be the hardest part of being a leader? The expectation of fearlessness, as in the whole “fearless leader” facade. Crushing, isn’t it?
COGNITIVELY COVID: The CEO Guide to Denial
Everyone defaults to denial at some point. It’s the brain’s way of lining up all of our implicit biases and testing them against harsh realities. Ironically, it’s because we’re trying to make sense of things with mental shortcuts. Now, in the time of COVID-19, as we all feel the need to move fast, CEOs might want to be especially mindful of biases, especially the biases that support denial and impede invention during crisis.
COGNITIVELY COVID: The CEO Guide to Acting Fast
You’ve likely heard the term “first movers” in the context of new sector growth. Moving first to take advantage of opportunistic pathways thanks to COVID-19 is almost a new sector unto itself. One website we love, CovidInnovations.com, is a global gathering of hundreds of new products, new apps, new wrinkles to existing services all in the name of the new world.
The 10 Truths of the COVID-19 CEO
In the midst of loosening lockdowns and tightening restrictions, dropping infection rates and second waves, CEOs must adjust to new truths in changed industries. During many conversations with my peers, a few of those truths have surfaced time and again.