As companies evolve, their marketing should as well. Ray Wiese has presided over a remodeling company that began on a lark in 1992 and grew to $3.5 million in revenue in 2005, with an average job size of $300,000.
“You start off working for people who are more price-oriented,” says Wiese, of Natick, Mass., “but you have to leave some of those people behind as you grow.” So as his clients skewed toward the CEO set, he began reworking his marketing one piece at a time.
First to go, in 1999, was the old name, Consider It Done Right, in favor of The Wiese Co. “I wanted to brand the company in a personal way,” Wiese says. Two years later, he launched a more refined logo.
The newsletter, originally produced in-house and sent to about 100 former clients, now mails quarterly to more than 10,000 qualified homeowners at a lower per-unit cost than the old version.
The latest redo is the business card. The blue (design) and orange (construction) color scheme is meant to evoke design/build, and the text clearly separates personal and company information, says Kelly Lynch, the company's marketing director. Hired just this year, Lynch's arrival signals the company's commitment to “look at everything we do to create a more consistent look,” Wiese says.
We asked Ruth Lozner, associate professor of marketing at the University of Maryland, to comment on this evolution.
