“We need to embody trustworthiness and authenticity in every conversation and action—and showcase our personality, values, and brand in a way that people will clamor to be a part of.”
PRIME AE: a rapidly growing architecture and engineering firm that solves complex, real-world challenges that make communities better for federal, commercial, and residential clients.
In the business of architecture and engineering, there’s more to build than buildings. For a successful firm experiencing rapid expansion, where the existing corporate identity is potentially competing with the “new” in the company, creating cohesion between disparate parts is paramount to continuing that success.
PRIME AE sought ADG’s help building that cohesion. PRIME AE needed to unite their expanded and geographically diverse workforce under a single, powerful brand to demonstrate its capabilities and experience and differentiate them in a highly competitive market.
Achieving that goal meant rebranding the company and creating a new website to present a unified presence to their expanding market.
To develop an authentic messaging platform, visual identity, and tagline for PRIME AE, ADG immersed itself in the company, its market, and its culture. Through a facilitated discovery process, involving leadership and other stakeholders, ADG helped navigate a variety of opinions, backgrounds, and interests, to identify the key brand challenges to address with the growing workforce. ADG surveyed PRIME AE employees, to gather critical insights to inform and validate decision-making.
These findings laid the groundwork for a new brand platform, voice, messaging, and high level conceptual and narrative exercises resulting in a brand strategy for articulating PRIME AE’s differentiators, value proposition, and key messaging.
Crucial to the brand efforts were balancing evolutionary change with a visual overhaul to the PRIME AE brand identity. ADG explored a series of potential new logo marks that ranged from slight modernization improvements of the existing logo to entirely new iconography and typographic styles.
In keeping with the directive to involve the company’s workforce, a presentation of the options was created and an employee-wide vote was held, resulting in a decision to go forward with a reinvigorated version of the existing mark.
Setting up a brand up for long term success involves more than the mark. Brand design efforts included guidance on visual language, notional executions, messaging that conveyed the company’s core values, and a custom photoshoot (by Steve Belkowitz) across three office locations—all tied together with the tagline “Trust Is Built.”
With the brand platform in place, transforming the website was imperative to reflect the new brand. ADG conducted an in-depth discovery and competitive analysis, uncovering gaps in how PRIME AE marketed its services. To address these findings, the website would require a complete overhaul that would involve expanding the existing 170 pages to nearly 300.
Stakeholder interviews informed content creation within the established brand voice. The expanded content required restructuring the information architecture and creation of a custom UI component system and template library for visual cohesion and ease of iterative development over time.
To provide PRIME AE’s marketing team the ability to easily update the website, ADG delivered a robust Wordpress CMS solution and provided developer-led training.
Through the process, ADG helped PRIME AE uncover new insights about their company, their offerings, and their people. ADG listened to every voice, built consensus, and engaged recently acquired companies to help positioning PRIME AE for the future.