Driving down the road today, I saw a truck labeled "Steritech: Brand Protection Services". The name is incredibly bland (especially in the land of anything-tech), but the tagline really jumped out at me. Did this guy drive around all day looking for misuse of people's brand names?
Looking at their website, this company has done, I think, one of the best jobs of well, branding, what they do in a way that makes you look at the larger picture of what they do, not their actual job.
They do what?
Essentially, Steritech is a pest control and cleaning company. Sterile-Tech. They deal in pest prevention, food safety, training and other things mostly focused in the restaurant space.
But, what an inventive way to think about what you do. If you are a restaurant with a certain image (maybe across a large national chain) and want to make sure that your restaurant brand is protected, are you going to call the pest control company? Obviously no, but you do call the brand protection company.
I think Steritech has done something really cool here. They've taken a very vanilla name, with highly commoditized services and simply by thinking differently seem to have put themselves in a different league than their competition. "We don't just kill roaches and show your chefs how to run a clean kitchen, we make sure that each time a customer comes into your restaurant, they have the same experience and come to love your brand." What a powerful message that is!
It all comes back to repro...
To put the reprographics spin on this post, "reprographics" is an incredibly outdated term for what we do. Not only that, but any company that wants to differentiate itself needs to run away from that term as fast as possible. Think about the larger picture and larger services that your company provides to your clients. What is it that you are REALLY doing when you look at all your services at once? Document management? Maybe, but overdone. Go further. How do you get from "Pest Control" to "Brand Protection"? Steritech did.
Jared Willis
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