Branding

Bring your brand
up to speed

Brand strategy, identity, and messaging for broadband providers and electric cooperatives.

Start a brand project

Branding

Bring your brand
up to speed

Brand strategy, identity, and messaging for broadband providers and electric cooperatives.

Start a brand project
Years in the industry
NPS score
Clients served
Ready to work with you

Branding sets you apart

Your brand isn’t your logo. It’s whether a member can tell you apart when the bill, the outage text, the truck in the driveway, and the ad in the county paper all look and sound like everyone else.

We’re a fire-bellied team with twenty-two years of helping providers stand apart from the competition.

Five reasons rural providers come to us for brand work

Besides our kickin’ attitudes

A telephone co-op with a fiber brand next to it. An electric cooperative that gave its broadband subsidiary a different name. Two logos. Two websites. Two versions of every campaign you run. Members still call in using whichever name they’ve known longest. A team of one producing everything twice is a team of one producing half as much.

Where we begin

  • Sort the brand architecture
  • Define what the brand stands for
  • Decide the name to run on
  • Get your team saying the same thing

They hired local techs. Opened a local office. Joined the chamber, sponsored the ball field. Now they’re running things that sound like your ads. They can match any promo you run. What they can’t do is show up already looking like you, sounding like you, thirty years into the relationship.

Where we begin

  • Find what they can’t copy
  • Build the brand around your difference
  • Put your proof where people see it
  • Give your team better answers

They hired local techs. Opened a local office. Joined the chamber, sponsored the ball field. Now they’re running things that sound like your ads. They can match any promo you run. What they can’t do is show up already looking like you, sounding like you, thirty years into the relationship.

Where we begin

  • Find what they can’t copy
  • Build the brand around your difference
  • Put your proof where people see it
  • Give your team better answers

Ask five people why a member should choose you and count the answers. If the GM says reliability, the billing rep says price, and the tech says we’re local, the brand isn’t doing its job. Members hear all three. They decide the company hasn’t made up its mind either.

Where we begin

  • Bring the leaders and staff in on the process
  • Write down what you actually stand for
  • Turn it into words and imagery people can use
  • Train the folks who talk to members

Nothing’s wrong with it. It was good when it was made. But it was made for a smaller screen and a market where you were the only option, and it doesn’t hold up next to what’s on a member’s phone all day. This is the most common reason people call us. It’s also the hardest to take to a board, because nothing is visibly broken.

Where we begin

  • Build a case for your board
  • Look at how you stack up locally
  • Refresh the identity without losing the history
  • Fix the things members experience most

What brand work looks like here

01

Brand strategy

Bring your team into the room. Positioning, architecture, naming, and the decisions behind everything you stand for.

02

Visual identity

Logo, type, color, photography direction, and the standards built to survive the next decade.

03

Messaging

Brand promise, values, voice, selling points. The words your website, your bill insert, your job postings, and your CSRs all use, so they sound like one company.

04

Rollout

Vehicle wraps, signage, uniforms, print, and the internal launch that gets your own people on board before a member sees it.

Brand work in the field

West Carolina

West Carolina was made of two brands: West Carolina Tel and WCFIBER. Every campaign had to be built two times. Then a customer would call in and hear the same two words the whole county already knew: West Carolina.

So we took the region and stopped defending two names. One brand, built to own West Carolina as a place, not just a company operating in it. Competitors were coming. We wanted them to have to say the incumbent’s name to describe where they were.

One brand, one name, one story. We ran the full launch behind it: naming, brand identity, messaging, website, CX, frontline training, and the ongoing marketing.

View the project

“Finally! Having a strong brand, clear messaging, and putting words to the intangibles of the work we do reinforces West Carolina’s goals.”

Mary Miller

Marketing & Communications Manager

We take the work personally.
It’s the only way we know.

See all our work

  • Inland Power

    Spokane, WA

    Branding

    CX

    Employee Experience

    Marketing

    Training

  • Cablelynx

    Longview, TX

    Branding

    Marketing

    Video

  • Jade Communications

    Alamosa, CO

    Branding

    Marketing

    Video

    Web

    Digital

  • West Carolina

    Abbeville, South Carolina

    Branding

    CX

    Digital

    Marketing

    Training

    Video

    Web

  • GVEC

    Gonzales, TX

    Branding

    Marketing

    Web

  • Totelcom

    De Leon, TX

    Branding

    CX

    Web

Questions we get about rebranding

Before, nearly always. The brand decides the name, the signage, the wraps, the way your team answers the phone, and every one of those costs more to change once it exists. The exception is a launch date you can’t move. Then we build what has to ship and phase the rest.

Usually just a look. A new name costs you recognition you spent decades building, and most of what people bring us turns out to be architecture, messaging, or brand identity rather than the name itself. When a name does have to go, it’s normally because it describes something you aren’t anymore. A telephone company selling internet, say.

Full strategy and brand identity typically takes 3 months, although we have expedited processes and slimmed down packages for those who need to move faster. Just reach out and ask. Rollout timeline depends on how much physical stuff you own. Fifty vehicles, six buildings and a warehouse of printed forms is a longer job than a co-op working with a handful of assets. We sequence it so the expensive items land on their natural replacement cycle.

Depends on scope, and anyone quoting a number before they understand yours is guessing. Rollout usually costs more than design does. Tell Ben what you’re working with and he’ll be straight with you.

This is the real question behind the other five. Boards say yes when brand work is attached to something they already worry about. Take rate. Member satisfaction. The competitor they keep hearing about. We’ll help you build that case, and we’ve sat in the meeting before.

They get phased. High-visibility items go first and the rest change as they’d be replaced anyway. Nobody needs to scrap a good wrap to satisfy a brand guideline.

Members can’t switch, so the argument for branding gets made on softer ground: whether people trust you enough to say yes to the next thing. A rate change. A fiber launch. A DERM program. That trust is easier to spend when members already know what the cooperative stands for.

Ask\-Ben\-Circle

You deserve a brand that speaks your language

Tell us what’s going on. Ben has spent years connecting broadband and electric providers with the right people at Pivot. Let’s set up a call.

Connect with Ben

Pssst! We believe in the work you are doing, and are happy to talk with you about your needs even if it doesn’t put $$ in our pocket.