Realwave Branding & Marketing
Client: Realwave, Inc.
Role: Brand & Marketing Strategy, Creative Direction, Graphic Design, Teaching
“As Realwave continued to grow we reached out to Quentin Smith for help bringing our graphical representation to a clear direction. His well documented information helped teams from engineering to marketing be on the same page. Quentin listened to our needs and gave timely and impactful assistance with branding, marketing, and consistent imagery from product to communications.” — Maria Smith, Vice President of Customer Success
Introduction of Brand
Realwave offers a complete Video Surveillance as a Service (VSaaS) platform, uniquely leveraging video analytics, data from integrated devices, and artificial intelligence (AI) to curate interesting events and insights that improve business execution across the enterprise. The platform increases operational efficiency, reduces shrinkage, improves safety, and enhances marketing for small, medium and large businesses, like quick serve restaurants, financial services, cannabis, healthcare, specialty retail stores, and convenient stores that desire to have greater control over its security system—minus the costly price tag.
Product features sales sheet.
Key Learnings
Educate to improve the situation
Start-up organizations typically operate on a skeleton crew at the beginning. Your client may be responsible for branding and marketing but may have little to no experience in either. Creating an effective marketing strategy and correlating materials for someone like this is no easy task. Put forth extra effort to educate your client. Trust and greater creative freedom will follow.
Lead with empathy
Your client is likely stressed over delivering a high quality product to the marketplace. Improve the quality of your client relationship by showing you understand their feelings and perspective. In doing so, you can better comprehend what they want and need, ultimately providing you with the necessary resources to create a more effective strategy and impactful campaigns.
Minimal budget does not equal minimal effort
You may think that having a small budget will allow you to put in minimal effort in strategizing, but you would be wrong. It’s the complete opposite, the smaller the budget the more time and effort it will take in selecting the marketing tactics that are the most appropriate for the brand and are poised for the greatest impact. In doing so, you will be increasing the return on investment.
Full page advertisement in industry publications.
Background
The standard security video feed needs monitoring in the need of full time staff. Although, most organizations cannot justify the cost for their limited surveillance requirements. The overall market for real-time video analytics, including the integration of AI, is expected to grow from $3.2 billion to $9 billion in 2023. As AI continues to become an integral component of video surveillance’s ever-growing datasphere, Realwave is at the forefront. However, the firm was in dire need of a multitude of business-to-business marketing materials, yet had no strategic branding nor communication plan to effectively reach their target audience.
Social media campaigns in LinkedIn and Facebook.
The Challenge
The new VSaaS company was in the start-up phase of launching its service and, like any other new business, they had a laundry list of challenges—some of which I inherited as their design and marketing consultant. There were three core challenges that needed to be overcome.
When I was brought on board, various branding and marketing components had been finalized and distributed. Unfortunately, they were created without a strategy and were developed reactively rather than proactively. Consequently, the lack of a branding and communication strategy needed to be addressed before moving forward with additional tactical components.
Like in most start-up organizations, the staff are responsible for multiple areas including ones they may not have experience. Realwave was no different. A significant challenge was working with a client who was responsible for marketing and design but had no experience in such a service. As a result, the client would need to be educated throughout the process.
Another common challenge for start-ups is a minimal marketing budget. Even with a small budget, positive results are feasible, therefore, the real challenge is allocating the budget effectively. Not all promotional tactics are appropriate for every business, even with a massive budget. Therefore, the right tactics with the highest probability of having the greatest impact must be selected.
Webinar presentation.
Creative Leadership
I was brought on board as a marketing and design consultant, working with the Vice President of Customer Success, to provide foundational design components, creative direction, and marketing guidance. Like many other start-ups, the budget was tight. Therefore, the team was considerably small consisting of the client, myself, a programmer, and a local printer. I was the primary point person on all of the projects, providing creative direction, managing the delivery schedule, as well as working with the programmer to ensure the client's vision for the website was achieved, while exceeding it and staying within newly established brand standards.
My client had minimal experience in either design or marketing. As a result, a large part of my responsibility had become to educate her on what constitutes good design, business-to-business marketing tactics, branding strategy, and more. Looking to the future, I navigated my way into building additional projects that would help give my client the necessary tools and resources needed for future success in her combined positions. The extra projects included the firm’s Comprehensive Branding Book, Strategic Brand Positioning & Communications Plan, as well as multiple marketing and campaign templates.
Realwave comprehensive brand book.
Brand Positioning
“The only VSaaS to provide its customers secured video access, operational intelligence, and realtime exception monitoring viewable anywhere, any time, on any device.”
The Creator archetype forms the basis of Realwave’s brand positioning. They are creative and innovative, wanting to build something of tremendous value that will continue to benefit the community for the extended future. As such an archetype, Realwave is a non-conformist, thriving on out-of-the-box thinking, not wanting to be restricted by certain parameters. As a Creator, the brand has a sense of pride and fulfillment that their technological advancement is helping a wide range of businesses take greater control of their security.
Realwave Strategic Brand Positioning & Communications Plan.
Brand Personality
The Realwave brand is passionate about empowering business owners to enhance their security and loss prevention capabilities without having to break the bank. Certain characteristics serve as the basis for who they are as a brand and helps clients relate to Realwave on a personal level.
Protective
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Creates a sense of stability, security, and dependability.
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Observant of others behaviors.
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Defends the weak natured and most vulnerable.
Visionary
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Motivated to break through boundaries of technology.
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Plans for the future, navigating challenges effectively.
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Thinks creatively and imaginatively.
Inspirational
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Does not settle for the status quo.
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Achieves things thought to be unachievable.
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Highly competitive and driven.
Set of icons used throughout many marketing materials including the website.
Brand Promise
“Increase profits. Save time. Gain peace of mind.”
Realwave brings their customers serious security with operational intelligence including real time exception monitoring with their Intelligent Video Surveillance Cloud platform. Through their proprietary D.I.V.E. engine, they apply deep learning with both integrated device data and image processing to monitor continuously for real time exceptions. The brand promises their clients they will increase profits, save time, and gain peace of mind when they purchase the Realwave product.
Features sales sheet for Realwave's RealCloud product.
Visual Signifiers
“Secured video access. Operational intelligence. Realtime exception monitoring.”
Realwave is the industry’s first artificial intelligence surveillance cloud offering real time exception monitoring and automation, secure video access with no VPN required, and absolutely no limitations—truly setting themselves apart from the competition. The unique selling point is the main marketing message integrated throughout all Realwave marketing materials.
Provided a comprehensive review of what they had already produced and distributed and more importantly, what they had in the queue. As a result, I produced a Realwave Comprehensive Brand Book as well as its Strategic Brand and Communications Plan for their current and future use. In addition, I designed multiple communication components to get the organization a strong foundation of marketing materials.
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Brand website user interface
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Comprehensive Brand Book
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Strategic Brand Positioning & Communications Plan
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Product Data Sheets
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One-pagers
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Brochures
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Creative Direction
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Ad campaign
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Email campaign
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Display ads
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Webinar presentation
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Process graphic
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Iconography
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Social Media campaign
Infographic demonstrating how the product works.
Skill Set
Skill sets employed throughout this project includes, creative direction, graphic design, project management, brand strategy, marketing strategy, and team leadership. Technical programs used to build the creative are all Adobe Creative Cloud products, InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop.