BrandingBusiness helps companies in transition develop market strategies—the stories they tell to customers and employees. Now other agencies are taking note of the Irvine-based firm’s own brand proposition and adopting it as their nameplates.
London-based marketing communication firm Gravity Global spun off its branding division and renamed it BrandingBusiness as part of a joint venture. So did Stepworks Company Ltd. in Hong Kong. Both agencies work with a notable list of clients, including Allianz SE, Burger King, Deloitte, Piaget and Cartier for Stepworks and Airbus Group SE, London Stock Exchange and Investec plc for Gravity.
BrandingBusiness itself has partnered with its fellow marketing shops on several projects over the years, and the newly formed joint ventures made sense for the firms and the companies they work with, said Ryan Rieches, one of the agency’s four partners.
“Most of our clients have international audiences and need representation in different markets,” he said. “We are now organized by three major geographic regions—we have London as a lead for [Europe, the Middle East and Africa], and we launched Hong Kong as our Asia-Pacific headquarters,” while the Americas region will be handled by the agency’s Irvine and New York offices.
Rieches said a global business-to-business focused brand-strategy agency holds the potential to fill a gap in the market that has many “small brand-strategy units,” “ad agencies that say they do brand strategy,” and “big global brand-strategy firms like Interbrand or Lippincott, but they mostly do consumer branding.”
The expansion comes a couple of years after the agency changed its name from RiechesBaird and added partners Alan Brew and Michael Dula.
Its focus, though, remained the same.
“We primarily work with existing companies who for one reason or another have to reposition themselves in the marketplace,” said Rieches, who founded the agency in 1994 with Ray Baird.
“A lot of our work is in the area of mergers and acquisitions. You have two companies that come together, so what is their new story? Our job is to figure out what is it that’s beneficial to the market … We are making potentially very big decisions for them in terms of how to position their brand and their business going forward that transcends down to operations.”
BrandingBusiness has a proprietary research methodology that presents clients with quantifiable data on how well they’re being perceived by customers and how they stack up against competitors.
“So it’s not just a pure marketing message, it’s a bigger decision on how to position the brand—what is the reputation that they want to earn, their value proposition, that’s what we help them figure out, and then an ad agency might come in after we are done and do the advertising, the marketing, but we build the executive platform for what the brand stands for,” Rieches said.
The creative portion of the agency’s work often involves creating a logo, slogan, and conducting a website redesign. It often partners with other firms for web development work, including Irvine-based Rhythm, which it recently brought on to help with the Schreiber Foods Inc. account.
BrandingBusiness’ shared projects with Gravity include ConvaTec Inc., a 9,000-employee, Luxembourg-based medical products and technologies company for which Rieches’ team developed a new logo and a “new vision, global brand strategy and corporate identity.” Gravity’s London office is “doing the implementation,” Rieches said.
The two agencies also collaborated on work for Teledyne Technologies Inc., a Thousand Oaks-based provider of wireless data connectivity for the aircraft industry.
“We defined their global brand strategy and launched the brand at the Paris Air Show,” Rieches said. “Together with Gravity in London, we continue to consult and implement their public relations, advertising and digital communications.”
Gravity Chief Executive Mark Lethbridge described the agreement with BrandingBusiness as “a game-changer for B2B clients in the [Europe-Middle East-Africa] region.”
“BrandingBusiness brings a new dimension in brand strategy, a combination of deep sector knowledge and experience with technology-based tools and analytics delivering insights and evidence that clients have never had access to before,” he said in an emailed statement. “It puts real power in the hands of marketers. We are thrilled to be part of the global team.”
The agency employs 20 in Irvine and five in New York. It has about $8 million in revenue from clients that include Cisco Systems Inc., Elsevier, GE Capital, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, Saint-Gobain S.A., Sage Software Inc. and Skillsoft.
