The I/O approach

Many companies make the mistake of evaluating their brand internally, solely from their own perspective. This unidirectional approach misses the multiple facets of your brand, basically leaving half of the story aside. Your customers need to be part of the conversation. How they connect with your brand, share it, and make it their own is crucial in creating a great Brand Experience and therefore, a better Human Experience. BX is a bidirectional process, a constant exchange between the business and their customers, making your brand a living entity that people can relate to.

This is exactly what happened a couple of years ago when we started working with CIMA+. The original mandate started as a website redesign, but as we were exploring who they were, how their customers saw them and felt about them, we realized that greater realignment of the brand was necessary.

Getting to the core

With more than 30 offices across the country and over 2,400 employees, 60% of which share ownership in the company, CIMA+ is one of Canada’s largest private consulting engineering firms. For more than 30 years, they have been offering a complete range of solutions in the building, energy and resources, municipal infrastructure, telecommunications and transportation sectors. Their clients absolutely love them for the quality of the service provided. We felt it was necessary to work on their market positioning for it to reflect exactly what was at their core: Engineering Excellence.

A brand, a voice and beyond

We started the whole process by connecting with their clients, suppliers, employees and management. We gathered perceptions, emotions and feedback to build a solid brand strategy. All this data, based on reel human experience, helped us paint the big picture of CIMA+ and served as a guideline to develop not only a refreshed logo, but a tone of voice, a tagline, office interior design and overall signage, and yes… a brand new website.