Too Many Brand Messages: David Feldman Worldwide

A while back, David Feldman Worldwide, a court reporting company, came to us wanting to update their brand and website. Under their old brand, one of their existing clients that apparently used them for one of their minor services asked, “Do you also do court reporting?” This confusion about their core business was a brand problem that was manifested on their website home page where you found too many brand messages, and that had its origins in the (not uncommon) desire to tell people about ALL of your services in one largely undifferentiated barrage of information. Some version of, “We do this, and this, and this, and this, and also this, and well, we do all of it well!”

Not surprisingly, this desire often results in too many brand messages and thus brand communications that, while they try to communicate absolutely everything, actually end up communicating next to nothing. What’s important is not that you have said it but that the brand consumer has heard it—and understood.

With the David Feldman Worldwide brand as it existed on their former website, the essential message they needed to tell—that they were a well-oiled machine when it came to providing court reporting services—was getting buried in a pile of non-essential clutter.

An effective brand must limit the message it seeks to deliver. Ideally, this message should be something simple and true.

In the case of David Feldman Worldwide, research and sales team experience indicated that law firms that booked court reporters for depositions were terribly bothered when the reporters were not exactly on time or when transcripts arrived late. This was an issue that David Feldman Worldwide had well under control from a business practices perspective and that they understood to be the kind of issue that could, in the right circumstances, inspire a client to switch vendors.

The new brand we created for them had to do a few things: make clear that David Feldman Worldwide is a court reporting company and not something else, assure brand consumers of the company’s capability and professionalism, and finally, assert the promise that they could get the job done on time.

“On-time reporters. On-time transcripts.” became the new tagline and the keynote message for the brand. All the rest of their regular services followed quietly under that.

We gave the new brand a more active and assertive color scheme and we created a very “Get down to business. Get it done.” kind of logotype treatment.

The previous website suffered from too many brand messages with no clear hierarchy of information and no clear expression of what was most important among all the things that the company could do.

Without eliminating any service offerings, we organized them into a flexible, ordered system on WordPress so that clients could reorder, add, modify, or delete services as they desired. This is true for all the other content of the website as well, of course, but none of this activity is allowed to obscure the keynote brand message: they get their people and their product to the place they are needed—ON TIME.