We devised a significant campaign to reposition and re-brand Brodart Books & Automation, a 65-year-old company providing books to public libraries. The company had no recognizable brand identity and an inadequately articulated position in its market when we started working on its sales and marketing.

When you've looked over the sketches below, click here . For a look at other Brodart campaigns, click here.		The goal was to overcome its competitive disadvantage (size) by emphasizing Brodart's value-added services: expert selection and shelf-ready delivery (customized to local preferences). To convey these strengths, we chose to focus on key customer and prospect challenges. The challenges were staff and/or scheduling shortfalls and budget cuts. Solutions included reliance on Brodart selection, cataloging and customized processing. Simple enough. So we started with three key challenges: THE CHALLENGES:

BRIGHT & UPBEAT The goal was to keep "challenges" from being frightening and to maintain a sunny outlook throughout. So even problems were treated somewhat light-heartedly.		Monster Budget Cuts?

STRENGTH & TROUBLE Every image of a librarian showed strength, even when faced with overwhelming difficulty.

Crushing Backlog?

RISKY SELECTION Title selection services of all sorts were positioned to distinguish Brodart. Selection help served many purposes.

Tricky Collection Development

The essential goal of the campaign was to frame significant customer challenges in such a way that appropriate solutions could be proposed by Brodart. The marketing message was intended to reinforce the sales effort, structured around the same arguments. So solutions followed on the heals of challenges. More sketches below: THE SOLUTIONS:

SELECTION Brodart's collection development resources were emphasized as a significant value to librarians (and directed purchasing decisions in helpful ways).		Our List is Your Map

PRODUCTION-SCALE RESOURCES Because the company could apply significantly greater resources to short-term challenges, it could deliver materials faster.

Speed Books Into Circulation

THE EXPERTS ARE CHEAPER Cost-cutting demands of the recession made outsourcing a viable alternative to reducing purchases or cutting staff.

Consider the Irony

In a fairly unusual effort to articulate the entire sales and marketing exchange with prospects, Brodart published arguments to overcome the most frequent objections to its solutions. A special effort was made to make these quirky, playful statements. HANDLING OBJECTIONS:

WE DO WHAT YOU DO Addresses the objection that a vendor can't understand or duplicate the idiosyncracies of a local library's processes.		We Mirror Your Processes

REMOTE CONTROL Physical separation from collection development, processing and cataloging raises fears of loss of control. Hence: Zenlike control where the near thing is far away.

The Zen of Librarianship

QUALITY CONTROL Inevitably, outsourcing prospects believe their systems can't be interfaced with nor their quality duplicated by a vendor.

We're Practiced Experts

DETAILS, DETAILS, DETAILS A slightly different spin on the objection that a remote vendor might not deliver adequate quality control and duplicate local preferences.

God is in the Details To take a look at the finished work, click here.