A small, family-owned company faces a challenge they had never encountered before. Over the past few decades, they have built a portfolio of three services and established a beloved, strong personal brand which is highly regarded by the local community.
Facing difficulties in sustaining and growing a business
Over the past couple of years, their local competition has given them difficulties in sustaining and growing. New yoga studios and massage salons emerge, providing services with fewer health benefits. Furthermore, the village’s population is changing.
These changes have made it difficult for them to find new customers. Even though they have extensive professional knowledge and wonderful personalities, they struggle to successfully communicate their value proposition to newcomers.
So, we defined the core issues
After several discussions, we realized that most of their problems could be solved by defining their brand and clarifying their value proposition. We faced a severely limited budget and constantly rising concerns with their plans to expand their business.
How did we help them?
We had them speak about their challenges and difficulties as openly as possible. We provided them with a psychologically safe space where they could share their thoughts easily and reframe them as potentials by providing facilitated discussions and workshops.
With their enormous knowledge about their market and less room for user research than we would have liked to have, we relied heavily on their expertise. We designed a very high-level and abstract strategy with a few outcome-focused workshops and led them through the process of solving their challenges themselves.
It was a lot of design work
We were able to redesign their brand. Together, we defined a new name for their business and strengthened their values, redefined their target audience and visual identity. Furthermore, we designed a new website with their goals and their target audience's needs in mind.
The value we created cannot be tested
Since much of what we created together is not visible to the market, for example, the new website isn't developed, we have yet to see what outcomes our efforts yielded.
What did we learn?
- Our partners didn't have a solid goal with the project, so they regularly changed their requirements and had a hard time communicating and making decisions. In this environment, we learned that helping them define their goal and communicating our boundaries is the key to better collaboration. However, being open to change and focusing on outcomes instead of outputs has helped us a lot.
- Working with people who are very open to learning new things, trying out new methods, and collaborating closely was very helpful and made the project very enjoyable.
What will be our next steps?
Even though we had plans on continuing the project, it got cancelled by our stakeholders.
