Marketing for Engineers

My first brush with branding

Casper, Phillips & Arneberg started as a two-man word-of-mouth shop, operating from their rural roots (as so many entrepreneurs do) on beautiful Vashon Island. Living and working there gave them access by ferry to the Ports of Tacoma and Seattle and a hefty chunk of the Alaska market, but isolated them from urban sprawl and traffic.

As Casper and Phillips grew and acquired a reputation, they added a third partner and discovered they were spending more time promoting themselves and marketing their skills and services. The decided they needed to create a corporate presence and develop the necessary portfolio of collateral materials.

I think I answered an ad they ran in the daily paper for a graphics freelancer. We met in the business center conference facility at Sea-Tac airport. I remember they were the first people I ever saw who actually had laptop computers. They carried an acoustic coupler (telephone interface), so they could have the computer dial the telephone for them, then take it off and talk.

They invited me to Vashon Island to strategize their marketing process. I recommended they stick to the things they did best—at least at first—and add collateral later for the areas they wanted to branch out.

They also needed a logo. They wanted to incorporate their surroundings, their environmental work, and the significant elements of their profession in a way that was simple, direct, visual, and immediately recognizable. I penciled several ideas on a sketch pad and they picked one. I hired a co-worker, a wonderfully talented graphic designer named Shawn McGrew, to refine the idea and come up with a printable version. I was amazed with the striking logo he designed.

It captured their rural setting (a simplified rendering of the scenic volcano just across Puget Sound) yet incorporated the modern and industrial (the ferry silhouette), and demonstrated their engineers' grasp of the linear (the ruler-straight "water"). Shawn was also able to convey my desire for a sense of escape from constraints (the ferry's hull is cut out of the water in knife-sharp yet graceful curves at bow and stern). The logo symbolizes solidity, experience, creativity, freedom, time to think and reflect, completeness with nature, and adds urbanity, industry, and movement—all elements of the engineers' service mix.

Once I delivered the logo, we embarked on a full-fledged branding campaign. The new corporate identity was printed on letterhead, envelops, checks, invoices, statements, business cards, notepads, and most of all—on the presentation folder and the marketing literature. It also adorned their 24"x36" technical drawing sheets and blueprints.

For their mailing/leaving pieces, I convinced them to give humor a try. Humor is a tough thing to sell with, and it requires a delicate balance. Together, we came up with four ideas that screamed "engineering" without actually saying it. I believe to this day, that CP&A and I "got it right" the first time, with just the right formula.

As you'll see clicking the examples at right, these pieces were funny, edgy, informative, intriguing, and successful.

I made two other choices that I think enhanced the pieces themselves and the development process. First, I convinced CP&A to keep the verbiage minimal. "If clients want more," I advised, "they will call. And if you are doing your homework properly, you'll send cover letters that speak to the specific needs your clients have. You'll be following up with phone calls and email. These pieces are really intended to whet their appetites and get them thinking about you. A little humor—and some mystery—won't hurt you at all."

There were four original pieces (we did four more later). The principals seemed to most enjoy working with huge container transloading cranes, both on the docks and in transit. They borrowed a photo from the Port of Tacoma of several cranes wending through the Gulf of Alaska on a ship and I converted it for the computer. They also design the decks used on those ships. And finally, they took pride in working within environmental constraints to beat nature at her own game.

The second choice was to use computer-aided design—better known as desktop publishing (DTP)—to create the materials. I was becoming comfortable with PageMaker on my job and had discovered a print shop that wanted to be 100 percent computerized. In fact, they offered to hire me away from my full-time employer to set up and manage their pre-press department. I declined the offer (and sometimes wonder how my life would be different).

Unfortunately, I was not able to hire that printing house, Orca Bay Printing, to do the CP&A materials, a mistake that came back to bite me. CP&A wanted to do business with businesses in their own community—a sentiment I heartily endorse if the work can be done right. Their local printer did a … well … adequate job but the first printing was not spectacular. They delivered late, I spent way too much time on the phone talking them through the work, and had to pay a visit at my expense to Vashon Island to ride herd on them at the critical time in pre-press.

Later, for the reprints and the second set of four mailing/leaving pieces, I DID hire Orca Bay. These jobs ran smoothly, had no glitches, were actually completed ahead of deadline, came out just as designed, and were technically perfect.

A few elements had to be juggled. I wanted to minimize but still show the permission attribution from the Port of Tacoma (I insisted CP&A get written permission to use the photo), so I turned it on its side up the right margin. The rotation feature didn't come to PageMaker until version four, so I sent this through as a standalone element and we added it in production. At the time, the four sheets of film output per printed page from the imagesetter (one each for black, yellow, magenta, and cyan) were taped to masking material that was opaque in the appropriate areas using a light table, then plates were burned. It convinced me to want direct-to-plate or direct-to-press workflow. (I guess I was a pioneer when I later insisted that my employer's vendor add that capability.)

The computer-aided drafting (CAD) diagram of the container loading process caused me to do a bit of teaching. The CAD plotter could do multiple colors but I didn't want to be stuck with muddy artwork, as would happen with a halftone dot. Using the CP&A principals as go-betweens, I was able to convince the CAD operator to output each color as a separate black-and-white drawing. I scanned them crisply at the highest setting as "line art" and cropping them extremely carefully. Then I placed each on a separate PageMaker color layer and gently nudged them until they lined up.

For the presentation folder (see below), I perused all of CP&A's 10,000 or so slides—records of every job they'd worked on. The one I selected was from a construction project at an Anchorage industrial park. I though it had just the right mix of natural and man-made elements and said "environmental responsibility." I loved the way the tree's shadow played on the concrete fluting.

But, as photographed, there was a large central third of the photograph with a bare concrete wall. I hoped to make the image as large as possible, vertically, without bleeding into the left and right margins. Shawn McGrew figured out (in the days before the sophisticated image-manipulation software we use now) how to slice out the middle third and glue the remaining thirds together on artboard so the cut edge wouldn't show. I suggested inking black along the left edge of the right piece to cut out shadow from the lithographic camera's lights.

Although the scan (click for larger view) doesn't effectively show it, Shawn also inked an acetate overlay using just the trunk and branches of the tree so we could create an embossing die. After printing, the die was used to outdent (blind emboss) the tree trunk into a tactile, light-shifting sensory element. You could see it was not flush to the paper and you could feel it by running your hand over the cover.

Obviously, we included the CP&A logo. I urged simplicity and we opted for the minimalist "Consulting Engineers" on the front cover. As the blue stripe runs to the left, it loops across the back cover as well, forming a cohesive line when the folder is opened flat. Inside, we glued pockets on both sides into which the "sell sheets" and "cover letters" can be inserted, with die-cut business card slots in the pockets. Corporate contact information was centered at the bottom of the back cover.

The display typeface used throughout the branding process has, as you can see, a solid square industrial look yet conveys a sense of curve and flow that appealed to me as well as to Casper and Phillips and suited my concept perfectly. It was created by the famous 1920s type designer Jan Tschichold. At the time we used it, it was called "Jan" but in the intervening years that name seems to have been reassigned to a stencil-like typeface that looks nothing like this. To distinguish the corporate identity, I made it "small caps" instead of upper-and-lower-case.

The second batch of mailing/leaving pieces included one sheet with bios of the principals. I have it and the others stored where it's safe but temporarily inaccessible, so there are currently no visuals available. I do remember being disappointed that we couldn't continue with humor as strongly as in the first batch, due to the more technical nature of the newer information.

When Casper and Phillips moved their operation from Vashon Island to the Tacoma waterfront, they left behind that tight little hometown feeling and became corporate. Their new office manager took a dislike to me I was never able to overcome. It was then I knew the original printer had done me a disservice.

She complained that the second batch of literature was "the wrong color." I brought my Pantone color guide down to CP&A's office and showed her the first batch, printed on Vashon Island, was actually the ones that were wrong. Orca Bay's work was impeccable—but she didn't seem to hear.[Ed.: Because of the way computer monitors display color, the cyan actually used will appear darker in the CP&A logos shown here. For an explanation, see creating a commemorative bookmark.]

The first set of sheets were also slightly smaller by about 1/16th-inch—and again, I could show her that my printer was the accurate one and the island printer had dropped the ball here, too. In fact, Orca Bay's general manager went with me down to explain the issue to CP&A. After the "discussion," he opted to take all his second series and his reprints of the first series … and retrimmed them at no charge to match what she wanted to see.

After hearing only complaints from her and finding the principals increasingly unavailable, I resigned the account. Although I did not have to, I gathered up all the originating materials, including computer files, mechanicals and output, and the masked films used to make the printing plates. (Technically, the print shop owns all interim materials created to finish a job, so I had to convince them to relinquish the workings.) I took half a day off my full-time job, drove all the items to Tacoma, and spent the afternoon explaining what I was giving them.

I believe, in hindsight, that I gave up too soon. The job was an excellent opportunity to apply my skills—and learn new ones. It was a great way to develop my ability to persuade. It gave me a chance to create a marketing strategy and then to build a branding program and develop appropriate materials. Although I've since been successful forging cordial relationships in other situations, I didn't give myself a chance to turn things around with the office manager.

I learned recently that Casper Phillips and Associates is still in business, having relocated again to the Tacoma suburb of University Place. After more than 15 years, they are still using our mountain-and-ferry logo.