Beam invests in becoming a strategic brand and defines its Brand Architecture—encompassing its two sub-brands—Beam Solar and Beam Airflow—resulting in business and sales success almost immediately.
Beam Solar Co. started as a company selling residential solar services. In an effort to attract new customers, the Beam team developed a sales funnel and ran digital advertising where they offered a brand new A/C unit for $0 down when homeowners agreed to install solar panels on their homes. The ad was wildly successful and the company received an influx of customers, resulting in the company adding professionals that would specialize in HVAC services. The risk of being perceived as a generalist instead of highlighting the capabilities and expertise of their crew coupled with the rapid growth the company was facing made the leadership team feel an immediate need to invest in professional branding services to define Beam’s brand architecture and design a new brand identity for their sub-brand—Beam Airflow.
Since the company was already operating under the Beam Solar name, the sales reps were currently driving vehicles with the Beam watermark displayed while wearing generic, unbranded collared shirts and other generic business collateral materials. The company needed to transform the Beam brand into two sub-brands, Beam Solar and Beam Airlow, without having to invest in redesigning its entire brand identity, re-wrapping the vehicles, and printing new materials. It was clear that to establish well-defined brand architecture, each sub-brand needed to live under this umbrella of trust, the Beam brand. With Beam Solar to represent the experts in installing and maintaining solar panels while Beam Airflow would identify experts in Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning services (HVAC.) Each sub-brand aims to maintain an approachable and familiar vibe, and be able work together as well as independently. Communicating trust and authenticity.
The Airflow leadership invested in professional branding services to define their brand architecture and strategy. E49 assisted in the definition of brand values, market positioning, customer profiles and validating a target audience, as well as unique-selling-proposition (USP) to establish a well-rounded strategic brand. This strategic phase is the foundation for all the brand identity development. Our team resorted to using a similar color palette with a few tweaks to what the company was already using, this to help keep the feeling familiar with existing customers. The typography system remains the same for both sub-brands but the wordmarks are completely original and express different styles and work in synchrony with the Beam master logo. The Airflow wordmark is dynamic, light, and modern. The color is cool and fresh but bright and bold. Such a visual system helps marketing and business collateral to feel familiar and impactful.
A few months after implementing the new brand strategy, and launching the new visual Identity for Airflow, Beam had their best month-to-date—achieving $1M in sales and a full pipeline of prospective clients. Beam is also projecting increasing growth and sales success for the next month and has reported an increase in its conversion rate. With these accomplishments, Beam was able to hire more specialists and give every new employee an extensive Brand Guide to ensure there was a shared understanding of the brand’s purpose and uniqueness as well as a clear vision of the future of the brand.