Marketing is the foundation for business development and finding ways to combine the two seamlessly is key to successfully running a company that is constantly growing. In this blog series, “The Benefits of DBA Marketing,” we will discuss how Marstudio, in an effort to keep our growth constant, uses a Doing Business As (DBA) method, a tool that combines marketing and business development seamlessly through the creation of a separate brand, to help grow our client base. We will present insight into using this technique to help guide your company in creating new avenues of business development.
Marstudio, like other companies, has a goal for constant growth every year and focuses on accelerating that growth. Finding new ways to bring in new clients and market ourselves is always an exciting feat, and recently we have used an approach that is both creative and impactful. This method is known as DBA Marketing or Doing Business As Marketing, which takes pieces of your company’s service and product offering, puts a focus on it, gives it more support, and in its own way creates it into a new company, but one that works as a division of your company. It takes advantage of the infrastructure, human resources, technology, and any other resources your company has acquired to give it a competitive advantage and markets it as a separate entity. This is not an approach of deception or bamboozling, it is simply marketing in its purest and finest form.
Now some of you may be wondering, with this method, how do these brands work together? Wouldn’t the brands cannibalize the other and end up hurting the Marstudio brand overall? These are valid concerns indeed. Time and time again, new products and services under an overall brand and within a company have hurt some of the cash cows within companies. Take companies like Kodak with the digital camera, and even the Apple iPhone and the iPod (one of the products that helped build the Apple brand). So, how do you go about developing new DBA brands that work seamlessly with your overarching brand? We’d love to answer this for you, but in the Marstudio nature, we will have to do it from a visual standpoint and use our new corporate car wrap to show you how these brands come together. The wrap’s design was not only built around the branding of our new brands, but as the visual representation of the DBA concept.
The Role of the Parent Brand
The seamless design of three different aesthetics must start from a concrete and focused foundation. That piece is the Marstudio logo. Starting in the middle of the car, the Marstudio eye exists as the face of the truck, without overtaking the entire design. This is the same way Marstudio functions in the DBA algorithm. Your main company must be a foundation for the DBA brands. From branding to capabilities to business philosophy and practice, this brand needs to encapsulate all the pieces of the other brands and then some.
The BLACKWATER Brand
Right next to the main Marstudio logo, one of the tentacles of 2-headed, 16 tentacle, Kraken creeps itself around the corner as the connecting force that holds all of our brands together. The source of this tentacle is the BLACKWATER Promotions side of the truck wrap. The BLACKWATER brand represents a raw and more angsty side of the Marstudio brand. The pure creative, adaptable, and fast-paced elements of it. This piece of the Marstudio brand was pulled out specifically as a yang to the yin of the MEDmar brand. Because of the diverse nature of BLACKWATER’s photography and videography style, the bolder and sharper elements of the wrap and the brand can fit into this with fullness, without clashing with the Marstudio brand as a whole. BLACKWATER brings a more contemporary element to the Marstudio brand, that directly relates to the modern, visually heavy, social media focused aspects of the marketing world today.
The MEDmar Brand
On the other side of the Marstudio brand and the car wrap is MEDmar or Medical Marketing. The reality of the medical world is, it is very sterile and direct. Between the laws that surround it and the nature of business itself, there isn’t much room for “creative.” The MEDmar brand pulls out the more business focused, and corporate feeling aspects of the Marstudio brands. What makes Marstudio unique is its natural balance of creative and corporate, artistic and executive, but that balance does not attract every industry. By extracting the business-focused elements of our brand and putting a focus on the medical arena, we were able to create a brand from our Marstudio brand, that spoke directly to C-level executives in companies from medical IT firms to primary care providers.
Marketing is a complex organism. For Marstudio we see it as a 2-headed Kraken, involving multiple people, silos, and approaches to marketing. Even with all the nuances and minute details that go into a single campaign, a single print piece, or even a simple headline or social media post, at the end of the day, the goal of marketing is business development. The marketing leadership and consultants for your company should act as guides to help the company determine the direction that it is going in. Check out the rest of this series to see how we use the BLACKWATER & MEDmar methods of DBA Marketing to create new avenues for Marstudio and to help guide your thinking for your future business development endeavors.
Share this Post