Rebrand & marketing plan for ethical investment pioneers

In a nutshell

We created a new name, brand identity and messaging, a new website and a marketing communications plan for ethical investing company, C2C. The new Ethical Investing NZ brand repositioned the growing team as market leaders and led to a gratifying increase in inquiries and new clients.

What was needed

Founder of C2C, Peter Lee, has been a sustainable business pioneer for over twenty years. In 2014 he had realised his dream to found his own ethical investment advisory practice. Peter had attracted a strong team and client base and approached GoodSense to give the business a brand refresh ahead of a planned name change.

How GoodSense helped

We worked with Peter, Practice Manager Suzanne Baldwin and their advisers and support team to first clarify the target audience the business wanted to attract. With ethical investing enjoying strong growth in Aotearoa it is important for participants in the market to clearly identify their potential clients and position themselves clearly as the best provider to meet their needs.  With a strong shared understanding of the audience we next developed with the team a brand personality and brand values, using our proven process of drawing on storytelling archetypes and emotive needs.  We also workshopped what content the target audience most needed to know upfront about the businesses in order to choose them to provide ethical investment advice.

Once we had an agreed priority for what the businesses needed to communicate we wrote a bundle of key brand messages, including a tagline and supporting messages, to convey the meaning in a way that also brought the distinct flavour of the brand and its service style to life.

The team approved the recommended tagline: ‘Clear, good-hearted advice’ and the supporting messages. They also told us the new name they had developed internally no longer seemed to do justice to the refreshed brand story – and asked us to come up with a better name.

Through our co-creation process with the team we generated the new name, Ethical Investing NZ.  We commissioned fellow Sustainable Business Network designer Katy Lee from Paradigm Associates to provide the graphics for the new name and to recommend brand colours that brought the personality to life but also honoured the previous brand identity to give the client some visual continuity.

The previous C2C Partners logo next to the new Ethical Investing NZ logo and tagline.

In the following months we worked with the Ethical Investing NZ team to develop a full marketing communications plan and to map out the content and structure for their new website. We project managed the website build for them, working with Ian Fraser of 89 Digital, our recommended web developer for this project, researched and planned the on-site search engine optimisation and wrote the copy for the new website. This brought together the new tagline and key messages in the website with the new brand story, in a structure tailor-made for the target audience, in a way that works for site visitors and search engines.  We also supported the team with the design of a new template for their enews, for event signage and with the design and copy and media placement strategy for their print advertising campaign in Forest & Bird’s membership magazine.

What this has meant for Ethical Investing

Even before the new logo and web design was in place Peter, Suzanne and the Ethical Investing NZ team were able to use their new name and tagline in their conversations with clients and potential clients.  The new name and tagline instantly gave everyone clarity on what the business did, what it stood for and the way it does it.  The credibility of this new positioning translated into sales success very quickly.  This was again amplified by the launch of the new website and brand collateral. The increased internal focus and sense of ownership of the brand story by the whole team, not just the founder, both boosted the culture and supported improved commercial success.

In this interview with Good Returns, Ethical Investing NZ attribute a ‘gratifying’ increase in inquiries and new clients to the rebrand.

What’s more, the new messages and clear value proposition really helped the team with their 2022 entry into the Mindful Money Awards. Ethical Investing NZ won the Best Advisor category.

Peter Lee, CEO Ethical Investing NZ

“It was vital for us that our marketing firm shared our commitment to sustainability and making the world a better place, and GoodSense was the obvious choice.  Kath and her team are great at building relationships. They really ‘got’ us and what’s important to us, so much so that our journey from ‘come up with a byline’ to ‘here’s your new company name AND a tagline we all love’ was a lightning-quick two weeks. I’ve known Kath for some years and always been impressed by her passion for being sustainable.”

– Peter Lee, CEO, Ethical Investing

To have a kōrero about how we can help make your ethical brand more famous, please do get in touch. We’d love to help