Research Drives the Positioning Strategy for a Global Design Firm's Online Presence
Background and Challenge
CLR’s 30-year anniversary marked decades of global growth, and with it came new leadership, new offices, new employees, and the need for a new website. The existing website was obsolete and lacked many modern features, such as mobile responsive design and a content management system.
But more than this, the existing site strategy and messaging was old-fashioned and out of alignment with the current competitive landscape. Crucially, it did not position CLR adequately with important audience groups: new customers and prospective employees. Our team has worked with architects, engineers, and builders for years, and we knew that CLR needed more than just another average website to maintain its position as the global leader in zoo design. CLR needed our help to re-codify its character, capabilities, and goals.
Approach and Recommendations
We established a cross-functional team and drafted a project management plan that set goals, established time frames, defined how we would gather input, confirm assumptions, and defined who had decision-making authority. With a clear understanding of Critical-to-Success criteria, we analyzed the buyer process across all phases of project planning and development and performed an in-depth competitive analysis.
Through primary research and secondary research, we gained perspectives on the competitive environment, customer preferences and perceptions of the client’s business, and a three-part solution was developed:
- A global positioning and differentiation strategy
- A content messaging strategy
- A digital strategy
Results:
A critical outcome of the research was to confirm the CLR Brand as the global leader in innovative animal habitat design. This created a challenge for the Strategy and Web design consultants to integrate CLR’s unique thought leadership process into the website in a way that would be relevant and useful to CLR’s target audiences.
From our research we learned that CLR’s clients used CLR’s industry leading animal well-being and design concepts to make critical decisions for Zoo’s Strategic and Facility Plans. This knowledge was a driver in how we positioned the CLR process on the website, and how we used it to define a unique website user dimension – Design Frameworks.
Unique to CLR, this web page weaves together a family of conceptual principles and ideologies that informs CLR’s approach to continually pushing the boundaries of zoo design and to solve their clients’ unique challenges. By capturing the story of how CLR inspired generations of zoo directors to trade individual cages for immersive landscapes where animals thrive in safe, naturalistic environments – and by connecting it to how CLR builds on these principles as design leaders today, we were able to honor the traditions of the CLR Legacy, position CLR to stay in the forefront of what is next for Zoos and Zoo habitats, and create a place of learning for CLR’s site visitors.
