THE CHALLENGES

CCI Power Supplies faced challenges common with Mittelstand manufactures: they are a smaller company than those that they sell to, their customers want to keep them a secret, and they face intense pressure as an American-engineered Chinese manufacturer to stand out in the hyper-commoditized market of B2B manufacturing. Inherent to the industry, many manufacturers don’t view themselves as brands, but it is a compelling, unique brand that we know as the strongest defense against commoditization.

In other words, how do you grow as a company when the market is flooded with seemingly cheaper options and when your best customers won’t advocate for you? To add weight to the challenge, CCI developed a revolutionary power supply design allowing LED lights to function identically to traditional incandescent lights. The implications of this innovation are revolutionary to many industries, but how do you promote this on top of the initial challenges faced brand-wide?

OUR STRATEGY

To begin, we needed to dive deep to understand the mechanics of B2B manufacturing for the lighting industry. Our discoveries lead us to seek separation from contemporaries by branding CCI through video as a unique innovator. Instead of branding around the technological breakthroughs themselves, CCI is an innovator that understands the implications of these breakthroughs and the advantages they offer to the end user. Instead of “buy this shiny new product now”, the message became “If we can do this, we can’t wait to discover what we’ll solve next- together”.

The shift in brand from a manufacturing operation to a collective of innovative, collaborative engineers with a factory to fulfill those visions answers the growing desire for experiences over services or products. Instead of selling white papers to engineers (generally, introverted people), we worked with CCI to discover the ability to inspire the managers of those engineers and to unlock the desire of “I want that” within us all.

THE WORK

THE RESULTS

“VES Creative helped put us on another level as a small B2B manufacturer. They helped us find and sell what makes our company tick.”
– President Terri Montante

Beyond just the increase in response and attention from customer prospects, CCI achieved the following unique results with our campaign:

HR: Convinced highly-sought engineer to work for CCI

Succession: CCI leadership was looking for a new investor to run the company. As a family business, it was crucial that the right partner was found and that this partner understood that they were buying into more than just people, machines, and IP- they were buying a culture. The video generated significant reaction among potential buyers and helped leadership identify by reaction who understood this and who didn’t.

Proud Collaboration: A prominent CCI customer (a major lighting manufacturer) asked to license the video from CCI with their own logo added to the end.