Crafting a new brand to penetrate the enterprise storage market.
Crafting a new brand to penetrate the enterprise storage market.
Services
Brand strategy & creationPhison is a 23-year-old leader in storage innovation, generating an annual revenue of $2 billion by white labelling its industry leading controller technology for the client market. This traditional focus enabled the company to establish a unique and flexible business model and earn significant authority in the client storage industry – without heavily promoting its brand.
However, to achieve Phison’s ambitious growth targets, the team wanted to break into the enterprise storage market. This new audience differs vastly from the existing customer base, as success in the enterprise sector hinges on brand reputation, familiarity, trust, and authority.
As a result, Phison needed a robust and resonant new brand that would appeal specifically to enterprise audiences while maintaining the loyalty of its existing customers, who remain crucial to Phison’s future success.
We began Phison’s brand transformation with comprehensive industry research, competitor analysis, and stakeholder interviews in collaboration with a seasoned industry expert. This process revealed several key insights that guided our branding approach. Most notably, while competitors were universally focused on off-the-shelf SSDs with similar messages and visual presentations, Phison had the opportunity to tell a distinctive story centred on customisation, partnership, and delivering added value that transcends being ‘just an SSD vendor.’
Following the research phase, we developed a brand strategy and compelling narrative, structured around key principles: vision, values, positioning, and functional pillars. Central to our strategy was the platform and tagline, “Engineering Imagination, Together,” highlighting Phison’s unique selling propositions:
The interplay between “Engineering” and “Imagination” encapsulates Phison’s balanced approach to innovation in storage technology, blending practicality with aspiration. This holistic strategy not only acknowledged the current dynamics of the enterprise market and the challenges faced by its players but also highlighted how Phison’s unique capabilities could effectively address those challenges. This foundation informed the development of our communication strategy and visual identity as we moved forwards.
To support the enterprise brand’s SSD portfolio, we developed a distinctive name – PASCARI. An acronym encapsulating the key characteristics of their SSDs: Performance, Acceleration, Security, Capacity, AI, Reliability, and Innovation. The logo, inspired by the Phison “+” symbol, forms a “P” resembling an abstract racetrack finish line, again symbolising speed and performance.
We crafted a dynamic and optimistic visual identity for Phison’s product brand and service offerings by leveraging yellow’s associations with creativity, innovation, and energy. This strategic use of yellow differentiated Phison in the enterprise market, as none of its competitors utilised this colour, making it a unique and ownable brand element that complemented Phison’s existing parent colours.
We enhanced the parent brand’s “+” design element, creatively integrating it in both large and small formats to consistently highlight Phison’s added value, with flexible options for how it could be used. We also introduced additional graphical elements tailored to Phison’s various enterprise product ranges, fostering visual recognition and distinction between those ranges.
To unify the brand’s visual identity, we adopted a sophisticated black-and-white approach for hero imagery, emphasising people and outcomes. This strategy aligned the aspirational nature of our messaging with emotive and human themes, creating a memorable visual impact that conveyed both intelligence and trustworthiness. This approach was highly distinctive in the enterprise market, ensuring that Phison stood out as a leader in storage innovation.
Finally, to ensure a successful brand launch, we developed comprehensive brand guidelines with clear instructions for both narrative and visual elements. To add a touch of flair to the launch, we created two impactful videos, each with a distinct purpose:
While it’s too soon after launch to be able to share concrete performance metrics, the new brand has been met with great enthusiasm from Phison’s internal stakeholders. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. For us, this is always a highly valued metric.
As for judging its effectiveness in supporting Phison’s aggressive growth targets, watch this space. We’ll add this data as soon as we have it…
“ I cannot thank you enough for all the work that you’ve done to make this happen – from start all the way to the finish line. Phison now cannot be unnoticed and will come out of shadows of being a component inside or hidden behind other brand labels, to a brand that has a product which can now be bought directly. This would not have happened without you and your amazing creativity, timelines, flexibility, and tireless dedication!!!! ”