Inside Sonder’s elevator pitch rebrand

A rebranding exercise has given the employee safety and wellbeing businesses a new short, sharp brand story for pitching to enterprise customer at speed

Personal safety and well-being support outfit, Sonder, recently debuted a new customer value proposition and core brand messaging with the aim of quickly and succinctly telling its brand story to executives, when time and attention is precious, and limited.

The ‘three-second elevator pitch’ conveying Sonder’s core message, ‘Trusted to care, ready to respond’, was developed to strengthen the four-year-old brand and encapsulate its service in a nutshell when pitching for new B2B business.

“It's framing what Sonder is, because it's a new category solution around mental health and wellbeing for enterprise customers,” Sonder head of marketing and growth, Brent Annells, explained to CMO.

“When we did some research, we found there were about 13 different ways to describe what it is we do. And what we’ve been able to do, and this is with FutureBrand, is define it and talk to the problems we solve.

“It’s a complicated space, employee support, and what we do is unique, so we needed to find a way to articulate that simply. We help address complex problem, we needed to express this simply put."

FutureBrand developed Sonder’s core message, ‘Trusted to care, ready to respond’ following an immersive process that enabled them to empathise with users as well as collaborate with team members from the frontline, support centre and executive team.

The process has entailed reviewing and remaking all the sales, marketing and other business collateral by way of coalescing the entire business around this proposition. “It’s talking with one consistent voice to the market,” Annells said.

The business has quadrupled its media coverage in mainstream and business publications as a result of the brand’s sharper focus. “We’ve also been able to execute a PR strategy for the first time, which now includes interviews with the founders, because we have a single message which explains what we do,” Annells said.

“Sonder is a B2B sales business and it's difficult to get right from a sales and marketing perspective. What we’re now looking at is how do we use digital channels, like LinkedIn, to do focused and targeted awareness work.

“With enterprise, this has been challenging. How do you make people aware of you when you’re a new company? What we can now do is super targeted and focussed brand building and brand awareness.”

Annells said conventional brand building work, like sponsoring conferences or advertising in airport lounges is inefficient compared to what can be done through channels like LinkedIn. So both have taken a backseat in Sonder’s new drive to build awareness and land new enterprise clients.

While it might not be possible to quantify a brand measurement study when working with smaller numbers, like single-digit thousands, as Sonder is when targeting specific audiences, Annells believed it’s easier to see shifts in consideration using the digital, professional platform approach with LinkedIn.

“If you deliver your brand proposition in-feed on a digital device, to these busy executives, and you get a number of impressions in front of them, you’re going to do the job of them seeing the brand and starting to understand what you offer, and they might start to actively consider you,” he said.

And this is where the succinct brand proposition is so valuable. “If you don’t get cut-through in three seconds, it’s all over. You need that at the executive level,” Annells added. 

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