New Branding and Marketing Strategy Helps Retail Business Coalition Achieve Success

The Client: The Collegiate Retail Alliance is a coalition of the largest independent college retailers in North America whose combined revenues exceed $1 billion. CRA members develop and share the industry’s best business practices and partner with top product and business services providers to deliver higher value to the universities they serve.

CRA members own RATEX Business Solutions (RBS), whose flagship product, VisualRATEX®, is the industry’s most comprehensive retail management system. VisualRATEX is the preferred store management solution for many of the largest and most successful college retailers.

The Challenge: The organization was founded in 1999 as the Retail Alliance.  With its 10th anniversary approaching, the RA’s Board of Directors wanted to bring the organization’s entities together under one integrated brand identity and position the group more effectively in the college store industry. The Board also wanted to create a marketing communications strategy to better communicate with current and prospective members and business partners.

The Gianfagna Solution: Gianfagna researched the industry and interviewed members, business partners, and the RBS staff to understand the benefits of participation in the Retail Alliance and how the organization differed from other college store groups.

Based on this insight, we recommended options for a revamped brand identity. Since there was solid equity in the Retail Alliance name, the Board selected “Collegiate Retail Alliance” (CRA) as the new name going forward. The new CRA tagline – Smart Solutions, Best Practices –captured the unique value the CRA delivers. We also created new, integrated graphic identities for CRA, RBS, and VisualRATEX.

The next stage of the project was developing a comprehensive marketing and public relations strategy to give CRA a marketing roadmap for higher awareness, increased membership, and new partnerships.  Among the plan’s tactics were public relations initiatives, a new website, and an e-newsletter. CRA asked us to create their new website, which has a members-only section for sharing confidential documents and collaborating on projects. We also are currently developing a new website for RBS.

The Results: The new branding strategy has been implemented across the organization, creating a powerful presence in the marketplace supported by dynamic, integrated messaging in a variety of media. CRA has gained new members and business partners and RBS has added several new customers for VisualRATEX.