Base Element

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We provide an environmentally-friendly product for fire protection. It’s a unique product in the world, with patents and research and development backing it up.
I am the CMO [Chief Marketing Officer] of the company. We have launched a marketing department three years ago, and we’ve seen tremendous potential in the technology and in its market expansion.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Base Element?

We had a problem with the company’s branding, specifically with developing a specific, harmonized collateral strategy. I have a background in finance, where I’ve used a lot of digitization processes, but this is a new area for the fire protection industry. Everything needed to be custom-made.

We have worked with a few agencies across Europe, and are still using some people locally. We utilize whatever we can find as the best value, from around the world. We have people producing components for us in South Africa, the U.K., Italy, and Germany.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We had to collect our brands from all these countries, harmonize them, and give the result back to partners, for them to operate in an efficient, elegant and non-intrusive way. Base Element helped us throughout the way. We created a digital hub or library that harmonized all the information, first in English, and then in several major languages. We produced a global website that catered to everyone’s needs.

We also created user-friendly templates for our partnerships. Base Element was a big part of the design process, through to the web development. We have sophisticated coding involved, which had to be SEO-friendly and catered to the local market.

We produced a custom engineering software catering to our specific parameters. It maintains and monitors the quality of projects. At any point in time, we will know what’s happening, and if something is wrong with a specific system. This hadn’t been done before in our industry.

What is the team composition?

We had multiple meetings between our marketing department and their team. We presented our short- and long-term strategy after it was approved by the board, which included PR, branding, digitization and so on.

We have a dedicated senior full-stack developer who has been involved from the get-go. He’s always been around to help, when things got a bit murky.

How did you come to work with Base Element?

They were a key background associate for us, and we’d collaborated on other projects in the past. We brought in another two agencies before making the decision, given that it was long-term, and it required trust. I was responsible for collecting the information from all three companies, and making my suggestions.

This is how we go about starting each project—selecting one out of three partners, based on which can bring the most value.

How much have you invested with them?

The project size has been between $50,000 and $100,000. The final cost will be a bit above this.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in May 2015. We still have ongoing projects, which we will be finishing within the next couple of years.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’ve undertaken research with all partners across the world, and received feedback from more than 70 of them. They’ve given us excellent feedback, and collectively agree that the work was good. They’ve actually been inspired to proceed with localizations themselves, even in smaller markets that we hadn’t had in mind, and where we hadn’t been strong.

The work was very good, and it paid off in terms of brand equity. Over the past two years, equity increased by perhaps 35%. It will take some time for the brand to be reestablished, so we still have a journey ahead of us.

How did Base Element perform from a project management standpoint?

Base Element has been quite patient with us. They handled the pressure, leverage and coercion necessary for getting everyone onboard, moving forward with all these projects.

They are located many miles away from us, but the collaboration is the same as if they were in the same city. We use Skype, Slack and email for communication. Skype is used for casual meetings, but we might also send something over Slack, which is an internal channel for us as well. Base Element also uses Asana for internal projects, which we’ve adopted internally as well.

We use a ticketing system for non-emergency tasks. We typically receive feedback or implementations of the requirements within 24 to 48 hours. We receive a monthly invoice according to the hours invested.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’ve never told us no, even when our Microsoft Azure server crashed on a Sunday. They worked on it through the recovery plan on Sunday night, and never complained. We were charged for overtime, and that was it. I can depend on them, which is great.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They’re growing fast, so new people are coming in, who might not be completely aware of how we do things. It takes some time for them to catch up to our process, but this is normal for any company. Their senior developer has always been around to help in these situations.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

I know that Base Element has had a few projects similar to ours, but technology-wise, they’ve built international websites with market localizations and customizations for a few impressive clients. We build custom engineering software, so there isn’t a big chance of another company building the same things.

Also, the portal is quite unique in terms of functionality, engineering, and operations. I knew that Base Element could accomplish this, since they’d done some similar projects, but I cannot give specific advice to other clients.