M.A.D. Group

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the marketing manager of Dunham & Associates, a small wealth management firm based in San Diego. We offer mutual funds and an asset allocation program.

What challenge were you trying to address with M.A.D. Group?

Our IT department is doing a lot of improvements to our technology, and we wanted to update our look and feel and modernize our brand at the same time. While we wanted to keep our logo and our position within the market, we wanted to refresh our brand across all of our channels. The main thing we needed was a brand style guidelines book. We also wanted to find a way to make it easier to understand how our two entities are related and group them under one bucket. Also, we needed to get the project done quickly, as we were planning to unveil it at a big event that was taking place in a couple of weeks.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We first identified the deliverables that we needed, which was a brand guideline to determine exactly how we should look and feel. We lacked brand consistency across our channels. We would have an external vendor produce a brochure for us that looked great, but it didn’t look like anything we had. Another deliverable was a corporate identity package, which was a PowerPoint template, business card, and letterhead. We also needed an e-blast prototype, a sales sheet, a brochure prototype, an email ad, and a mobile website prototype.

M.A.D. Group’s process kicked off with a whole-day workshop with all of the C-level executives and our marketing team. We focused on nine categories—our definition of success, what our client mix is, our products and services, our operational benchmarks, additional goals, competitive set review, how we get new clients or advisors, our target market analysis, marketing channels and strategies, and our key brand attributes. We did one of those sessions for each of our entities, including our trust company and our investment advisor. Jason [Founder and CEO] and Spencer [Branding Strategist] were the ones who walked us through that creative and interactive process. They took a lot of notes. I really liked their process because it was inclusive and the topics were all important for rebranding.

How did you come to work with M.A.D. Group?

I believe I found them on Clutch. I reached out to a number of different vendors, but I loved what Jason from M.A.D. Group had to say about his process and that he would be able to produce the guidelines for us. He was willing to come and meet with me and another team member and then later came back to meet with the chief of sales and marketing. He put a lot of time into getting everybody onboard. He brought past examples of rebranding projects that he’d done so we could see exactly what they can do. M.A.D. Group was willing to work really quickly. Compared to other competitors that I reached out to, they were a lot more cost-effective.

How much have you invested with M.A.D. Group?

We have spent around $27,000 over the course of our relationship.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in November 2016. Our workshops were scheduled in December and he got the branding to us by early March. We are still working with M.A.D. Group.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

We’re still in the process of rolling the project out. We’d like to do it all at once at the event planned for May. They provided the prototype and the guidelines, but it’s up to us to apply it across our materials. I’ve had questions come up as we implement the deliverables. I’ve reached out to Jason about their recommended vendor for our business cards and the changes needed for our pie charts. They’ve been really responsive and helpful, going above and beyond to be sure it’s implemented correctly. They really care about the way it’s implemented.

How did M.A.D. Group perform from a project management standpoint?

Given the rush of our project, I think they did a great job. It’s been easy to get a quick answer from them. They’re a very busy group, but they manage to get it all done. I have one point of contact.

What did you find most impressive about M.A.D. Group?

They are a full-service rebranding company that specializes in the brand style guidelines.

Are there any areas M.A.D. Group could improve?

When they were revealing our branding to us, they walked us through the headline choices and the words first. What we really wanted was to see what it all looked like altogether, but they saved that for the end. We had to wait for an hour to see how it turned out. It turned out great, but I would have started with the big picture and then gone into the details.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a global company specializing in robotics. Headquartered in Korea, we have been researching, developing, manufacturing and selling our products for 30 years. We entered the US market in 2014, mainly selling robotic vacuums to major retailers like Costco, Sam's Club, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Sears.

I am the vice president of US operations for the company.

What challenge were you trying to address with M.A.D. Group?

We have a great product that is well-recognized regarding technology and user experience, both in Asia and Europe. Since we have no brand awareness for the US market, and the robotics industry has been growing every year, our biggest challenge was making our company better-known.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Unlike other marketing agencies, M.A.D. Group started out with what is called a branding workshop. This workshop consists of an all-day meeting during which we went through our company's goals, products, competitors, and positioning. We discussed a mission and vision statement, a brand slogan, a brand pledge, and headlines. We also looked at our products' attributes, how we would position in the market, and what messaging we would convey to end-users.

How did you come to work with M.A.D. Group?

I researched many marketing agencies in California. We had a tight budget, so our main focus was on reviews, namely what people were saying about those agencies. I called each one individually and talked to the people in charge. M.A.D. Group's founder seemed to know what he was doing and provided many creative ideas just within our first one-hour conversation. I could see that he was very passionate and loved what he was doing. It was about more than just the money he would be getting; he loved to take underdogs and build them into big corporations.

How much have you invested with M.A.D. Group?

The cost of M.A.D. Group's work has been around $40,000 so far. We expect to spend another $200,000 for their services in 2017. We couldn't have found the same quality and amount of work for the same price anywhere else.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with M.A.D. Group in November 2016. The project will be ongoing until the end of 2017. I have no doubt that we will continue to have a partnership with M.A.D. Group beyond that point.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

We have just started the marketing process two months ago. Our new website has gone live, and our social media platforms have been set up. We are already seeing some pickups in sales and hope to see great results in the following months.

M.A.D. Group creates posts for our retail promotions and rebates. We've had a recent one-day campaign with Sam's Club which we promoted on social media. We saw record sales on that day.

How did M.A.D. Group perform from a project management standpoint?

M.A.D. Group is a very well-prepared and strategic group. They always stuck to deadlines and discussed any concerns we may have had, prior to starting the project. We are given time and resource scopes, and M.A.D. Group responds immediately to any additions or changes we need to make.

What did you find most impressive about M.A.D. Group?

M.A.D. Group has treated us as more than just a client. They can think from the customer's perspective, bringing in a lot of passion.

As a robotics company, one of our challenges revolves around product returns. We were trying to reduce this and worked with M.A.D. Group on finding improvements. They started from scratch, changing product boxes and manuals in order to better satisfy customers. It's hard to have such a deep thought process without looking at issues from a client perspective. For the price, we couldn't expect to receive the same level of quality anywhere else.

Are there any areas M.A.D. Group could improve?

I'm very satisfied with M.A.D. Group.

Please describe your organization.

We are a residential property management firm. We manage single-family townhomes and small apartment buildings in San Diego, Phoenix, and Las Vegas.

What is your position?

I am the president.

What business challenge were you trying to address with M.A.D. Group?

We interviewed several different companies for a rebranding of our own company. After a couple of months of sifting and sorting, we found that M.A.D. was the best fit for us. They have a lot of experience working with smaller companies like ours, so we felt comfortable working with them.

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

They rebranded our company, which included updating our marketing materials and website, among other things.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

It was less than $10,000.

What is the timeline of this engagement?

I would say between 60 and 90 days from start to finish. It was mid-November, and we wrapped up in mid-February [2016].

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We don't have any success metrics at this time as it's relatively soon since we relaunched the brand. I would say that we are pleased with the product that came out. You never know when you turn the reins of your company to someone else what they're going to do with the look and feel of your brand. We let M.A.D. Group have free rein with our brand, and are totally satisfied with what they came up with.

What distinguishes M.A.D. Group from other providers?

It's their people, including the head there, Jason [Delfos, founder and CEO of M.A.D. Group], is very smart, and he's great about showing you that he has what's best for your company in mind. He's great about making sure we keep the end game in mind.

The second thing is the people that he has working with him. They're also very quality people. Across the board, if we weren't talking with Jason, if we were talking with someone else, we were still very confident, not only in their skill level, but also the deliverables that they were providing for us.

Is there anything M.A.D. Group could have improved or done differently?

They care so much about what brand they put together, it was kind of hard to get them to relinquish it at the end of the project. But, overall, I'm fine with that because it showed me that they put a lot of time and care into their work.

Please describe your organization.

The Marshall Institute provides consulting and training related to the reliability of production processes and systems to industry. We work with companies in most industries, including aerospace, food and beverage, pharmaceutical, oil and gas, and mining. We help our clients remove waste, unreliability, and unnecessary cost from their processes.

What is your position?

I'm the director of training services. What I do is drive the training business. We develop educational seminars, online training, and deliver on-site training to support the enhancement of the human performance and capital of our clients.

What business challenge were you trying to address with the M.A.D. Group?

I wanted to make a significant investment in raising awareness of our services. We've been in business for 40 years, so we have a strong name in training, but in the last 10 to 15 years, we've seen a growth in competition, both in size and numbers. We've also seen a growth in the sophistication of the competition's business practices, of their products and services, their training and their offerings. I wanted to put some money into advertising, promotion, and the generation of customer care. Before doing that, I wanted to make sure that I had the right positioning for the business in the market. I wanted to be sure that whatever money we put into messages, ads, blog posts, press releases, and so forth was the right message that would resonate with our user base. I needed professional marketers and branding experts to help us with that.

We are a wonderful company, but we have a communication problem. We don't necessarily do a very good job of communicating who we are and what we do. We too often fail to highlight our integrity, the value we offer and the fact that we'll bend over backward for a client. We truly want the best for our clients, and we know that their success is our success. We are invested in the people we work with, but that's not something that comes through in any of our messages. We're much more than our current communication shows, so I think there's going to be a positive response to the improved messaging and to the improved visuals. We're going to see an uptick in calls, interests and inquiries from the Web. That is my prediction. To be clear, however, none of these things has happened yet.

Please describe the scope of your work with the M.A.D. Group.

From my perspective, their work is a branding facelift that's been broken down into two key parts: the visual branding and the verbal branding. They'll be helping us with a revision of our company logo. They'll be helping us with sales sheets, website, business cards, and key corporate literature. They will develop slogans, taglines and a position statement and advertising for each key target market. They'll provide the toolkit we need from both the visual and the verbal side to present ourselves with the confidence that comes from knowing we have the right position and the right message.

How did you come to work with the M.A.D. Group?

Although the Marshall Institute is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, I am actually in San Diego, so I initially narrowed down the focus of my search to San Diego. I wanted to be able to meet these people face to face, shake their hands, and get a feel for them in person. I did not want to engage in a long-distance project. Also, given San Diego's proximity to Los Angeles, I knew that there would be plenty of talent in this area to help us. Reaching out to M.A.D. took a couple of Google searches to see which companies came up at the top of the list relative to branding and marketing strategy positioning.

I seriously considered another organization that I liked, and their sales representative was very friendly and very forthcoming with information. That was also my feeling about M.A.D. Jason [Delfos, founder and CEO of M.A.D. Group] actually returned my call and email and was very friendly, very interested in my business, and very interested in our goals. He was very open to sharing information and insights, which gave me an idea as to what it would be like to work with them. If he was that forthcoming at that stage, I was confident that when they actually were paid to work, they'd put something great together.

I liked their website, and I liked the verbal interactions I had with Jason. He also mentioned that M.A.D. likes working with smaller companies like ours. Most of the time, marketing engagements and branding journeys are expensive endeavors. There were a handful of agencies in San Diego that wouldn't get out of bed for $100,000. M.A.D. was very flexible. They had a small business package, so I was immediately attracted to that offering.

M.A.D. seemed very genuine. I believed they would apply the same strategy, ideas, and creativity to a $200,000 project as they would to a $10,000 project. I believed them. I met them in person. All this solidified my initial assumptions, and I was confident when signing on the dotted line.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

We've spent something less than $10,000 working with the M.A.D. Group.

What is the status of this engagement?

We had a branding workshop. It was a one-day session during which they asked us questions about the Marshall Institute. They were just trying to understand our history, services, personality, intangible value, and client perspective. They wanted to understand as much as possible about us to ensure that the branding and revisions they were going to develop would be aligned with who we are and where we want to go. That one-day workshop was conducted at the beginning of February [2016], and they're actually going to be delivering the final product next week [April 2016], so it's been about a four-week project.

Could you share any statistics, metrics, or other feedback from this engagement?

The workshop itself was a stepping-stone to the deliverables, but it ended up being far more impactful than my colleagues and I anticipated. I had the president, marketing manager, and manager of training services business fly out to San Diego for the meeting. My background is in marketing, so I was not expecting to be surprised by anything Jason and his team said in the workshop. For the most part that was true, but having the president and the manager of training services, both industrial guys, being exposed to marketing messages from marketing professionals was powerful. I think some of the messages that the marketing department had been developing through the years were slowly starting to take shape. Hearing that from professionals really solidified those principles, concepts, and ideas in the president's mind. The president left the workshop inspired, excited, and much more engaged with the purpose of marketing.

We had an amazing brainstorming session the day after the workshop with just our people, but it was inspired by the previous day's session with Jason and the M.A.D. team. The unintended consequence of that first workshop was to inspire us to come up with very different ideas beyond just the visual and verbal branding goals. We're talking about different business strategies. We're talking about different packages of products and services that we could offer in ways that we hadn't previously. It was a very inspirational session. As a result of the deliverables we are expecting, I'm confident that we will see a positive first reaction from both our existing and potential clients. The work of the M.A.D. Group will position the Marshall Institute and, specifically, our training services as more modern, professional, and aligned with who we are.

What distinguishes the M.A.D. Group from other providers?

I cannot compare M.A.D. to other agencies because this is the first marketing agency I've worked with. I will tell you what attracts me to the M.A.D. Group: their genuine and sincere interest in understanding our business and in helping us. It was very obvious in the workshop that Jason and his team were genuinely interested in our business and our goals, in understanding as much as they could to support our journey into the future. My guess is that there are many agencies that are more interested in the paycheck than the project – like those companies that will not get out of bed for $100,000. I think M.A.D. is very much more interested in the project than the paycheck.

Is there anything M.A.D. Group could have improved or done differently?

Not at this stage – no.

Please describe your organization.

We are a real estate firm in Downtown San Diego focusing on luxury properties. 

What is your role at the company?

I am the CEO and lead broker of the company.

What was the business challenge that you were trying to address when you approached M.A.D. Group?

I approached M.A.D. to help me develop a luxury brand and marketing platform for a sophisticated audience. 

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

The scope was large and challenging, in that they had very little to work on as the company is still new. The scope included branding, website design and the creation of a number of marketing materials. 

They brought me in for an initial workshop with my team that lasted hours and, after just a few weeks, they revealed a brand that blew me away. They listened to our focus and where we wanted to take the company and built a brand around those ideas.

How did you come to work with M.A.D. Group?

I selected M.A.D. because I had worked with Jason [Delfos, founder and CEO of M.A.D. Group] in a CEO peer advisory group in San Diego. He had worked with a friend of mine to create a beautiful brand, and I already trusted that he would provide the best service at a competitive price.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

At day's end, I probably spent close to $15,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The timeline kept changing, and it took slightly longer than expected. The brand book was revealed to me on a very quick timeline, but it took a while longer for the other marketing materials.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I cannot measure the success of the projects just yet because really the success is in the implementation of the brand in actual advertisements. While it's difficult to give objective results, I can say that subjectively I'm very happy with the brand they've created for us.

How did M.A.D. Group perform from a project management standpoint?

This was the first team I've hired for such a full-scale project. However, I would say what stood out to me was the quality of the work for the price I paid. M.A.D. Group could have charged four times as much, and I still would have been satisfied with the work they delivered.

In hindsight, are there areas in which they could improve, or things you might do differently?

The only thing, they could have improved on was their scheduling. I would have liked a little more transparency about the timelines; however, as the quality of the work has been excellent, I'm not upset.

Please describe your organization.

I work for dysmorphology and teratology division of the University of California Medical Center. We focus on birth defects and types of exposures during pregnancy that could cause a birth defect. We working on trying to prevent those types of exposures and thereby prevent birth defects.

What is your position?

I am the director of communications.

What business challenge were you trying to address with M.A.D. Group?

We initially engaged M.A.D. Group for one of our programs, MotherToBaby California. It's a free service where a woman, a health care provider, or a significant other, could contact one of our expert counselors to ask any questions they might have about any possible exposures during pregnancy or breastfeeding. The national organization was looking for a vendor that we could use for a wide variety of our marketing needs.

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

They've pretty much worked with us on everything, at this point. Their work on the website has probably been the most significant portion of the work. They've also worked with us on our brand strategy. We needed a brand that was accessible to the public because the words "dysmorphology" and "teratology" are not common words in the lexicon of normal people.

M.A.D. Group came in and helped us with the entire branding process for what was essentially a new organization.

We do very extensive paid advertising efforts to try to recruit women to participate in research studies. M.A.D. Group helped us develop probably 15 different landing pages that we can attach to our paid advertising that track our conversions and find out where our people are coming from and how our digital ads are performing.

They've also done some collateral development for some of the direct mail campaigns we've engaged in.

How did you come to work with M.A.D. Group?

We had a list of about four different San Diego area marketing and advertising firms that we went out and met with. M.A.D. Group differentiated themselves by showing both an understanding of our organization and a passion for its mission.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

It's been several hundred thousand dollars.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project is hopefully wrapping up in the next month or two [August 2015].

What have been the results of the project? Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I can't share any statistics with you, but thus far, the results have been great. Their work on our brand has been extremely successful. We were very impressed with the research that they did ahead of time to learn a little bit more about who we were. They asked great questions that forced us to think very deeply about how we wanted the center to be represented to the public. It's gratifying for somebody who's outside of our field, who doesn't necessarily have technical understanding about birth defects and exposures in pregnancy, to get what we do and be able to convey it to the public.

Their work on the technical side has also been successful. We're still wrapping up the new website, but it looks great and seems to be at least as sophisticated as any other site I've seen in the medical field.

What distinguishes M.A.D. Group from other providers?

I think what is nice, compared to some of the other groups that I've had exposure to, is that they are a smaller operation. There's an intimacy in the relationship that M.A.D. Group develops with their clients that you don't find with larger agencies. It makes them feel like they're a part of our team, as opposed to some outside vendor who's coming in and telling us how to do things.

Is there anything M.A.D. Group could have improved or done differently?

I guess there are two sides to every coin. I love their size, but because they're a smaller operation, I think it can be hard to predict what their workload is going to be like on a week-to-week or month-to-month basis. From an account management standpoint, I sometimes feel like I'm having to follow up with them a little bit more proactively, as opposed to having an account manager on their end who's very on top of things. But, that's obviously a trade-off that you accept if you choose to work with a smaller operation.