Tronvig

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the president and CEO of The Health Museum, a museum about health and medical science.

What challenge were you trying to address with Tronvig Group?

We wanted to get brand clarity. We’re in the Houston Museum District, perfectly positioned between a world-class children’s museum and a natural science museum. It was difficult for our constituents to determine whether they were going to an extension of the children’s museum or the natural science museum. We didn’t have our own niche because we didn’t know where we stood.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Tronvig helped us to define who we are. They worked with our board, staff, and external stakeholders collectively. Once we were able to define that, they helped us to clarify how we would be positioned. We decided to be purely health and medical science for the whole family to differentiate from the children’s museum. We needed to communicate that to our potential patrons. Tronvig provided survey results of external evaluators. They gave a presentation to board members and all stakeholders to lay out the data they collected, explaining why they determined that we should be an intelligent space in a market filled with folks who support entertainment.

How did you come to work with Tronvig Group?

I found them through the American Alliance of Museums. Their president, James Heaton, had conducted a panel discussion at the conference. I saw how authentically astute he was about the lay of the land for museum participants and attendants. He also knew how to measure that.

How much have you invested with Tronvig Group?

We’ve invested about $25,000 over the course of our relationship.

What is the status of this engagement?

I started working with them five years ago, and the work is complete.

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

We changed our exhibits to be on-par with their recommendations. To date, we have an astounding 344% increase in attendance.

How did Tronvig Group perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re very efficient and time-conscious of your stakeholders. The follow-through is great. They were always there for a conference call and kept the pace of the project. They didn’t drag it out.

What did you find most impressive about Tronvig Group?

They follow the client all the way through until the project is successful and beyond. You can fix a problem with a great presentation, but Tronvig is good at staying with you for the long haul.

Are there any areas Tronvig Group could improve?

One of my board members pointed out that one person primarily represented the Tronvig Group. It looked as if they were a one-man shop. He felt that there’s some vulnerability in having one person be the keeper of the knowledge.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

‎Ingalls is a healthcare services provider. We offer hospital services and a robust regional ambulatory network. We've recently merged with the University of Chicago Medicine [UCM], which is a much larger quaternary healthcare provider.

I am in charge of corporate strategy and business development. In this area, we undergo things like strategic planning and new program development for key partnerships. We played a role in helping to facilitate the merger and are currently integrating ourselves with the UCM.

What challenge were you trying to address with Tronvig Group?

Being a community-based hospital and healthcare provider, our services are different in nature to those offered by the UCM. We provide a certain value proposition to the local community, while the UCM is a globally-recognized quaternary services and teaching organization. Before heading into joint planning, we wanted to make sure that we had a good understanding of how things would be post-merger. While we couldn't undergo any planning until the merger was finalized, we still wanted to hone in on an understanding of our Ingalls brand and how it may relate to a larger organization with a different and very powerful brand.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Tronvig Group helped us understand ourselves, our brand, and how it could be leveraged with the UCM brand. I would call it strategic planning with a branding emphasis. Tronvig Group performed beautifully and I cannot imagine hiring a better firm for the same purpose. They took us through a disciplined and thoughtful approach to understanding ourselves and our brand. They facilitated interviews with key people in our organization—the board, C-suite and physician-leadership-level people who had been with Ingalls for a long time. These stakeholders could accurately characterize our brand from an internal point of view. Tronvig Group also had a novel approach to understanding how our brand would be perceived in the minds of the people in our region. It was a balance between internal and external looks.

How did you come to work with Tronvig Group?

We found Tronvig Group through web research for brand strategy firms. We didn't know the company before engaging them, but we had extensive conversations and followed a traditional interview process. After looking at a variety of firms for our particular engagement, we decided on Tronvig Group. What intrigued us was the fact that they articulated the specific niche that we wanted to explore for Ingalls on their website.

How much have you invested with Tronvig Group?

Given the fact that Tronvig Group isn't a large global agency, we found them to be market-competitive. Their fees were not exorbitant.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Tronvig Group at the end of 2015. The project concluded mid-2016, spanning a six-month period.

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

We have consummated our merger with UCM in October 2016. Right now, we are in the infancy of that process. It remains to be seen in the long-term how effectively we can, by working with the university, extend both of our brands in a way that acknowledges the differences of each. This work is yet to be done, but since the goal of our work with Tronvig Group was to set up for joint planning with UCM, then we have been well-prepared. There has been some very good groundwork laid in this sense. Tronvig Group has helped us be successful in getting ready for joint planning, but it's hard to state specific growth numbers for our particular project. Our goal was to reach an excellent understanding of our brand, lining it up with the university's brand. As a result of Tronvig Group's work, I feel that we couldn't have had a better outcome.

We came to know the leadership of the firm and worked with the president of the company, who is a wonderful resource. This was more valuable to us than using a large agency that may have assigned a random project executive to walk us through the paces. We were given access to the senior-most people at Tronvig Group. They were simply outstanding. I found them easy to work with, and the quality of their work was fantastic. We would bring them back in a heartbeat for further work on this project or for others.

How did Tronvig Group perform from a project management standpoint?

Tronvig Group’s performance was outstanding. This being our first engagement with them, there wasn't an established norm for working with the group. Tronvig Group scoped their recommended approach in the proposal. We followed it according to the deliverables and timelines specified. Of course, as projects go along, we want to make sure that new opportunities are identified and that we can pursue ideas which hadn't been anticipated in the proposal development stage. Tronvig Group did a nice job of not only driving us through their prescribed process but also moving with us so that there were no gaps in the work. Where there was a need, they adapted their process in order to accommodate it. It was a hand-in-glove approach. They were disciplined and thoughtful while being flexible to the needs of our project as we moved through the work. Tronvig Group is based in New York, while we're in Chicago. The distance was a point of concern for us initially. It could have proved difficult to achieve the hand-in-glove process that we wanted, but it did not prove to be a barrier at all.

What did you find most impressive about Tronvig Group?

What I found unique about Tronvig Group is that they didn't have a cookie-cutter consulting approach, with only a study of the market and of key people. They drew from scholarly research in the area of branding and organizational development. This added value to the usual steps expected in a process like this. Tronvig Group demonstrated a lot of depth in doing the very thing we needed to be done. I couldn't speak to how Tronvig Group functions as an advertising agency for developing marketing materials per se since our work revolved mainly on brand strategy. In our niche, Tronvig Group was outstanding.

Tronvig Group is a good facilitator of C-suite, board-level teams. I’ve worked for 20 years as a consultant and have worked with other consultants. From a content perspective, I can hardly recall anyone who has the same mastery of organizational development theory. Tronvig Group was able to apply this expertise to our project. I don't know if Tronvig Group covers everything that a global agency might, but they're fantastic.

Are there any areas Tronvig Group could improve?

Whatever concerns we may have had, we quickly got past. I can't really say anything negative about Tronvig Group.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are an art museum, and I am the director of communications and marketing.

What challenge were you trying to address with Tronvig Group?

We were looking for assistance with rebranding, strategy, and creative services.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We worked with Tronvig on brand workshops with our staff and board. We used information from those workshops to come up with key values and branding of the museum, and we are now aligning those values and brand ideas to our brand. They helped us with our special exhibitions and interviewed people in these events. 

How did you come to work with Tronvig Group?

I met their creative director and founder four or five years ago at a museum conference. They are the first agency to work on our project.

What is the status of this engagement?

They began working with us in June 2013, and it is still ongoing.

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

We have been happy working with Tronvig Group. It has been helpful having an outside agency look at our institution as a whole and analyze for us where we want to go aspirationally and how we can get there over time. Their ideas go into our creative concepts to help market the museum in new ways. As well, our attendance has been very good for the last few years, so we are seeing that the money we spent on marketing and creative is paying off.

How did Tronvig Group perform from a project management standpoint?

As far as estimates go, we have not had any problems. We have an annual contract, and they are good at giving us our hours. It takes time for a firm to get into a groove of how you work which has been achieved working with them for 2 ½ to 3 years. We email throughout the day as needed and have weekly phone call meetings with them, going over everything we have in the weekly agenda. Combined with what my staff and the staff of Tronvig Group do, we have an excellent project management setup at this point.

What did you find most impressive about Tronvig Group?

Our experience with them is they take the strategy behind the creative seriously and move your institution in a direction for the future. Making an ad look nice without any research behind it is not what they are going to do. They are not going to be happy with only making a pretty ad. Instead, they are involved with the organization on a cellular level.

Are there any areas Tronvig Group could improve?

No, I am pleased with the firm.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

When we worked with Tronvig Group, I worked for Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. I was the senior director of design and communications.

What challenge were you trying to address with Tronvig Group?

We were beginning the process of going through a rebrand and needed to lay the groundwork for successful internal alignment. We worked with Tronvig Group on strategy and data-gathering sessions across the institution to make that happen.

What was the scope of their involvement?

What they came in to do was a series of workshops. Within the workshops, we were trying to take a deep dive and look from the internal perspective of what our brand was, what our goals were, and what we were trying to achieve. The workshops included staff on every level and board members. Tronvig Group ran the workshops in a very successful manner in terms of getting people on the same page, weeding out our real goals, and working through issues that came up in between.

How did you come to work with Tronvig Group?

I actually found them through a web search. What really appealed to me was the way in which they outlined their workshop method. We had been through several stop-and-start branding efforts before and workshopping seemed like a great approach to kick it off again. It seemed less threatening and like a productive way to spend our time.

How much have you invested with Tronvig Group?

We researched several firms and Tronvig Group fell squarely in the middle. However, the selling point was the workshop approach where I felt you could test the dynamics of the group and feel out how our team and their team could work together.

What is the status of this engagement?

We completed our goal of producing foundational work for the rebrand. Over the course of a year (to a year and a half) we worked on everything from brand mapping and the brand pyramid, to persona mapping and a competitive advantage diagram.

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

Because our core work with them was all internal, what we achieved was a complete shift in the organizational attitude, excitement, knowledge, and understanding of what a rebrand really means. Tronvig worked really well with our board and our senior staff, and they were able to get everybody on the same page. Prior to that, we had internal misalignment. The work was invaluable. Everyone was ready to embrace the process!

How did Tronvig Group perform from a project management standpoint?

Very well. It was great. It was a seamless project management. We were always updated. We had calls and emails outlining what the status of everything was. We had transcripts from our sessions that we could distribute to staff. 

What did you find most impressive about Tronvig Group?

No matter what someone brings up or how the conversation evolves during a strategy session, James Heaton is extremely talented at having a relatable anecdote or example that quickly unfolds and then guides the conversation back to the original topic. I’ve never seen anybody be able to work a room like James Heaton at Tronvig does. He kept us on task, he kept people excited about the topic and moving through the agenda. He was tremendous at that.

Are there any areas Tronvig Group could improve?

Honestly, no. I think that I was so impressed by what we were able to achieve with them that there was nothing that I could point to. It was a great experience overall.