Big Ideas and Lasting Value for B2B Companies

Princeton Partners helps B2B companies build, refresh and elevate their brands.

Our approach is informed by a strong background in business consulting and development. We’ve helped clients align their people and processes, innovate product solutions, restructure operations and deepen engagement with customers. We’ve even launched our own businesses. When you combine that with creativity, data, research and cross-category expertise, you get a marketing and branding partner that can help your company thrive in any market condition.

Capabilities

Engagement Program Development

iTi Tropicals is North America’s leading supplier of tropical fruit juice concentrates and purees. When they hired Princeton Partners, they needed to refresh their brand to better convey the excitement of their products. After all, these tropical ingredients are new to many people, and the flavors bring a sense of adventure and discovery.

Princeton Partners conveyed that feeling with the tagline, “What’s Possible with Tropical.” With this idea, we modernized iTi’s core brand elements, giving them a distinct look and feel and developing messaging that clarified the company’s benefits and conveyed a fun, authentic brand personality.

We developed the new iTi Tropicals website to be informative, intuitive and graphically interesting. We built awareness using distinctive infographics, web video, and PR initiatives. We’ve done so much with them, in fact, that we’ve become their strategic advisor, helping them with every aspect of marketing.

EDAX makes electron backscatter diffraction and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy devices. These devices allow scientists to see the makeup of everything around us so they can make steel stronger or discover whether a painting is priceless or a forgery. EDAX had long been the industry leader, but aggressive marketing by competitors made EDAX look less dynamic.

Research told us the category is very specialized. A few key players dominate. Most of the audience knows them. Marketing in this sector emphasizes products and features. Users are scientists, and the tools are all about consistency. The products are expensive and must last a long time. These factors, together, lead to the category’s defining feature: its parity. The functionality and core features of the products are basically the same.

So we stepped back from the technology and thought about who used it. We thought, these are smart people. They’re doing cool things. As we spoke with the people at EDAX, we felt their excitement. They want their customers to have the best equipment because they understand how important their customers’ work is. And that work… is cool.

We decided to convey the cool. The new branding showed common objects the way researchers might envision them and conveyed that EDAX sees the world like they do. The campaign was a hit and put EDAX back where they started—on top.

Choose New Jersey is a privately funded, business attraction and retention 501(c)3 that positions New Jersey as a premier location to expand or relocate business. Choose New Jersey hired Princeton Partners to enhance lead generation, create content, and build a new website to serve as the center of its marketing efforts and business goals.

A key aspect of these efforts was developing a stronger way to present New Jersey to the world. Interviews with the Choose New Jersey staff and our extensive experience with New Jersey government and business community gave us the insight needed to develop visuals and messaging that best showed off New Jersey’s features. They also helped us communicate what makes the state truly special: how those features work together.

This idea formed the basis of the lead gen campaign and website redesign. The lead gen efforts were highly targeted. We brought Choose New Jersey many new tactics for reaching their priority audiences. For the website, we developed a more intuitive information architecture and simpler navigation that dramatically improved the user experience. The site also enabled users to reach the right Choose New Jersey expert within two clicks of any search. Along with the stronger narrative, these improvements led to a phenomenal bounce rate reduction of 88%.

Pacer International is a global logistics and transportation company. The company was comprised of nine distinct businesses, obtained through a series of acquisitions. All operated under the Pacer name, but each had its own website, logo design, color palette and way of speaking to its customers. The company lacked a unifying business strategy and this disjointedness put them at a competitive disadvantage.

Pacer hired Princeton Partners to grow the brand and generate leads. We knew we first had to bring the company together with a singular creative expression. After an intense process of discovery, research, and development, we created a strategic platform; new mission, vision, and values statements; and a branding campaign that unified all of Pacer’s divisions.

The campaign, “Making your world run smoother,” was a resounding success. By the second quarter following the launch of the new marketing, total revenue had increased 6.7% over the same quarter the previous year and 11.7% over Q4 2009. The stock price jumped 73% in the second quarter and 259% in the third quarter. Just as importantly, the new creative direction was enthusiastically embraced by the entire Pacer corporate family.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) is an independent State agency that finances small- and mid-sized businesses, administers tax incentives to retain and grow jobs, revitalizes communities through redevelopment initiatives, and supports entrepreneurial development. While they had received headlines for providing large incentives and loans, they lacked awareness among their primary targets: small- to mid-sized businesses.

Princeton Partners created a new brand and media strategy for NJEDA. The brand explicitly ties NJEDA to the success of businesses it has helped. This is captured in the tagline “EDA Was Here.” Successful small- and medium-sized businesses become the proof points for EDA’s ability to positively impact business growth. The media strategy is heavily digital. This allows for better targeting, tracking of results, and testing of specific messages for effectiveness and response. The results have been positive. Inquiries have grown significantly, and senior management has extolled the valuable partnership it has with PPI.