The Canon Business Services Brief

For Canon Business Services, the struggle of an outdated brand perception crushing business growth was very real. How could they get people to view them as serious, heavy-weight IT and Outsourcing providers when people still saw them as camera and printer creators? With Canon Business Services now going to market as Canon Group, it was the perfect time for them to tackle those perceptions and offer up an alternative narrative that would convince the market that they could be trusted as their chosen IT partner.

What we discovered
Put simply, we knew they needed to change the way they told their story. Their audience – SMBs, mostly made up of millennials – would view this growth as random or obscure. Canon needed to create an umbrella justification for their brand. Taking GE as inspiration, we knew they needed to revisit their positioning line ‘achieve more’ and align the values that started the company in the first place, with their current decision to launch Canon Group. That golden thread? Their Innovation Story.

What we did about it

We wrote a script, creating a concept that intertwined their core value (achieving more) with the product that propelled them to success many moons ago: the lens. And so, The Lens Story was born. Our aim? To remind SMBs of Canon’s long history of vision, innovation and invention. It was time to disrupt, challenging SMBs to look at IT through a new, broader, business-focused lens. This involved:

  • Writing, refining and producing the video that would spread higher-purpose messaging.
  • Intertwining the script’s narrative, of the lens and the power of innovation, through EDMs, social media campaigns and web pages to drive engagement and create lead-gen.
  • Developing a holistic strategy that fused all prongs of IT into one service, one bill. Then branding it (FuseIT) so Canon could have real ownership and command authority.
  • Designing a slide deck for Canon Group’s sales team, explaining the transformation story, rooted in innovation, to SMBs.
  • Creating the hashtag #KnowNoBounds to monitor campaign engagement and involvement.

And the result?

Canon Group now has a strong sense of purpose and pride, with a story steeped in innovation – one that could carry them through future launches. Now that they understand the how, why and what, SMB millennials can now take the brand they’d grown up with through each step of their career, making Canon Group entirely future-proof and secure as an IT super-brand.

(Here’s a funny story about changing a brand perception. It’s called Rebranding the Potato.