WCR – Brand Refresh
Unique Selling Point:
Protecting your vehicle’s value.
Justification:
Most in this category present themselves as repairers. Whangaparaoa Collision Repair go a level further to make your vehicle better than it was, thus focussing on protecting value rather than just repairing damage.
More:
Success in their sights despite Covid lockdowns.
It’s great to see some people have been using some of their unplanned downtime to work ON their business and processes. A great opportunity to keep the mind active, positive, and come out of this Covid nonsense stronger than ever.
Some have embraced this opportunity. Take Whangaparaoa Collision Repairs, now rebranded to WCR Collision Repairs. They have been running a great vehicle repair facility for coming on to 10 years now. They’re different, you’ll see if you visit them. They are quick and professional in helping you assess your vehicle’s repair and with their strong insurance alliances can help your claim to get accepted promptly. With 16 staff and 23 hire vehicles, including those for trade customers they can help to keep you on the road. With a state-of-the-art facility they are computerised including a job tracking system and will notify you, by text, with a brief status update during key milestones of your vehicle’s repair. That’s something you won’t find in most shops and something this writer found helpful during his own repair.
When faced with having to close their doors temporarily due to lockdowns, owners Matt and Elina Cameron choose to make good use of the time and futureproof their brand for their long-term business strategy and modernise their look. “If you don’t refresh your logo presentation and evolve things, a business can look stale. It was time,” says Matt.
Matt recalls a mentor once telling him – 1/3 of the business is what you do, 1/3 is how you look and the last 1/3 is how you are perceived. “So, the last 2/3 is branding right?”
“Not just our logo, but everything we do with our logo too. But it was more than that. when we first started, we designed the logo ourselves, on a napkin. We didn’t need a logo this time, we needed a brand.”
70% of NZ Businesses take a DIY approach to their brand and sales tools. That’s okay but doing it yourself will only take you so far, and the results can be slower.
If you look professional customers instantly are put at ease, The way you look, the way you operate to deliver for your customers – it all adds up in the way you are perceived.
In this rebranding it was crucial WCR didn’t lose any of the good value they had already created by re-inventing the wheel. It was important to them they instead built on the strengths and enhanced the value.
“Choosing Chris Norris from Allbrand.co.nz, we achieved exactly what we set out to do.”
“We retained some of the recognised colours and wording. Chris helped us to understand how to make this work and guided us the whole way with useful tools like a logo sheet that includes colour specifications to use with our paint suppliers, and brand guidelines that keeps everything in one place for us.”
A rebrand or refresh doesn’t have to be a large undertaking or expensive by anyone’s standards, if done well. When everything gets done at the same time there is so much efficiency in the way you can rebrand, and this adds up to real savings. “Allbrand came to us with $1000’s savings from some of our existing suppliers and were even happy for us to use any of our own, if we had good deals in place already”, adds Matt.
“Now we think we have a professional and modern brand. And it is great to see this becoming uniform across everything. Chris helped us update the key items and as we need to replenish stocks for the lesser items, we’ll use the new brand on these too.”
WCR are on Whangaparaoa Road on the Hibiscus Coast, North of Auckland. Their service is still as good as ever. Now they have a great looking brand to go with it too.