Driving Efficiency Forward: Rebranding OTC Industrial Technologies

After nearly six decades of growth, OTC partnered with Origo Branding to create a new brand strategy to better reflect their evolved set of solutions and sub-brands, as well as their national reach beyond Ohio, helping set the course for continued growth for the company’s future.

Background of OTC

OTC Industrial Technologies was established in 1963 as Ohio Transmission Corporation. Since that time, it has grown to beone of the largest industrial distributors and service providers in the United States. As a leader in its field, the company offers expert services and solutions for industrial motion control, factory automation, fluid power, pumping systems, spray finishing, power transmission, and compressed air systems.

Challenges

With growth, came branding and marketing challenges. New acquisitions and expansion of services created new segments and divisions of their business. This can lead to certain groups under their umbrella to be disjointed from their enterprise brand story, generating confusion internally, as well as in the market. Therefore, a new brand identity needed to be established to re-introduce the company and its evolved suite of offerings and sub-brands. Also, OTC needed to establish clarity and internal stability around how each of their different entities laddered up to their network of evolved offerings, creating a cohesive marketing message. 

Opportunity

Recognizing this as a new opportunity for the next chapter of their business, the organization changed its name to OTC Industrial Technologies. This was to reflect how their business reach has expanded to a national level over the years. It also provided a branding strategy that can transcend to other services and technologies beyond transmission, while paying homage to its roots by maintaining “OTC” in the name. To help round out this initiative, OTC reached out to Origo Branding to bring their new brand to life through a new logo, messaging system, brand architecture, media toolkit, and Brand Guideline. From his exercise, our goal was to also help create a structure for how the organization will implement its brand story at each level of the company, creating a visual hierarchy and messaging system that will allow for the continued growth of OTC through a Branded House system.

A New Look For The Future

To create a fresh and forward-thinking brand strategy, the first and most visible change was a re-envisioned OTC logo. Origo consulted with corporate leadership and partner organizations to determine OTC’s desired vision of their future, as well as their positioning in the industry. We audited competitors, as well as identified essential brand attributes to differentiate our creative approach. Attributes that were identified were themes of strength, innovation, experience, trust, and OTC’s American foundation. These elements were integrated into three conceptual directions that were tested, eventually leading to a new and highly recognizable logo lockup that reflects OTC’s competitive advantages and heritage, as well as its constant drive for future innovation.

A Strategy For Continued Growth

Not only did the new logo mark need to embody OTC’s current strength and capabilities, it also needed to be applicable to the company’s existing and future divisions and sub-brands. Origo crafted brand guidelines that outlined how to implement the new logo and visual elements into a Branded House architecture, applying the new symbol to their different entities, as well as their communication strategies and marketing mix. What we found was that the logo was unique to OTC, helping to generate lasting brand recognition, it was also able to easily be applied to each sub-brand. This helped each group or division maintain their separate value propositions, while creating greater connection to the umbrella brand of OTC, providing better opportunities to cross-promote the organization’s wide range of offerings to partners.

Supporting Communication

With its new logo, tagline, and brand system in place, OTC was ready to begin promoting its new identity and leveraging it for sales growth. They needed to develop sales team brand champions through internal communication strategies, as well as share the new strategy with external partners. Drawing inspiration from the new logo design, Origo tailored supporting graphic elements and messaging solutions for various print and digital tactics, including the company’s new online experience, generating an emphasis on emerging services and the their new e-commerce website.

Now, with a name and image to reflect the evolution of services and sub-brands of OTC, the organization can better communicate with partners from different segments within the B2B space. We are proud to have helped generate this new corporate identity and replicable brand system for their team, as together, we were able to craft a creative business strategy that will be a catalyst for future expansion in their relationships, services, and success.