Brand marketing from the ground up: from startup to growing business
Plant Factory, Australia
Plant Factory was born with a local focus in Melbourne’s vibrant city fringe but was always targeting national growth.
An agri-tech startup, Plant Factory builds smart hydroponic growth systems and produces fresh vegetables in scalable hydroponic farms. With a big idea that really stacked up, they needed to put down roots and grow quickly, attracting interest and investment while they still had the first-mover advantage. Realising this would take more than just an average agency, but a true growth partner, they got in touch with The Walk.
The destination
Knowing how important the local community would be to their initial growth, the team at Plant Factory wanted to work with a local partner and approached The Walk in inner-city Melbourne, just a short walk from their headquarters.
Our team loves innovation, healthy food and being good to the environment, so Plant Factory’s visionary idea was quick to capture our imagination. Our experience with startup marketing showed us that a well-elucidated, passionate and visionary brand would be important to their early success. This meant we needed to quickly understand their business, the technology, market, growth strategies, audiences and more. Then we would be able to help them become an established, visible and respected brand with a scalable marketing strategy to help them flourish and grow.
The route
The first step was to meet the product. The team met with their chief product engineer, who demonstrated the hydroponic garden technology for us and explained the unique features of their growing system and what it could mean for customers. Next, we conducted a discovery workshop with key stakeholders, where we established the important business information, motivation, and brand values which we’d need to build a magnetic brand for their passionate audience.
The result of this deep, structured immersion into the what, the who, and the why of Plant Factory, was a brand that fitted like a glove, from vision to visual design to brand positioning for distinct audiences. Our web development team delivered a succinct and stylish startup website featuring their first products. Crucially, this was wrapped in the context of the vision and mission of the business.
The Walk
With the brand established, we continued to partner with Plant Factory while they grew their team and internal capabilities and began to work on digital marketing. Taking an integrated approach, events and trade shows were identified as key to starting commercial relationships, and we helped with a striking event booth design which showcased their products and vision, alongside printed brochures that brought home the detail. Next came assistance with building local marketing partnerships with restaurants and supermarkets, targeted email campaigns, and starting up a social media presence. The stage was set for Plant Factory to then use brand marketing to build an engaged community, cultivate a loyal following and turn them into brand advocates.
With an agile approach across traditional and digital channels, we identified and supported the marketing activities that would make the biggest impact as the startup quickly developed into a viable business. We collaborated closely with Plant Factory as it grew so that the brand we were developing could be coherently applied by the internal team to social, email, digital marketing, and web updates.
An eye-catching exhibition stand showcased the product and the feeling of freshness and abundance that Plant Factory wanted to communicate.
Used for events and as hand outs for in-person meetings, a simple A5 flyer gave Plant Factory a piece of physical collateral to leave a brand impression in the real world.
Brand consistency is powerful for startups
Through a proven process of discovery, the marketing foundations built with The Walk helped Plant Factory present a clear and coherent brand vision and identity, to look and sound consistent and professional across all their marketing. We empowered their team to deliver the same consistency across all marketing touchpoints so they could efficiently and quickly respond to opportunities as they arose.
A quick and simple brand guide enabled Plant Factory to have a fast start whilst still managing their brand basics consistently, to build brand equity.
Brand building with a cohesive look and feel on social media helps quickly establish a recognisable brand.
