My business partners and I came to Method to help evolve the company. Our goals were to unlock Method's amazing portfolio of work and bench of creative talent, and turn it into a global studio with the potential for major impact with its clients.
As we worked through our strategy for achieving those goals it became clear that we needed to clarify Method's own brand proposition and determine the appropriate mechanisms for communicating that to the market.
Over the past decade, we have created dozens - even hundreds - of websites that do a superlative job of creating compelling brand experiences and effectively conveying the value proposition of many world-class organizations, from TED Conferences to Gensler to Autodesk. It became clear that our existing (and award-winning) site did not do as forceful a job for us as those we have created for our clients!
But this is not unusual in our industry, is it? So often service firms suffer from 'the shoe maker's children syndrome': websites that are dated and do not showcase their offerings well enough. In other words, we are so busy doing this stuff for other people that we don't have time to do it for ourselves and given we have so much work - why bother as it does not seem to be hurting us?
As part of an intensive internal branding exercise, which generated a number of marketing initiatives including increasing the visibility of our thought leadership and spending more time on the conference circuit, we felt that a new method.com site that did a better job of showcasing Method, its work, its people, and its thoughts, was a key part of the equation.
Furthermore, we wanted to employ techniques and technology that we have successfully used in our work, and in some cases pioneered, to showcase ourselves - such as rich media/video-based experiences, integrated blog postings, and hybrid HTML and Flash for best-of-breed interactions.
The result of these decisions became a significant effort for us as a company. We spent substantial time determining which case studies to showcase, established an editorial team, drew up standard policies, restaged the chosen content, generated new content that included entirely new images, assets, video, postings, etc.
At some point, almost everyone in the firm was involved in the creation of some aspect of the site - it became a living thing that everyone had a stake in. Opinions were surfaced daily, discussions became heated at times, but we got there.
And so it is with some pride that we unveil our new Method.com - we hope that it helps you understand who we are as a firm, what we can do for you as a client, how we work, what we are like to work with, and what it's like to work at Method.
And most of all, we hope you like it.
