Making a B2B organization greater than the sum of its parts

In many B2B organizations central marketing often takes a backseat to demand generation and sales activity that sit at the product level. While this keeps budgets and resources closest to the customer (which is good), critical cross-company initiatives often get neglected. In the case of Morningstar, perceptions of their total capabilities lagged behind reality, their vast portfolio of products was complex and difficult to navigate, product naming and classification lacked a common approach and in many segments the brand was positioned uncompetitively.

Across the various business units within Morningstar, there were multiple competing definitions of what constituted a product, platform and / or feature. Internally this made it hard to sell multi-product solutions and made cross-sell and up-sell difficult as well. Externally this led to client confusion and frustration. We solved both issues by working across the various family brands to develop a single hierarchy and classification system for the portfolio.

While on paper Morningstar followed a descriptive naming approach, in practice the various business units applied their own naming conventions and logic to their various products and services. We helped strengthen naming consistency globally with a re-imagined naming process, new tools and better creative guidance on how to develop a rich palette of potential candidate names that adhered to the descriptive naming approach.

As a product centric organization, typically Morningstar would go-to-market with messaging that was somewhat ‘inside-out’ - with an over emphasis on features and benefits over client problems and needs. Working with marketing teams inside the business, we drove a more ‘outside-in’ approach to positioning the six new family brands. Our new positionings would center on the needs of advisors, asset managers, institutional investors and issuers of securities and the unique ways Morningstar could address them.