With one man, one truck, and in one city, John Planes, Sr. founded Planes Companies as a local moving company in 1921.Today, Planes Companies is a thriving 3rd generation company focused on moving, warehousing, transportation, and logistics. With a global footprint, Planes can help a person move across town or help a company solve complex global supply chain problems.
Adding Marketing Expertise to Their Growth Strategy
Coming out of the COVID epidemic in 2020, Planes Companies engaged CMO-OnLoan to help them with two marketing issues. First, they wanted an outside perspective on their growth strategy. Second, they wanted to bolster their marketing team’s strategy and execution by incorporating CMO-OnLoan’s depth of experience.
Amy Connor, founder and CEO of CMO-OnLoan shares, “Planes Companies operates in a complex business segment, offering a vast array of services. They are a premium service provider with global expertise in residential moving, specialized logistics, office relocation, corporate campus facility support, warehouse fulfillment, healthcare activation, and hospitality warehousing and install.
Early in our discovery process, we recognized that as they expanded and diversified through the years, many of those services were branded as distinct business units. By 2020, they promoted nine different brands with nine logos, nine websites, and nine marketing plans. This made it difficult for them to effectively go to the market with a clear story. Their stories and branding often confused customers to a degree. Even their internal teams struggled with articulating how the brands meshed. Together we decided to adapt our scope of work to a more strategic starting point.”
Craig English, Planes Companies Executive Vice President, adds, “When you spend years in an organization, sometimes it is hard to see how the things that make sense to you from the inside may not appear so clear to the outside world. CMO-OnLoan provided significant clarity in this regard. Not only was maintaining that many brands hard inefficient from a cost perspective, but we were also diluting the power of our core brand.
Streamlining to Promote the Power of Core Brands
CMO-OnLoan recommended a revised brand architecture that streamlined the brands from nine down to two. Says English, “We defined how the two brands correlated to each other with shared values and shared services. We explored countless iterations throughout the discovery process. CMO-OnLoan met with our leadership weekly to stay aligned. They broke everything down in a very logical and strategic manner. They asked a ton of questions and listened intently to the various voices in the company. Then they gave us a step-by-step path that made sense to our key stakeholders. With CMO-OnLoan’s guidance, we were able to align our entire team behind promoting the power of core brands vs. many small brands.”
English adds, “The benefits of the work we did on reinventing the brands, making our story more powerful, and getting buy-in from everyone is now woven into our culture. The simplification has had huge operational benefits, but creating that clarity and being able to tell our story more simply and powerfully has really helped our identity in the marketplace and with our team.”
Once the brand foundation was set, the teams moved on to a more operational focus. Says Connor, “We modified websites, created marketing and sales plans, set up KPI trackers, and created internal processes and infrastructure. We helped redefine the marketing team’s roles and objectives, hire new marketing team members, and reorganize their agencies. Our focus was to first streamline, then build, and then scale the infrastructure.
Being a Part of One TEAM
Connor adds, “The Planes culture and the way they treated us as part of the team truly made our engagement with them work. They listened, but also challenged us. We were having conversations not presentations. It was not transactional at all.”
English says, “CMO-OnLoan truly became part of our team and part of our culture. There was a lot of trust in the relationship. They really pushed us to think with critical depth and we appreciated that. We also respected the fact that they were open as a partner and very flexible. The biggest thing was them coming in, embracing our organization, and becoming part of the team. We wouldn’t have had a three-year experience with them if that hadn’t happened.”
English closes, “I have been with the Planes organization for over 24 years, during that time we have diversified our service offerings and recognized tremendous revenue growth. We find it extremely fulfilling that we have built an environment and culture that our people proudly promote. Our entire leadership and executive teams feel that our relationship with CMO-OnLoan has helped us develop a marketing foundation to propel our growth at an even more accelerated pace in the future.”
Explore how Planes Companies brings its exceptional business and household moving services worldwide through its divisions, Planes and GWS:
Planes Companies – https://teamplanes.com/
GWS https://gwspartners.com/