Regional Innovation Centre ELORIN Refocuses Their Brand Strategy with Distility

The ELORIN team and their Disitility 1 Page Brand Strategy

ELORIN is a not-for-profit organization that capitalizes on the experience and intellect of business leaders to help new and existing biobusinesses in the Eastern Lake Ontario region take their ideas to market. As one of 14 Regional Innovation Networks in Ontario, ELORIN provides services to local entrepreneurs, with the overall goal of making the Eastern Lake Ontario region a leader in innovative biobusiness, both in terms of R&D and employment.

Over the last 18 months, ELORIN has prepared for a transition from primarily facilitating networking opportunities to also providing expert business advisory services through resources such as its Opportunity Response Team. In changing focus, the need arose to reconsider how to present ELORIN to the marketplace. “We’d known for some time that we were undergoing a change in direction and while we didn’t want to lose the brand we’d built up, we wanted to be able to explore that brand and have it also mean what we now stand for,” said ELORIN’s Executive Director, Shelagh McDonald. The question was, how?

Distility 1day1brand was recommended by ELORIN board chair Tim Smith, whose organization, Octane Medical Group, had previously gone through the workshop.  At the board’s request, Ms. McDonald interviewed Distility founder Axle Davids, as well as representatives of two other branding agencies. After considering the three firms, ELORIN selected Disitility because while the competitors were focused on crafting marketing messages, Distility understood the depth and breadth of the exercise ELORIN was undertaking and could help ensure that the board and management were walking a shared path to a common goal.

Members of the ELORIN board and management then came together at the MaRS Collaboration Center with the Distility team. Moving through the Distility 1day1brand workflow, they explored the essence of the ELORIN brand through images and words. In discussing the nature of innovation and the organization’s role in helping regional businesses, participants were guided by the Distility decision-support system, which allowed them to methodically assess the ideas they had generated together, so they could could commit to those that best expressed the brand’s promise, personality and position.

“I found the day really helpful. We often struggled to articulate who we are, what we do and how we provide value to our clients. I think the process that we’ve gone through has helped to bring clarity to that. And I think the visual images that we’ve come up with are going to be really helpful to being able to articulate [who ELORIN is] to others as we go forward,” commented board member David Berg, Technology Group Leader at E.I. DuPont Canada Company.

Adding a different perspective, Tim Smith, a Distility 1day1brand repeat participant, observed that “one thing that is interesting is having gone through a different but in some ways similar session as a company, is being able to apply this to a not-for-profit, and get in our heads different terminology around competition. It was quite interesting to be able to stretch in the context of being a resource, a government resource, to enable our different clients.”

The Distility 1day1brand participants gave the workshop top marks and feel it was incredibly beneficial to the organization. ELORIN is moving ahead with renewed vigor; it is in the process of bringing its website into alignment with the new brand strategy and, more immediately, Shelagh McDonald has found great success in using the new brand promise to articulate to the marketplace what ELORIN does, what it doesn’t do and how it can help Eastern Lake Ontario region.