Honoring Legacy and Setting a Tone for Future Growth

Unified CST

Honoring Legacy and Setting a Tone for Future Growth

the Overview

Nesnah Ventures is a family-owned holding company based in La Crosse, WI that operates a unique portfolio of businesses in a variety of industries. The company supports its brands from a centralized shared services model that supports each business to maintain focus on providing exceptional products and unparalleled service. Nesnah Ventures entered the weighing solutions industry in 2011 with the purchase of La Crosse Scale. Since then, they’ve acquired four more scale companies throughout the region to become the largest weighing solutions company in the Midwest. They partnered with Kolbeco to create a new identity that honored the history and legacy of their weighing solutions companies while uniting them under one brand for the future.

the strategy

People get attached to brands. Regular customers know the name by heart and it’s attached to positive experiences and memories they have with team members and products. To employees who have been with the company any number of years, that brand is part of their identity. In this situation, that reality was multiplied by the number of brands we were merging into one. In addition, the brands already shared the same logo that the client wanted to keep. It was important that we emerged from this process with a name that truly reflected what this collective company brought to the market and felt at home with their current logo. Kolbeco worked with the client to assemble a team of creative thinkers from throughout the Nesnah portfolio of brands to collaborate on this project.

the tactics

Discovery Session: Multiple members of the Kolbeco team led an in-person discovery session with Nesnah Ventures key stakeholders. Through these sessions, we dove deep on what differentiates Nesnah Ventures’ scale companies, what customers and employees valued most, and what qualities we wanted to lean in on with this new identity.

Workshops: Additional in-person workshops extracted inspiration and ideas from this cross-functional team. We used that information to develop three potential families of names for the new scale company, each thematically tied in a manner that told a story and invoked the essence of various core pillars of their identity.

Presentation: Kolbeco presented the potential options to the client, each with their own explanation and brand story, that accentuated some or all of the most important traits we identified through our process. The names were all met with excitement, but the name Unifide CST stood out to the team and was ultimately chosen as the right identify for merging these brands.

Launch Support: Launching a new brand requires earning the buy-in of stakeholders, and inspiring them to lead by example as they make the new name and brand story part of their vocabulary, allowing the new brand to fully take root. To make this possible, Kolbeco developed talking points for both the internal and external launches of the new brand name to ensure people understood why we were doing it, how the name was chosen, and what the team could accomplish together under this new identity.

the results

Unifide CST is now embedded as the company’s identity in all markets. Employees and customers have been drawn to what it represents and how well it aligns with the brand’s values of Customer Focused, Fearless, Flexible, Honest, and Compliant (regulatory). With this new name, all locations benefit from a larger footprint and broader reputation. Customers with multiple locations know they are dealing with one company with vast resources and expertise, and can expect consistent service and support. With future plans to grow, Nesnah Ventures now has one strong brand to confidently welcome in new locations, assets, and team members.
“Kolbeco was the right partner to help us unite the scale companies in our portfolio under a new and exciting brand. They walked our team through a process that was engaging, interactive, and considered the input of everyone involved. Taking inspiration from our conversations, they presented our team with a variety of new names and identities to consider. In this collection we found our new identity- Unifide CST, a brand that perfectly reflects our commitment to leveraging our expertise and vast footprint in service of our customers.”
Cate Hollowitsch – Chief Marketing Officer

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