Betsy Treinen believes that right here, right now is the most exciting time in her marketing career. “Everything is changing,” says the director of client services of Minneapolis-based Catalyst Studios. Let us count the ways: Business models, how businesses interact with customers, interactive technology, doing more with less money—all are challenging clients and marketers to change the way they do their work. Even if some companies have to be dragged there kicking and screaming.
If marketing agencies (advertising, design) are evolving, Catalyst offers one model of that. Like Zeus Jones (discussed here last week), Catalyst eschews the “A-word” (i.e., agency). The term can suggest a goofy-clever gun for hire rather than what many “new marketing” firms seek to be: a thoughtful, active collaborator in helping make a product or service succeed.
And like Zeus Jones, Catalyst hasn’t quite come up with a name for its species. (Marketing and design strategy company, maybe? Okay, a little long.) But it is clear on what it does—as Betsy puts it, “not advertising but problem solving.”
Founder Jason Rysavy started Catalyst primarily as a graphic and Web site design shop in 1999—his first client was Target. Catalyst quickly grew as it took on more and more work with big brands. Many are still with Catalyst, notably Best Buy, Kohl’s, Medtronic, (and Target). Over time, he saw that simply producing materials was not a long-term growth strategy for his shop. (It was also getting way too competitive—too many designers chasing less and less work.) Particularly in the last few years, he’d seen clients’ needs shifting a bit from traditional media into new directions. So he decided to focus the company entirely on interactive.
And he decided he wanted to do more than simply design stuff. “We want to help companies to think more—to think more strategically about their marketing, but also their products, their packaging and their processes,” Jason says.
As interactive technologies change the ways brand messages are being received—in short, much more critically by “consumers,” who are less and less prone to being passive receivers of glittering marketing generalities—and with corporate marketing staffs being downsized, the “skeleton crews” that remained needed outside marketing consultants who could provide not just “creative” but also “strategic.”
To help build that kind of company, Jason—who says he likes to hire “people who are smarter than me”—began several years ago to bring in heavier-hitting talent, starting with Betsy, who’d worked in brand strategy with several agencies in town, most recently Peterson Milla Hooks, the Minneapolis shop largely responsible for the “Target Look” in the 1990s in print and TV advertising.
Besides Web sites, Catalyst’s specialties include game design, social media, and what it terms “motion.” (Check out its portfolio here). It also has done what Jason calls “less sexy” but still strategically useful projects, like developing internal process applications, which deal with anything from automating the management of digital assets to restructuring entire job flows and reinventing how a company manages its vendor negotiation processes.
The projects that particularly interest Catalyst are those where a client’s ideas haven’t quite jelled—and that tend to fall between the cracks. “We’re often brought in to deal with a bastard child,” Jason says. “Many times our job is to tell clients what they don’t need.”
Case in point. Kohl’s wanted to recruit higher-quality marketing talent via its Web sites. Kohl’s came to Catalyst, saying, “Can you make us a sitelet to help us recruit in this one category?” Catalyst said, basically, Um, okay, but the problem is bigger than that. A sitelet would simply be one more in a stable of recruiting sites that were all over the place in terms of design and messaging.
Catalyst instead developed a strategy that stepped back and approached the challenge in a broader, more global, more branded way. The look changed, but more importantly, an entire employment brand was born, a place the client hadn’t even thought to go. The various sitelets were pulled together under one umbrella, the employees were brought in as “evangelists” via video, and the various office locations began to look like parts of a seamless whole.
Jason notes that it’s difficult to convey this “marketing think-tank” approach on the company’s Web site. How do you portfolio-ize thinking? How do you communicate the idea that people are less and less passive to marketing messages, and are looking for better products and more useful information about those products?
“Over time,” Jason believes, “there will be less tomfoolery in marketing. Risk taking, yeah, by all means. Experimentation even, as technology pushes ever newer bounds. But calculated risk taking, thoughtful experimentation. These are the things that will put companies on top of the heap.”
BTW: The Minnesota chapter of the Business Marketing Association (BMA-MN) celebrates its first anniversary this month. It’s gone from zero to 120 members in that time. Business-to-business marketing strikes me as a particularly dynamic field right now. More and more B2B companies are looking to get away from standard brochures and “brochureware” Web sites and create more dynamic interactions with customers. B2Bs have rightly focused on selling on features—but they’re realizing that a more “emotional” (there may be a better word) engagement can drive sales. You can watch some of the speakers from previous BMA-MN’s events here.
Birdwatching in the Twitterverse: @catalyststudios, @BMAMinnesota, @generebeck
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