Traditional Case Study

The Lancaster Chamber of Commerce and Industry

After an exhaustive strategic planning process, The Lancaster Chamber of Commerce & Industry (LCCI) emerged with a new mission, vision and set of core strategies. They selected Stoner Bunting Advertising to create a new brand position and identity to communicate the new mission, which involved transforming the fundamentally transaction-based group to a more impactful community-focused organization.

The Chamber had a generous body of research for us to consult and interpret prior to formulating our strategy. Membership studies, community leadership surveys, and member exit surveys revealed that every member had a different definition of the value of Chamber membership based solely on their own individual goals and experience. There was no consensus on what The Chamber stood for, and a large variety of expectations for membership.

Our challenge was to communicate clear and consistent benefits of Chamber membership to an incredibly diverse audience, which literally includes every business, educational, agricultural, government and community organization in Lancaster County. To this end, we developed a model that established three phases of membership, showing how each interacted with the others and ultimately served the overall goal of community prosperity. This Cycle of Prosperity incorporated LCCI’s core strategies to tell a very complicated business story in a very simple manner, and to increase member participation by targeting programs to the appropriate audience.

We created a new logo, tagline and brand design standards to support the new position. Based on this new look and strategy, we also developed a brochure to introduce the new position to current members as well as a complete sales kit targeting businesses that were not yet Chamber members.

The new brand positioning and materials were launched to an audience of 700 members at The Chamber’s 2009 Annual Meeting. The new logo, tagline, and the story behind the position were all enthusiastically received by the membership. More importantly, in the first quarter following the launch, The Chamber had a record number of new memberships and renewals. The new brand materials clearly met the goal of making the value of Chamber membership compelling enough to justify the investment, even in a challenging economic climate.