Moss Adams

Background

Moss Adams is an integrated professional services firm dedicated to assisting clients with growing, managing, and protecting their prosperity. With more than 2,600 professionals and staff across more than 20 locations across the Western U.S. and beyond, Moss Adams works with many of the world’s most innovative companies and leaders. Moss Adams is distinguished for deep industry expertise and a canny ability to help middle-market clients identify and embrace emerging opportunities.

Challenge

Facing stiff competition from the Big 4 – and fighting a perception that they were “just an accounting firm” – Moss Adams needed to communicate their comprehensive breadth of services, as well as their deep industry expertise.

Additionally, the numerous local offices traditionally produced their own materials in support of their local business development efforts. This resulted in a huge variety of materials, formats and messages, without the strength and influence of a strong, coordinated, centralized brand identity.

Moss Adams engaged Stoke to conduct a comprehensive brand initiative to help them research and identify their unique strengths and values, and develop a differentiable and defensible brand position in the market.

Outcome

Stoke conducted a comprehensive research program, gathering insights from internal stakeholders as well as current and potential clients. This was followed by a Brand Opportunity Modeling initiative in which we developed and tested three different brand positions.

The selected position – Bringing More West to Business – highlights Moss Adams’ western/Pacific geography as a metaphor for the way they approach business: “With an abundant spirit of optimism, openness and enterprise, we help clients explore, understand and embrace emerging opportunity.”

Stoke also facilitated a Simplification initiative for Moss Adams’ collateral system, reducing the huge volumes of sales and marketing materials that were created into one streamlined and centralized brochure/insert system – transitioning the majority of materials to the website.

In support of this new position, Stoke worked together with our partners at Turnstyle to develop a new logo and fresh visual identity expressed through an ad campaign, brochure, sales inserts and PPT template.