Spring 2018

Elevage Partners is a financial advising firm composed of a team of experienced financial advisors with goals and aspirations that executes careful, thoughtful & well – executed management of clients’ financial assets and retirement savings highlighting that with their tagline of “Plan First. Then Invest”. They pride themselves in crafting personal relationships with each and every client, they showcase that with their “Stand In Your Shoes” philosophy that is a driving force in all their financial planning. The company has been very successful with clients who are from older generations, but Elevage Partners has been looking to expand their clientele to the younger market such as millenials; and they feel that a possible company rebranding was needed. Our team’s task was to work alongside our client Brian to rebrand the Elevage Partners company by creating a new name and logo, plus a brand style guide. Since our client was also looking to expand to millenials, we recommended revamping their social media to give them a stronger web presence, optimize SEO, and legitimize them to the audience they are trying to attract. Our role in this was to draw up deliverables in the form of a social media guidelines write – up and a social media whitepaper.

The team that would be working together all semester was made up of Jared Cyr, Michael Ferreira, Justin Markert, Christopher Nista, & Joey Spagnuolo. Michael & Jared would be the project managers; and then the team worked together in two separate task forces in a divide & conquer strategy to tackle the tasks of the company rebranding and the social media.

Our initial meeting with Brian, who is one of the founding partners of Elevage Partners, went smoothly. We were not only able to learn to learn who’s working within the company, what their vision is, but through this meeting they entrusted us with steering the ship for the project. We had the luxury of working with enthusiastic & invigorated members of the company who were on the same page with our plans. Following the meeting our team immediately put our heads together in  brainstorming sessions to think of names, colors, and any other ideas on how we should rebrand the Elevage Partners company. We looked into the meanings of words, the psychology of colors, and even what other financial businesses were doing. We took that all into consideration, and combining that with the friendly personal image we knew our client was looking to project, we figured Amity (Definition: A close personal friendship) was ideal. After looking into the name, seeing if any other financial business uses the name or if there’s a trademark, we found the greenlight to go with Amity as no one else was using it. We crafted several logos with different designs, then we put together a poll which we sent out to our peers to do focus testing. After looking at the results, seeing which logos were the favorites & why, we took the results into consideration to pick the design we would go with. Color-wise we initially had our hearts & minds set on the logo being purple, our research showed it gives off a “wise” image. Our client liked our reasoning but felt better staying closer to green & other natural colors which is what we ultimately used.

When it came to social media, Elevage Partners had company guidelines set up but aside from that they weren’t familiar with social media as the company had an extremely limited social media presence. Realizing that it was more than likely none of us from the team would be able to see through the launch and the subsequent maintenance of the social media profile our solution was to draw up comprehensive company guidelines and social media white papers to guide the newly formed Amity social media accounts. These documents came to fruition after conducting research into recommended social media practices, looking into FCC regulations, and seeing what other established financial businesses had for their companies’ white papers. Once we gathered the information that was necessary and trimmed away what we felt what wouldn’t suit our client, we put together a social media white paper we felt would be a quality manual to success on social media.

Project Team
Jared Cyr
Michael Ferriera
Justin Markert
Chris Nista
Joey Spagnuolo