Engine Room Design Spreading the Message of Education

PR Log (Press Release) – May 21, 2009 – Design and branding agency, The Engine Room, has just unveiled the launch of a simple yet clever re-brand to reposition txttools®, a dynamic company that provides SMS text communication for education, healthcare, councils, the police, and businesses, by injecting an invigorated and technological look into their marketing communications.

txttools® is an online application that allows SMS text messages to be securely sent and received from a desktop computer to large groups or single mobile phones.
With a particular focus in the education sector, txttools’s product edutxt® is now used in over 45% of UK universities and colleges. edutxt® is a feature rich application with many uses, for example allowing lecturers to reach their students should a lecture be cancelled or the lecture room changed and sending course information and all types of updates.

Founded in 2001, txttools® has established a reputation for excellent service levels, cutting edge technology and products that benefit business. Their existing brand was not truly reflective of these capabilities and needed to be improved to take the business to the next level. txttools® have just secured funding from existing shareholders and the Viking Fund* to help grow the business during the recession and so the new brand unveiling is even more timely as part of an overall upgrade in the marketing communications to drive sales and profit to the bottom line.

The new txttools® identity captures the essence of the business: functional and user friendly with simplicity being central to setting them apart from their competition, a defining factor in using design as a competitive tool. Cutting-edge technology that is simple and easy to use lies at the core of this re-brand. Darren Evans, Creative Director of The Engine Room said: “The 'Simple.Clever.' concept uses down-to-earth language and communicates what the product does perfectly. Many of txttools® competitors rely heavily on a technological look, blinding the customers with science. With txttools®, the technology is no lesser in quality, in fact it's better, but there's a very strong human side to the business that is worth exploiting as a differentiator – txttools® are 'the text people'.”

With features such as scheduled messaging, templates, messages to landlines, inbox rules and data exporting. txttools® is one of the only systems to use 2-way messaging, allowing the collection of inbound texts. txttools® managing director, Stephen McCann, felt that it was time for their brand to reflect the multitude of services they can provide, and promote the time and money saving factors that are imperative for every business.

“Good marketing communications improve your bottom line. We go in and present to prospective customers and once we are gone they must then sell the idea to their peers - the web site and other marketing materials needed to make that process more compelling. The re-branding process has been a pretty exciting journey, we know we have great applications and a great proposition. We just weren't conveying that message as clearly as we might have.”

“Darren and Mark [of The Engine Room] came in and did a very thorough job of de-constructing our current, somewhat conflicting, messages. They spoke to our team, customers and even competitors. They have done a fantastic job of re-positioning our business with a clever mix of design and good old fashioned logic. Everyone in the company has confidence in the new branding, we firmly believe that this process will add money to our bottom line."

txttools® are on target to hit £1.8million this year, in comparison to the £135,000 they were turning over in 2004, showing a vast growth for the company that started out with one employee in 2001 and now has 27.

The Engine Room have a long standing relationship with txttools® and are planning to monitor the success of the re-brand over the coming months.