Insights

How a ‘Second Opinion’ helped IOTAS reclaim its innovator status

June 24, 2021

COHN talks with smart apartment leader, IOTAS, in our latest webinar episode

“A second opinion is something everybody needs and should be actively seeking. It’s really easy to become complacent and make assumptions and think the status quo is good enough… But if you really want to innovate, you have to have an open mind.” – Layne Spencer, Director of Sales & Marketing, IOTAS

Finding truth through objectivity is one of the primary benefits of hiring a marketing agency. No matter who you are or how much success you’ve achieved, there is only so much you can see from your own perspective, and bringing in a second opinion can be the key that unlocks your greatest successes as a marketer.

This is the premise for our new webinar series Second Opinion.

To launch our first episode, COHN chatted with IOTAS, the leader in smart home technology for multifamily apartment buildings. Our relationship with IOTAS began a little more than a year ago, as the world locked down in the face of Covid-19.

“I think [Covid-19] gave us a lot of time to pivot. Where are we going to be? How are we going to make our voice and our dollars count? And that’s kind of where COHN came in,” said Ren Robinson, Marketing and Events specialist at IOTAS. “They looked at what everyone else was doing, what was happening in the industry, and figured out where IOTAS fit in terms of where our core values were as a company, and what the industry needed from us.”

Led by visionary founder Sce Pike, IOTAS was one of the first in multifamily to bring smart home technology to apartment complexes. After gaining traction and becoming the brand leader in the industry, IOTAS soon saw well-funded competition on the scene, and they sought a marketing partner to help retain their market leader status.

COHN began its work by diving deep into the competition, the IOTAS brand and its audiences in order to find insights and brand distinction. Through long-format interviews and audience surveys, two major insights formed the foundation for our marketing strategy.

“I think in a lot of ways we wanted to validate our own assumptions, our understanding of our own audiences, the strategies we had in place,” said Layne Spencer, Director of Sales & Marketing, IOTAS. “But at the same time, we wanted all of that to be challenged, too. We wanted a fresh look, and we were able to do both of those in partnership with COHN. It enabled us to take the brand to a new level.”

For more of the IOTAS story, watch our full conversation with their team and ours on Second Opinion. And to get a second opinion for your business, give us a call and inject some objective expertise into your marketing, like IOTAS did.

SECONDOPINION_6821 from Cohn Marketing on Vimeo.

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