Arska Group – Clarifying the brand strategy and rolling out updates

Goals: The Arska Group’s product brand hierarchy, marketing communications and concept in relation to the parent company needed clarification, and tools and materials for rollout were to be renewed.

Smartbutlers’ role: In addition to supporting the strategy work, our role was to create the marketing tools and materials, taking into account international sales growth objectives.

Results: The project’s outputs include an updated brand strategy, visual identity, brand manual, and new website and e‑commerce platforms for all companies in the group.

Arska Group and its subsidiaries Mepu Oy and Arskametalli Oy provide grain drying solutions for agriculture and industry. All products are designed and manufactured in Finland at the company’s own factories. In addition to the domestic market, the company sells to 13 European countries. Arska Group is a long-established Finnish family business that has been part of the Finnish grain industry since the 1950s.

“As farms grow and to better serve industrial customers, we want to offer our customers strong project and solution expertise. We have local sales representatives in the target countries, but we manage marketing and sales in export markets centrally from Finland. There are large differences between export markets, not only in seasonality or the type of grain grown, but also in buying behavior and marketing needs. In the project with Smartbutlers, our goal was to create operating models and implement tools that allow us to manage marketing in the target countries and ensure brand consistency,” says Marketing Director Tarja Viilola from Arska Group.

Mapping, concepting and visualization

The work began with interviews with management and sales as well as competitor and market reviews. This was followed by concepting the brand strategy and updating the brand identity. The brand strategy was made concrete, for example, in the form of an updated company presentation. To guide the brand identity both in Finland and among local sales representatives on international markets, a brand manual and a marketing plan were completed.

As part of the visual refresh, Smartbutlers updated materials and graphics such as logo and symbol libraries, product and company brochures, company presentations, business cards and social ad templates. After the visualizations, the website and e‑commerce redesign followed.

A website platform that grows with the company

“For the websites we wanted a solution that meets the needs of multilingualism and can also serve as a product and asset management tool and meet advertising needs. It was also a requirement to be able to update all sites from the same platform. In addition, we wanted a site integrated with our e‑commerce environment and CRM and that can be easily integrated with other systems in the future. The result is a platform hosting three sites with their online stores and 4–10 language versions per site. Work on the websites is ongoing; during the spring we will update the e‑commerce platforms,” Tarja says.