Manufacturers Alliance

Powering Leaders

After 80 years of stellar leadership in the manufacturing industry, The Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation (MAPI) needed to remind stakeholders of the exceptional value they provided members. With a goal to expand and diversify membership, and launch new online programming options, the association’s leadership team came to Grafik looking for a stronger foundation and a clear path to renewed relevance.

Our efforts to define, name, and express the evolved MAPI brand started with a market research initiative aimed at engaging top manufacturing executives to gain a deeper understanding of the value MAPI, and other member organizations, held within this industry. Insightful feedback from this survey, coupled with one-on-one interviews, a competitive audit, and internal working sessions, yielded a scalable framework for the brand that informed how we’d approach the identity and communicate with both internal and external audiences.

But we still had one challenge–the name. Like so many trade associations, they had adopted an acronym that provided little insight into the mission of the organization. Furthermore, the name presented numerous challenges for the marketing team. Few pronounced MAPI correctly, and even fewer could recall the full name. After carefully evaluating the existing equity in MAPI, we presented dozens of options but in the end, the most straightforward was selected. Rather than adopting a new name, we were able to shorten MAPI to more accurately represent their role in the industry.

Building on the brand narrative, Grafik created the mantra “Powering Leaders” and developed a logo and visual identity to reflect the organization’s new clarity and purpose. In the end, Manufacturers Alliance was reintroduced to the market as the preeminent leadership community for America’s manufacturing industry.

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