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We're wearing our 7th name tag — and it feels right.
When we created our agency, we asked clients — enterprise tech companies, mainly — to hand us their sh*ttiest, most oddly shaped problems, with the promise to solve them. And as it turned out, people love not having to do things they don’t want to do. Or don’t have time to do. Or don’t have the resources to do.
Taking these complicated puzzles and turning them into concrete, interesting solutions was something we came to love. Something we started to hang our hat on, so to speak. And from that hat, we pulled out a pretty specialized agency that tackled “really hairy, house-on-fire marketing and communications problems” (a real former tagline of ours). Soon, we had built a business that catered perfectly to enterprise technology — a space that always had products with intricate value props and hard-to-reach audiences.
The more we built enterprise solutions, though, the more we realized that behind these solutions was another problem: “enterprise tech marketing” wasn’t a term that was useful to anyone but us. The aha moment came as we understood this massive and emerging space before us had yet to be defined, and we rushed to give it a name. Enter: an identity crisis.
In the years that followed, we adopted several other taglines with varying mileage:
Vague, but not wrong: You have a story. Let’s tell it together.
Agency-splaining: An agency (a bunch of smart, talented people) / That helps companies (that’s you) / with what they want to say (the message and strategy)/ and how they want to say it (the medium and execution)
True, but not unique: Interdisciplinary, outcome-focused and pleasant.
Limiting; vaguely impolite: We specialize in helping leading brands with complicated value propositions
And as we moved through these adolescent phases with varying ways of self-identification, we continued to learn that we still didn’t know ourselves. Not really. Because the space around us was changing just as fast as we were, and we hadn’t stopped long enough to reflect how we showed up in this new world — or how our clients did. The people who were once amorphous enterprise employees with a suite of problems slowly grew a face, a recurring job title, and tasty requests to help bring a product to life.
You could consider us teens now. Our agency has grown from 7 to 70 employees in 7 years, with 20 percent of that growth happening in the past year. And the more we’ve grown, the more we’ve come to understand that generating an identity is a continual, iterative process.
As we were off having the quintessential “What is my purpose in life?” period that all teens experience, the omnipresence of digital marketing gave way to a whole new genre subset of business growth. A discipline of its own that positions, advocates for, and nurtures products in a brand new way. And it just so happened that we came to feel quite comfortable in that space.
So. While we can’t promise that we won’t look back 10 years from now and cringe at the outfit we’re wearing in 2022, we can promise that it feels really right for the first time.
Hi. We’re Article Group, and we’re a product marketing agency*. We’re so excited for what’s to come.
*A best-in-class agency that focuses on the needs of product marketers. We specialize in creating messaging and positioning frameworks, GTM campaigns, sales enablement, and content strategies for people with big ambitions that need smart solutions.
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