Starfish

I'm a department head at a real estate development company. We have offices in the US and Germany.

Starfish has provided branding, advertising, and graphic design services for our company. Starfish has created the branding identity of a restaurant we work with, including the restaurant's logo, menus, and collateral marketing materials. Starfish supports our company in communication and graphic design projects since their team has the ability to create all necessary assets regarding communication and branding.

We work consistently with three teammates from Starfish, including an executive, an account manager, and a creative director. These teammates work with a bigger creative team, although I don't engage with them directly.

We've spent around $500,000 with Starfish.

We started working with Starfish in January 2019, and our engagement is ongoing.

I’m satisfied with Starfish's work that meets our business objectives.

Starfish is very responsive to our requests and to urgent tasks. We've requested work for the next day, and Starfish has stayed up all night to deliver work. The team goes above and beyond to satisfy our requests. We communicate via weekly Zoom meetings, in-person meetings, and phone calls.

I'm mostly impressed with Starfish's dedicated team that understands our requirements. The team is smart and propositive, delivering top-notch solutions. We have a great relationship and enjoy working with Starfish.

Starfish is able to work and satisfy any client, but clients have to be creative, too. I recommend potential clients have a clear idea of what they want to accomplish with their project, and Starfish will help any client regardless of their situation.

I am the former Sr. Director of Marketing of Optum Tri-State

Healthcare services provider of care delivery organizations and pharmacy care services (including a pharmacy benefit manager).

2-5 Employees

The project scope included the development of one website that rolled three care delivery organizations into one branded, engagement-oriented site to match the corporate entity's brand (Optum):

Overall visits increased significantly along with specific Current and New Patient engagement as measured by webs tools, EMR usage, etc.

Starfish delivered on time and were highly responsive to the team especially given the changing needs of the assignment.

They understand the full marketing function and are masters at branding, know how to get it done and how to activate it all. All with a the smarts and great customer service!

None.

I’m the senior director of marketing for CommScope, a consumer products group. We’re a manufacturer of electronic communication equipment. I oversee the marketing for all the retail segment, which is marketed under another brand name. We make a line of surfboard and cable modems and surfboard max mesh Wi-Fi systems.

We needed help with marketing and advertising. The work was aimed explicitly at messaging and positioning a new product for our mesh Wi-Fi system.

We initially had a briefing meeting with Starfish; they talked to one of our marketing people. We gave them the background on how we would position the product to customers, some of the key message points we wanted to highlight, the audience we were targeting, and the distribution channels. They went back and made changes. Then, we reviewed it with our product team.

David (Founder & CEO) was very involved. Additionally, there were two creative people on the project.

I worked with Starfish at a previous company. They did similar work, and I’ve known David for years. We’ve worked together on several projects.

The project cost was between $15,000–$20,000.

We worked together from February–April 2021.

They understood the product and audience very well. They built our messaging strategy across different media, which was very effective. The sales for the product have been good, although they’ve been slower than what we’d like. However, I don’t think it had to do with the messaging; there were a lot of other factors involved.

Project management was excellent. We didn’t use any project management tool; we communicated via phone, Zoom calls, and emails.

Their key strength was their ability to understand our technical products and translate them into consumer language that is meaningful to consumers.

We worked with them on a subsequent project, and they were a bit slower to respond on that one. They could improve on their time management.

Whether in-person or via video conference call, be thorough on your brief and fully engage them when you meet with them. When we got our first review back, we didn’t have to go through multiple rounds of edits.

I was the former sales director of a beverage manufacturing company.

We needed someone to help us market and advertise our new product in the US.

Starfish provided us with general branding and marketing services. Their deliverables included establishing the positioning of our brand, developing policy statements, creating a brand manifesto, and creating tag lines, as well as other creative initiatives associated with the core elements of the positioning statement.

We communicated regularly with the CEO and about three other people from their creative team.

We found them through my network of industry contacts. We hired them because we thought they would be a good fit, as they provided the talents of a large agency at the scale, budget, and attention of a smaller one.

We probably spent about $500,000.

I worked with them from January 2013–January 2015, as I left the organization in 2015.

They helped us win the hottest new brand award at one of the industry’s largest trade shows thanks to the exhibition display they put together. That alone reinforced the value of their work, and it gave our brand credibility to have discussions with potential customers.

They managed the project and implemented tools internally, so I wasn’t aware of how they did it. They had a more entrepreneurial style of working, and we mainly communicated through email and phone.

Their ability to scale their business for large and small clients is really impressive. They have the talents of a large-scale company, but they also provide a greater degree of attention and flexibility in working with startups or companies that are trying to enter the marketplace.

They accomplished all their deliverables, responded consistently, and were honest about some of our feedback, so there’s nothing they could’ve done better.

I advise you to do your due diligence and speak to different agencies so you can understand what you really want out of the partnership.

I am the US Marketing VP. Firstsource is a business process management company, providing solutions to more than 100 global businesses in the Banking and Financial Services, Healthcare, Communications, Media and Technology, and diversified industries.

We had not developed a messaging platform for our healthcare business units. We were bringing together our Provider and Health Plans/Health Services business units under one umbrella, so we needed a messaging platform that covered this new expanded area.

I worked with some of their team members when I was at a previous company, so I knew the quality of the work and the people.

The Starfish team interviewed key members of our HC business. across several levels. They then interviewed clients in both the provider and payer businesses. They also did extensive competitive research.

There were multiple people on the team:

We just finished the project and are rolling it out to our teams now. The internal reception has been very strong from our BU leaders - they were activity involved in providing input and they are thrilled with the outcome. More to come as we roll it out.

They had a person devoted to scheduling calls and follow up on action items. We had bi-weekly calls to talk about status and creative direction. We primarily used email and video calls to communicate. Part of each call was a tight agenda and reminder of where we were on the timeline.

The final product is wonderful. Their ability to synthesize what they hear from team members and turn that into conversational and impactful language was top notch. Our language was always technically accurate, but had no emotion. Starfish created messaging that blended the technical and emotional benefits in a high impact way.

The project could have moved a bit faster, but the schedule was communicated.