Melbourne based digital agency called Sonder Sites has helped tech startup Applied Electric Vehicles launch a media campaign that saw AEV win a Good Design Award for innovation.

Julian Broadbent is the CEO of AEV and, in former life, was the Global Director of Advanced Planning at General Motors. He puts a large part of AEV’s success down to the use of powerful storytelling, having a small team and being partnered with Melbourne-based digital agency Sonder Sites.

“Sometimes you can look at a large organisation and think they have a big marketing budget and they have the capability to do so much from a marketing point of you. But at the end of the day no one really wants to listen anymore”, he said.

AEV burst onto the global stage at CES in Las Vegas in 2019 with the launch of the Modular Vehicle System (MVS). Julian described CES as a “momentous turning point for our business” which, up until that point, had been working on the concept in secret for several years.

Since the campaign AEV also announced new partnerships with international companies (including Japanese giant Teijin) and won an Australian Good Design award for innovation, alongside Tesla.

Tom Hamilton is the Communications Strategist who was behind AEV’s launch.

He said: “It was a great campaign in terms of coverage because we were able to capture the attention of a lot of people. But what makes this such a good business story is that we were able to take that attention and drive home very specific messages in order to produce a very specific business results”.

Hamilton also recognised the challenges of launching a brand internationally and was clearly grateful for the support provided by Sonder Sites.

“Launching a brand is challenging and launching it on the global stage throws up lots of problems. Tim and his team from Sonder were able to manage those problems with us at every step of the way, he said”.

Sonder Sites has helped to launch brands like Purvis Beer, 12 Boards and AEV. They also work with established businesses to help them tell their story.

Last month Sonder’s CEO, Tim Sullivan, got together with Julian and Tom to create this video in which they outline how to deal with uncertainty and launch a brand on the global stage.

We also launched our how to guide here at www.brandlaunch.com.au

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