The Minelli Group Case Study

From the expertise of Minelli Group, a company specialized in high-quality custom wood components, comes mPackting, a brand producing eco-friendly materials and solutions for the packaging industry.

It’s a start-up aiming to revolutionize the sector with mBlack™, a fully biodegradable material created and patented by Minelli from wood waste, with a strong focus on aesthetics too.

The main problem mPackting faced was market perception around their innovative mBlack™ material.

Despite its remarkable ecological qualities and technological superiority, some potential customers saw it more as a plastic variant than as a genuinely sustainable, wood-derived material.

Resistance to change is significant among companies used to plastic, glass and aluminum, mainly because these are established, widely used industrial materials.

This created a major obstacle to market acceptance and limited commercial penetration.

On top of that, there was the cost factor: the price is significantly higher than the competition.

mPackting also faced the added difficulty of standing out in an emerging market still in its early stages: potential customers weren’t actively searching for this type of product, or weren’t ready to buy it yet.

With competitors offering alternative, sometimes cheaper, solutions, the brand needed a strategy to position itself in the sustainable packaging innovation market.

The challenge was therefore twofold: change the perception of the product among the target audience, and establish a distinctive, influential market presence able to attract not just attention, but also trust and investment from customers and partners.

Hence the need to define a marketing and communication strategy that would identify the tools and resources needed to get this business project off the ground.

The overall strategy OTO Agency developed for mPackting focused on defining a plan that would help the client generate real business leads, in order to validate the business idea.

Where to start?

First, the brand needed to become known, to build its reputation and its market positioning.

The next step was putting together a strategy to generate qualified leads genuinely interested in the product — without neglecting support for the sales team and commercial strategy.

To reach these goals, we started with a strategic analysis.

This let us highlight the company’s strengths and weaknesses, identify its buyer personas and study its competitors.

We started by analyzing the marketing tools already in place through: an SEO audit, Google Analytics, a Google Ads audit and a LinkedIn Ads audit, essential for capturing a clear picture of the starting point.

We analyzed the brand, the logo, the vision and the mission, to assess their consistency and strength relative to the parent company and the target market.

We then put together a multi-phase marketing and communication plan covering several critical areas, defining the channels and tools best suited to reaching the expected results.

Through the strategic plan and the project Gantt chart, we structured concrete actions and timelines.

Then, developing an advertising strategy let us establish how the company should promote its products or services across various online channels, factoring in the costs associated with different advertising channels and content production activities.

From there followed the identification of key talking points to leverage in communication and marketing campaigns: values, visuals, mission and value proposition — along with the promotion of in-person events to discuss innovation and sustainability in the sector.

It was also essential to tell the story of the mBlack™ material’s uniqueness, its applications and benefits.

The process also included analyzing the visual identity and its weak points, highlighting the importance of building a consistent, always-recognizable visual system.

We then put forward the idea of developing a communication concept emphasizing how a clear, distinctive message can improve the brand experience.

The focus was generating business opportunities through marketing and communication activities, in order to launch a concrete business project.

This process gave the client a clear picture of the market it’s entering, starting from identifying its own potential. It also gained greater awareness of the risks it faces relative to competitors.

With our consulting, Minelli Group now has all the tools it needs to increase the visibility of the mPackting brand and build its authority, in order to improve its market positioning and generate new business opportunities.