The U.S. rail and logistics industry is highly concentrated, with just seven companies accounting for the bulk of revenue. It’s also one of the oldest U.S. industries and has been slow to utilize new technology. As a new brand—on a digital platform, no less—eRAIL faced significant challenges for infiltrating the established, rigid industry.

With more than 30 years of experience between them, eRAIL’s founders understood industry challenges well. They knew that credibility and reliability was key to infiltration and remaining competitive, so they contracted IDealogic® to develop a brand identity that would successfully position the company as a reliable trade and commerce brokerage innovator that provided a convenient online community for industry professionals to connect and do business.

Our goal was to position eRAIL as an industry leader by developing a brand identity that looks as innovative as the company actually is. eRail was planning to shake up an established, old-school industry; so prospects would need to take one look at eRAIL and intuitively know that the company is professional and trustworthy.

A detailed discovery phase enabled us to understand the target audience and know how to communicate with them in a way that would ensure demand. Railcars aren’t profitable when not in transit, so we developed messaging that focuses on the ease, efficiency, and higher margins eRAIL’s services provide. We purposefully engineered the brand around this key differentiator to generate immediate interest, and we created the company’s positioning statement, “Rail Commerce Made Easy,” to instantly convey this to the target audience.

Additionally, we aimed to assure prospects that dealings within eRAIL are safe, and that businesses would see increased revenue because of eRAIL’s improvements to the industry. We wanted customers to understand that eRAIL is an ideal solution to stay on track, lower costs, and easily market available railcars and storage space. And not only did we design the website as a hub for customers to search for available railcars or list cars for sale and lease, we also created it as an integrated social platform where they can communicate with each other immediately and directly.

As a result, the new eRAIL brand is professional, modern, and innovative with a focus on human communication and connection. Our mission at IDealogic® is to empower companies and people in order to be the catalysts that invoke a movement of change, and we took on this project because we believed that we had an opportunity to do something bigger than ourselves. Our work with eRAIL helped us do exactly that.

• The value of shipments of railroad rolling stock manufacture in the US is expected to grow to grow to nearly $25 billion by 2020.

• The number of freight rail industry employees in the US grew to over 150,000 in the 2017.

• 73% of industry affiliates expect the number and quality of routes and services to grow in the next five years.

• Expenditure on public transit and railroad construction in the US rose to over $22 billion in 2018.

• Ton-miles of freight is predicted to grow to $8.28 trillion by 2045.