Case Study:
Tino Seismic and Tino Structures

Tino Seismic (a division of Tino Structures) specialises in the seismic assessment and retrofit design of New Zealand buildings. The company is led by Dr John Jing, who is arguably New Zealand’s leading expert in seismic engineering.

With New Zealand being extremely susceptible to seismic activity, much of the country’s building stock is rated ‘earthquake-prone’. In viewing the assessment and design work of other engineers, Tino Seismic knows there is room for massive improvement in the seismic assessment, design and retrofit of New Zealand’s earthquake-prone buildings. Tino Seismic believes by doing the work they do, they can make New Zealand communities safer and ultimately prevent the loss of human life.

Tino Structures are structural consulting engineers, specialising in structural engineering design for new residential and commercial buildings, as well as large infrastructure projects, including bridges. Their expertise is regularly called upon by councils, professional industry bodies and leading engineering firms.

We started with a Business Positioning workshop with John. Structural engineering is a complex and very technical profession and Tino was a start-up company. The Business Positioning was absolutely crucial in enabling us to understand what made John and Tino unique. The resulting Business Positioning document and the Marketing Action Plan that followed formed the basis for everything we did from here.

While John has more than 15 years’ experience in engineering consulting and design, Tino Structures and Tino Seismic were brand new entities. That meant each needed their own brand IDs.

‘Tino’ is the Maori word for ‘importance, best, top, genuine’, which was why it was chosen as a name. The Tino Structures logo we designed reflects the name’s Maori origins with a design that represents six unfurling fern fronds in six modern colours. The grey bottom half of the logo represents solid foundations.

For Tino Seismic, we designed a fresh, clean, modern logo with modern colours. The concentric circles around the ‘O’ in TINO represent the shockwaves of a seismic event. Both logos share the same font, so there is a connection between the two entities.

Brand guidelines, business cards, letterhead and email signature followed once the logos were signed off.

2 Websites

Tino Seismic

With the Brand ID and logo completed, we started with the Tino Seismic website first. We use the content gathered in the Brand Positioning to write the website copy that set out Tino Seismic’s services and points of differences. John is unique among structural engineers in New Zealand, and much of his knowledge is proprietary, stemming from his own research at the University of New Zealand. It was essential we highlight this.

Real life case studies of Tino’s seismic retrofit designs formed a very important part of the website content. We also had to reproduce many technical drawings as part of these.

Tino Structures

The Tino Structures website followed, with a design consistent with the seismic website. One of the most important features of this site is the Projects section, which showcases the most recent projects on which they have worked. The two websites are also linked.

The challenge for both sites was writing about such a technical profession in a way everyday people could understand it, but John assures us we have achieved this.

Online Profile

We set up John’s profile on ACENZ.org to tell his story and kept this copy consistent across LinkedIn.

Whiteboard

Working with John, we created a whiteboard video to tell Tino Seismic’s story in a fun and imaginative way. Because the average person can struggle to understand engineering or even why they might need Tino Seismic’s expertise, this is an essential sales tool and will enable viewers to understand what Tino does and how Tino can help them.