Does everyone in your business clearly understand what your brand stands for and do customers see the same picture?

Branding your customers will love you for, your team will feel inspired by and your competition will hate you for.

We have developed 5 simple steps for fast effective brand optimisation. We listen to you, your employees and your customers, we look at where you’ve come from and where you want to go. We review your products and services with a view to how you consistently present them and what is very essence of your brand purpose. We define future success succinctly and with differentiation. We build on your strengths with the very latest brand thinking to deliver a strategic plan with imagination and engagement. You get a brand plan that enables you to pivot, adapt and grow ahead of your competition.

You know your business but sometimes a third party perspective can shine new light on opportunity. Before we immerse ourselves in a deep dive into your business we do two things. Firstly, we develop a point of view from a customers perspective from every brand touchpoint. Secondly, we ask 5 people in your organisation 11 questions to get a snapshot of the current situation in regards to the brand. These questions relate to 11 success criteria that define best practice branding, we collate the responses and provide a summary report. We present the summary report to the project leader with our customer perspective observations. The purpose is to debate and ultimately agree the key gaps and opportunity areas. We have found this approach creates an early opportunity for robust debate on key issues and helps efficient focus in the right areas. For further reference to this approach refer to this article in Marketing Magazine.

Example areas of opportunity visualisation for branding: We draw upon feedback from five different departmental leaders to identify clear opportunity areas. We send out a web-based questionnaire and ask each recipient the same questions, we then compare the answers to draw out the key issues. The questions are based on proven criteria that contribute to top performance. Knowing that key stakeholders are often extremely busy the questions have been designed to take less than 5 minutes to complete. This has proven a highly effective way to very quickly get a visual map of the key imperatives plus get all the key people involved from the start. It also serves as a measure to cross reference in the future to identify our areas of improvement.

We dig deep focusing on your key areas.

Armed with the support of the key stakeholders, we immerse ourselves getting to understand your business and the industry you’re in. We dig deeper to understand the commercial imperatives, and your ambitions for the brand. Only by truly understanding the challenges can we be in a position to articulate the brand solution to solve it. We focus on specific areas identified in the early diagnosis report, any other areas nominated by key stakeholders and by drawing on cross category experience. Our process includes desktop research of all available information and stakeholder interviews. If required we can instigate further qualitative or quantitate brand research and insights gathering. We present a feedback report to the project leader and for discussion with key stakeholders.

We define what success looks like.

This stage could also be called distillation as it refers to a process whereby we articulate the vision for the brand in a short succinct statement. We ensure the statement is aligned with the company’s strategic priorities, built on a foundation from the past and importantly with the opportunities for future growth in mind. We define the driving factors and their commercial effect.

The purpose of the vision statement for the brand is to provide an internal statement that serves two all-important ends. Firstly, it is the only point of departure for each and every brand expression. Secondly it provides the ultimate and only benchmark for evaluation.

We develop a series of draft statements for key stakeholders to agree on one often these are derived from insights uncovered in the deep dive analysis. Businesses that have a clear vision are more successful because they understand what success looks like at every level. Refer to this article on Success written by Duncan Wakes-Miller in Marketing Magazine.

We plot your journey to a point of advantage with innovation.

We create a plan your competition would like you to do least and challenge conventional thinking. Modern markets are complex, priorities lists are long, creating momentum and maximum leverage of all assets is crucial. When often 99% of products, pricing and channels are the same or similar it’s the 1% that is different that is 100% of the difference. The creative expression of your brand and the social engagement around it can provide you with a competitive advantage.

We provide a plan with both quick win opportunities and capability gains against your horizon for success. Our brand plans represent a balance between proven strategies executed well and innovation to disrupt the market for immediate growth.

The brand can be presented in a simple easy to communicate the brand for internal communications and in the form of a guidelines manual. 

The objective is to empower leadership at every level of the organisation to ensure consistency of brand expression at every internal and external touchpoint.

We get the right stuff done and keep improving on it.

Resources are scarce; your investment in your brand demands a positive return. You need roles defined, tasks and deadlines set and realistic goals established. Everything designed to be measured, managed and optimised. We can provide your existing creative resources with clear briefs and direction or provide fresh thinking. Our expert third party perspective will make sure you stay on track and we can draw upon specialist creative, design, digital and mobile specialists if that is required.

Thirty years of research by leadership guru Dr John Kotter and McKinsey have proven that 70% of all major change efforts in organisations fail. Why do they fail? Because organizations often do not take the holistic approach required to see the change through. We apply Kotter’s 8 steps for change as an effective delivery methodology for optimisation.