A consistent approach to presenting your brand to the market is one of the most important pillars of brand management – yet many organizations struggle on this front. Often the breakdown in consistency occurs across functional departments (Human Resources, Corporate, Investor Relations) or across different geographical regions.

Regardless of the source or cause, it leads to brand degradation and an inefficient investment of marketing resources. By carrying out an audit of all communications materials, creating branding guidelines, and designing a program to communicate brand standards to employees across the organization, we can help bring consistency to the way that your brand is presented in the marketplace.

Not surprisingly, mergers and acquisitions are events that cause branding to move to the forefront as a business priority. It’s a rare time when the senior management team as well as the board are fully engaged in brand discussions. Deciding which company name is carried forward or if a new name is required, can be a difficult decision.

A primary goal is to preserve all the brand and reputation equity possible from the pre-merger organizations. A process is required to evaluate options, and research is often a key component as it helps bring objectivity to the decision-making. We have extensive experience facilitating the entire process, carrying you through the sensitive challenge of engaging employees in the new brand, and integrating it across the entire organization.

We often see organizations that haven't described their core customer. We're not talking about a customer segment based on what they do for you (revenue / profit) or straight demographic information, rather, this is about defining a customer based on the common set of emotional and functional needs that your organization has a track record of fulfilling.

The answer involves customer research to determine what needs your product fulfills and identifying why your best customers keep selecting your product or service over the competition. Having your organization settle on a core customer and targeting marketing efforts at this specific audience, can be transformational in terms of marketing effectiveness and efficiency.
We can help your executive team arrive at a core customer description.

Central to each organization’s decision about how many brands they need are three key questions:

1. How prominent a role should the masterbrand play in the naming and promotion of product brands?
2. How similar (or dissimilar) should all the brands be with each other?
3. Which brands are helping you move closer to achieving strategic corporate goals?

Answering these questions starts with research to find out how customers think about the category; if they focus on the company behind the product, there is an argument for less brands and stronger promotion of the masterbrand. There are many potential configurations but the guiding factors are always: clarity of meaning (making it intuitive for buyers to understand the brand), leveraging brand equity (transferring trust and awareness between brands), and marketing efficiency (it’s less expensive to resource fewer brands).
We can help you figure out the optimum number of brands for your organization.

Describing what you stand for and the key benefits that your organization provides to customers, are fundamental branding questions. However, organizations often lack clarity around these questions. If senior management lacks clarity in this area, it trickles down to employees and customers. Developing a research-based brand strategy is the answer.

The development process begins by interviewing the senior leadership team to fully understand the vision and corporate goals. Research is then used to gather insights from employees and customers. When these inputs are triangulated, a brand strategy can be created that is relevant, differentiated, and a driver of purchase behaviour. The brand strategy also acts as the foundation and provides guidelines that unify all future marketing activity.

Having senior leaders agree on a brand strategy is essential. But it is equally important that the frontline staff, who actually deliver the brand to customers on a day-to-day basis, be onside and interpret the brand in a consistent way. If an organization fails to communicate to employees what their specific role is in delivering value to the customer, it is unlikely the organization will be able to keep the brand promise.

Using a top-down approach to engage employees in the brand is not enough. Engagement and clarity are improved by: gathering employee insights early in the development process, showcasing examples of employee actions that are on-brand, and demonstrating how customers’ views formed the basis of the brand strategy. We can weave these elements together to form a consistent understanding of your brand throughout the organization.

Research reveals that in the minds of customers, there is often little difference between the top 2-3 leaders in a market category. It is important to rely on customer perspectives to determine where differentiation opportunities lie because it's their opinions that count and we find clients have a tendency to overstate their own competitive difference.

When research identifies a point of difference that is valuable to buyers (assuming it has some longer-term defensibility), product development and service delivery should be accelerated in order to widen the gap, and the difference should be promoted aggressively. We can help you find your point of difference via research and develop the tactics to promote it effectively.

This is an emerging issue that we've been seeing more frequently, where an organization has a formalized brand strategy but the CSR initiatives exist outside the brand. Corporate giving often lacks focus, people inside and outside the organization don't know about it, and it's not clear what social causes the organization should say yes or no to.

It is ideal when the CSR strategy is integrated with the brand and the mission / vision as it becomes easier for stakeholders to understand, is more credible, and there is greater likelihood of employees getting behind it. Branding can identify the essence of a company and its purpose; when these are revealed, a foundation for a CSR strategy and a natural opportunity to integrate the messaging emerges.

When the service experience or product performance doesn’t deliver the benefits that customers believe a brand has promised them, a contract is broken and the credibility of a brand sinks. Research with customers enables you to determine where the disconnect is between the promise and the experience.

This problem often has two sources: 1) the brand promise hasn’t been communicated to front-line staff in such a way that everyone understands their role in making the brand a reality, or 2) there is too much dependence on marketing communications to deliver the brand promise.
We can help you map out the customer’s purchase experience and develop a strategy to align the experience with the brand promise.

When we see situations with downward pricing pressure, the product or service often has an unclear value proposition or there is lack of differentiation in the category. This is common later in a brand’s life-cycle when competitors have had a chance to catch up – attacking price and bringing attention to the leader’s specific points of weakness.

The first course of action is to return to promoting the specific benefits that originally made the brand successful. Use research to ensure these benefits are still relevant (purchase decision drivers) and if not, identify new points of difference and promote them aggressively. Another approach is to use a branded energizer such as a compelling spokesperson or a personality-rich creative concept to distance yourself from competitors.

We see this type of challenge frequently and always recommend customer research to answer key questions such as: who will be most interested, what differentiated benefits does it offer, is it a new category, how can we best reach buyers with the offer, etc. We can help you position the product, build a plan, and develop a compelling campaign to launch it.

Along with a launch plan, new brands often require a new name. Analyzing how others in the category are named provides valuable clues on how to proceed. Decisions need to be made about whether the new name should describe the product or service's purpose or if a more compelling and evocative name should be used and accompanied by a descriptor line. We often recommend tagline development to help a new brand become understood faster.

The competition to attract the best talent is often as challenging as competing for customers. Increasingly, employees are looking to their work for a sense of purpose so an organization’s ability to communicate the intangible benefits they offer is directly correlated to their effectiveness as a recruiter.

Research in the marketplace can reveal your relative strengths as an employer and internal research can discover the common sense of purpose and intangible benefits recognized by current employees. We can identify your organization’s strengths, craft it into an employee value proposition, and carry it across recruitment campaigns, ads, tradeshow displays, website, social media, etc.