We co-create with you the strategic foundations for your brand

A fundamental need in Brand Strategy development is knowing what your brand stands for. Because it is hard to make choices if you don’t know what or who you are as a brand.

Brand DNA discovery is like archaeology: with a core team we work to unearth what the core of the brand is, psychologically and physically.

What comprises its DNA, what are its roots, its heritage or core assets? We look at strengths and weaknesses, but most importantly at what drives the brand, its values and beliefs, its personality, its look on life.

We want to unlock what is truly important to the brand next to delivering a great product/service.

Profound and actionable insight into the lives of people must be at the base of all your brand building activities.

With the core team responsible for brand growth, we help you formulate your need for consumer insight. Next, we help you design and execute research that brings out rich consumer understanding.

Then, we facilitate a working session where all who need to work with the insights are immersed in the world of the consumer, and together we create true consumer-inspired springboards for brand strategy and/or brand activation. If required, we help you write consumer-inspired briefings to be used with your agencies.

Knowing how to make your brand optimally meaningful to people is at the very heart of the Brand Positioning.

With the core team responsible for brand growth, we help define the foundation of the brand that is the starting point for all your briefings to activate the brand. We work towards a simple story that describes who and what the brand is, and how it connects to the world of consumers.

Our two-phased approach is simple yet rigid. First, we define the Brand Bedrock: the core of who/what the brand is today, psychologically and physically. We look at its strengths and weaknesses, but most importantly at what drives the brand, its values and beliefs, its personality, its look on life. We want to unlock what is truly important to the brand next to delivering a great product/service.

Second, we define who/what the brand will be in the near future. Always keeping true to the brand’s core, we set a direction on how the brand will play a meaningful role in people’s lives. Because being meaningful is what matters most.

Before you ask: we don’t deliver big, wordy brand books… We aim for a short and simple storyline, a memorable and sharable narrative that all those working on the brand will easily remember, will relate to, and will feel inspired by to get into action.

Knowing how people connect with all branded propositions is what Brand Architecture is all about.

With the core team responsible for brand growth, we help define how your main brand relates to all your brand’s product variants (extensions). Together we define the ecosystem of all branded propositions in a way that in the minds of customers, all propositions complement each other while leveraging their own uniqueness.

Understanding when and how people interact with your brand and product/service helps you improve the brand experience at every interaction moment.

With the core team responsible for brand growth, we map the journey from the first moment of awareness, to purchase of the product/service, to usage, and back. Next, we identify improvement areas across the entire consumer journey and ideate optimization strategies for maximum brand experience.

Innovating and offering new products/services is a way to keep your brand fresh and interesting to people.

With the core team responsible for brand growth, we help define and drive your innovation agenda. Working from the brand positioning, and the brand architecture, we help you explore where the brand can grow through offering new experiences. We facilitate a working session where we scope opportunities, unlock consumer insights and ideate new propositions. If requires, we help you design and execute concept research, before turning ideas into hands-on products

Sales and service reps are often the real face of the brand, beyond the product/service itself. Good brand building needs Sales reps to understand what and who the brand is, and how to bring that to life through their actions.

There is a reason why we don’t deliver big brand books (see offering ‘Brand Positioning’): no-one reads them really. Marketing loves them, creative agencies love them, but beyond that no-one knows what to do with them. Particularly Sales. Those in the front-line of brand growth.

With key Brand team members, we design and facilitate a working session to translate the brand positioning into concrete principles and behaviour guidelines.

Next, we facilitate training sessions with Sales reps to help them understand the brand positioning and the ecosystem of the brand, its Brand Architecture.

More importantly, we prepare Sales reps in telling the Brand Story to their customers, in their own words. Clear, ownable and personal. No scripts, no rules: we’re working to get to the Sales reps’ best personal version of the brand’s story. Only that will inspire genuine, authentic brand-compliant behaviours.