“Big ideas with modest budgets” is something of a mantra for us. Over the past 25+ years, we’ve worked within, next to, alongside or on the outskirts of nearly every industry you can imagine. This keeps things exciting for us and it also works in your favor. We routinely take disciplines and tactics we’ve used successfully in one industry, then adapt and apply them to another. At the end of the day, brand marketing is still brand marketing.
Your customers will never know as much about your business as you do, but here’s the kicker: they don’t want to. All they care about is how you will improve their lives. We approach your marketing with that in mind, and speak to your audience on their terms. And their terms rarely include inside lingo or detailed specifications.
We’ve always been — and remain — a “sure, we can do that” type of operation. That’s how relationships work: you don’t need to be an expert in everything just to offer help. That said, our expertise is greater in some areas than others, those areas being:
“The Brand Strategy Process” would not be the most riveting ticket at Sundance, but it sure energizes us. Each brand, each website, each audio & video campaign all start and end in the same two places: with a challenge and with a solution. The steps between are what make up our brand strategy process.
Instead of a tried-and-true “recipe,” our brand strategy process is more like a road map. The journey from challenge to solution is not a series of steps we’ll follow to a pre-determined outcome, but a ride we’ll take together. Here’s a peek at the stops we’ll make along the way:
We’ll begin our brand strategy process by taking a crash course in your business. From its origins through its competitive victories to its current challenges, we want to know it all!
It’s our job to approach your business both as the brand marketing experts we are and as the current and potential customers that fuel your business. The more you can expose us to, the better. Even if that means a tour of your manufacturing facility, a mock appointment with your medical practice, or a sample vacation on your cruise line (especially a sample vacation on your cruise line).
On our next stop in the brand strategy process, we’ll line up everything we’ve learned about your business and compare you to your competitors. In other words, we’ll assess the landscape.
Since you can’t occupy the same turf, you have two options:
By applying our signature Vibrant Brand Personality, we’ll determine the best approach for you. We’ll embark from this pitstop in the process with a carefully planned Positioning Statement and Creative Strategy. These will be our guides in choosing the road to take next.
Websites, graphic design, video production: which serves your brand best? Not every medium is appropriate for every product, service or company. During this step in the brand strategy process, we take what we want to say (your Vibrant Brand Personality) and determine where it will best reach your audience.
In this stage of the process, we’ll factor in:
It’s finally here–the step in the brand strategy process where we unleash brief the creatives!
No doubt they’ve been clamoring to get their ideas down from the start (creatives tend to be over-caffeinated). Thanks to the previous three steps, however, their ideas will be focused, strategic and effective.
In addition to an endless stream of external stimuli, we know creatives often produce their best work when given parameters—parameters we’ve already nailed down. Even the creatives will tell you that there’s nothing more fun than creating great work that produces great results.
The million-dollar question, regardless of budget: is it working? Even in the age of social media and viral marketing, brands don’t “happen” overnight. Likewise for booming sales.
Once we launch, our road trip isn’t over. We keep a close eye on all the marketing activity and gauge what’s taking hold, what’s not and where we can enhance.
We have firm convictions and confidence in our talents. A big part of that confidence stems from the fact that we know the work involved in a campaign, no matter the medium, doesn’t end at launch. It’s constantly evolving. And if something doesn’t have quite the impact we were aiming for? Well, fire up the espresso machine and look to the bench. There’s always more where that came from.