What We Do

Benefit

Our role is to objectively assess what about your enterprise and market opportunity can be leveraged (or leveraged more fully). We help businesses improve their performance by revisiting and refining their brand position and offering.

When the work is done your opportunities are clear and the messages that go with it are more relevant, more engaging and more compelling to your target prospects.

Scope

The scope of the project and deliverables are up to you; ranging from just an executive summary of our recommendations, to a comprehensive go to market plan and re-execution of your brand creative and messaging.

Mission

Brand strategy is the core of our focus. we define "strategy" as the blueprint for success. What we will be looking for is an opening or opportunity for your brand that can be developed and exploited. We want that opening to be an obvious idea -  something that leverages an existing truth about the brand, the offering, the customer or your difference. We want the new blueprint to imply the minimum pivot possible. Whatever level of change the new strategy might entail should represent a doable, practical, affordable change path.

Process

We begin by digesting a range of inputs. In a perfect world (of endless time and infinite budgets) we would do ground up research as well as examine everything about your business, market, customer and operational data exhaustively, but it is almost never needed.

Our approach embraces a sense of urgency and recognizes that all the clues are usually already within reach. We keep it simple by collaborating with your team and making do with the data and info you already have (customer, competitive, market insights, and both company and marketing performance histories). Then, we integrate our insights about the path forward with your operational and institutional wisdom - which we gather by speaking with key stakeholders in leadership, operations, marketing, strategy, IT, HR and legal.

Creative Strategy

When consensus is reached on a new brand strategy, we always recommend that we collaborate with your internal and external marketing teams to re-visit how best to express the brand (aka the CREATIVE strategy).

The form and function of a creative strategy can take many forms. Suffice to say, to achieve influence one must structure communications intentionally, because anticipating how people are affected by informational and emotional content, the structure of the storyline and the pitch, is a subjective craft.  

This is why a given successful marketing endeavor inevitably depends on commercial artists to create content.  

Creative Development

We see it as fundamental to take an active role in the creative strategy and execution in addition to our role in strategy - because we have the creative background to do it - and because first-hand creative guidance makes for more effective creative executions. 

The degree of our involvement with creative strategy and executions is also up to you. Whether we directly coordinate the creative executions with your internal and/or external agencies, the role we take is to provide strategic relativity, to provide a critical eye and to encourage the strengths of the creative strategy and communications structure as well as to discourage the weaknesses. 

Campaign Planning

We have led marketing planning and execution at budgets from $24,000 a year $90Million a year. If you need our help getting the message out, we will lead a team of traditional and digital media and PR experts who will detail and execute the plan. That team can be your agency or internal marketing team, or we can assemble a team or recruit an ad agency, if needed. Our direction to the team is all about achieving efficiency (i.e., leveraging resources for maximum effect in the mix of paid, owned and earned media). We collaborate to yield the budget, the KPI's, measurement and reporting of results, and the campaign calendar. We make sure your team is clear, has the skills and tools required, and are ready to execute.

Mitigating Risk

Going to market with a new brand strategy can feel risky.  And certainly, there is inherent risk to deploying new plans. Our experience is that the opportunity cost of not renewing the strategy periodically far outweighs the risks of making some mistakes as you go to market.

The key ways we help you mitigate risk is to work collaboratively, use data to support and verify decisions, only recommend reasonable, doable change, measure consumer reactions to new creative prior to deploying, work closely with your legal team, and assist HR in the internal roll-out for employees.

Program Management

As consultants, we engage to get you ready for success (i.e., "Insights into Ideas Into Plans into Growth". That means we step away when you are poised for the growth phase. However, if it makes sense for you to engage us for the program execution, we are available to function as a fractional CMO.