We live in interesting times. While businesses have many more avenues to reach customers, track the efficacy of marketing spends and make mid-course corrections, they must also contend with a rapidly evolving media landscape, increasing customer choice and spiraling marketing costs. Several businesses are increasingly finding themselves under the weather, forever playing catch-up with emerging trends. While larger, established brands are on the lookout for ways to keep their brand relevant and connect with newer audiences, upcoming brands are looking at clutter-breaking ways to get noticed, tell a compelling story and establish scale.
Whether you’re an upcoming brand or an established one, the disruptor or the disrupted, there is one thing that you cannot do without – a sound strategy for your business and your brand.
Here’s how we can help:
Ultimately, our analysis helps define the vision, target audience, competitive advantage, positioning strategy, brand values, brand personality and brand promise for the client’s business.
What exactly do people expect from brands? While different brands fulfil different needs (peace of mind, satiety, hope, happiness, moments of togetherness), there is one common need that all great brands fulfil – consistency. Over time, great brands come to mean essentially one single thing in the lives of people, for instance:
It is consistency that keeps people coming back to brands – the knowledge that the brand we love will treat us and make us feel the exact same way, every single time we interact with it, across touch points and time zones.
We help create distinct brand identities for our clients, enabling them to offer consistently delightful brand experiences to their customers:
All three aspects – brand graphics, content and style – form part of a comprehensive brand manual that we deliver to our clients.
Visualize a restaurant started by an experienced master chef. He distills years of experience to come up with a brilliant new concept, creates some crackerjack recipes, and brings on board some brilliant chefs to run the restaurant with him. Guests walk in the first time, some for the second time, but then stop coming altogether. Puzzled, the master chef spends a day observing things in the kitchen, and realizes the problem. The chefs working with him have been cooking the dishes per their own accord, adding the spices and flavors they like and garnishing it differently each time. No one stuck to the recipe.
A brand strategy and identity are essentially the recipe for brand success, but what ultimately matters is how the recipe is used, i.e., the brand expression. Brands express themselves through different tools and channels – social media posts, websites, brochures, event branding, print ads, blogs, etc. Consistently adhering to the code outlined in the first two stages – brand strategy & brand identity – is imperative for brand optimization and success.
We operate as the single point of contact for our clients, consolidating brand expression initiatives under one umbrella:
In the pre-digital age, brands interacted with their customers by meeting them in-store or through customer-connect events, snail mail and telephone calls. Good ol’ AIDA worked just fine, but with the dawn of digital age, the way people view brands, interact with them and share their feedback is changing. AIDA (Attention – Interest – Desire – Action) has transformed into AISDALSLove (Attention – Interest – Search – Desire – Action – Like – Share – Love). Simply put, once a prospect has been made aware of a brand, how easy is it for him to find out more about the brand online (through a search-optimized online presence)? Similarly, once the purchase has been made, does the brand have a mechanism to reward customers for their engagement and advocacy (through a proactive social media presence)? These are important questions for brands in the digital age.
Taking engagement to the next level, several brands are actively involving customers in collaborating and co-creating offerings. After all, once the customer himself is involved in creating a product, can he walk away from it?
All these aspects point to the evolution of the brand from an experience to a relationship – a symbiotic, real-time, two-way process of co-creating greater value for both parties involved. Is your brand ready for this?
We work with clients to explore avenues to engage customers more actively with the brand, create a sense of ownership in them, and extend the relationship in a mutually-beneficial manner for a longer period of time.
