Building businesses and brands that outperform the competition.

By leading with and from purpose we help leaders transform how they and their employees think and act

OUR PROCESS

“Living the Brand^Ⓡ” acceleration process

Our proprietary process combined with newly released groundbreaking research (developed by our founder with support of 14 global highly diverse organizations) has proven to help companies excel in market while inspiring customer and employee loyalty. These processes combined with our framework-based approach are supporting CEO’s, CMOS, CHROs and entire leadership teams to drive clarity, build confidence and support long-term growth and commitment.

We set aside preconceived notions about what should be done or remaining status quo. Our belief is that innovation is not born out of this approach. We challenge conventional models, are open to fresh ideas and work to form prompt hypotheses. We use design thinking methodologies and experimentation to gauge what ideas will work.

We continually learn from research, analytics and insights – enough to move ahead with confidence knowing that ideas often improve as they move forward.

Our thinking, trademarked processes and a flexible set of tools allow us to deliver measurable outcomes and amazing work for our clients.

Brand Discovery and Assessment
Brand Promise (Purpose / Mission / Vision)
Brand Blueprint
Brand Culturization
Brand Activation & Advantage

CASE STUDIES

Business strategy

Purpose/Mission/Values

Purpose, mission and values alignment begins with understanding the difference between these terms. When leaders understand the difference between purpose and mission, and how values can support either or both, they can leverage these elements effectively to move their organization in the optimal direction for success.

Customer Experience

Customer Experience (CX) refers to everything an organization does to deliver superior experiences, value, and growth for customers. In crucial times when how a business delivers for its customers is just as important as—if not more important than—the products and services it provides. In a digital world, where customers review and share in public forums, it is vital for companies to connect with customers across their journeys at an emotional level.

Interim CMO Role

We can provide seasoned marketing executives to help with customer acquisition, sales development and company growth. Your company will get executive experience without the full-time cost. The idea of a mid-sized company hiring a fractional executive is not new. Virtual CFOs, for example have been around for decades. They can bring incredible value to companies when having a full-time CMO or CFO wouldn’t make sense, either fiscally or practically due to the typical scope of challenges needing attention.

M & A Branding

There are few times in the history of an organization that are as profoundly disruptive as a merger or an acquisition. In the case of merger, when two separate entities combine to create a new, joint organization with a new management team, disruption could not be more profound. Everything changes. A new company is being formed and a new reality has to be created. In these cases, the new executive team has to make critical, long-term decisions about the future. It’s not a time for guesswork and intuition.

We can guide you through in-depth brand equity and culture evaluations as part of the process to ensure executives have the necessary information they need to make key strategic decisions about their brand.

Brand strategy

Brand Architecture

Understanding, visualizing, and explaining your brand architecture can help you to manage your brand portfolio more effectively. Whether it’s from marketing perspective or a business growth angle, documenting your company’s brand architecture can help you to tell a more compelling brand story.

Outlining your brand architecture can help you to clarify your brand identity, solidify corporate hierarchy, enable accurate customer perception and expand product or service lines effectively.

Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is the process of deciding how you want your customers to think of you. When you’re selling products and producing content, it’s likely that there is a certain emotion and affinity you want to elicit.

Brand positioning is more than simply producing a logo or tagline. Done right, it can help you set your business apart from every other competitor out there, even if you’re selling more or less identical products. We can help you outline your target customers’ needs, define your positioning based on these needs, highlight your brand’s differentiation points and create a marketing plan based on all of these first steps.

Product / Service Strategy

A product or service strategy is a high-level plan describing what a business hopes to accomplish with its product or service and how it plans to do so. The strategy should answer key questions such as who the product will serve (personas), how it will benefit those personas, and the company’s goals for the product throughout its life cycle. We can assist in development of your strategy that should provide clarity for your company, prioritize your product / service roadmap and improve your teams tactical decisions.

Innovation / Brand Stretch

Today, a strong brand is more important than ever as companies are forced to compete with an increasing number of players, heightened customer expectations, and limited budgets and resources.

We can assist you to shape, test and validate your innovation ideas and bring growth to your business. Learn how to prototype, test and gradually sharpen and de-risk your innovation. This will allow you to turn ideas into fully fledged business models, create alignment and build trust within teams — all while managing and improving what you have while exploring the future with business model portfolios.

In addition, a solid brand presence can give a company an edge over its competitors. To be effective, brands need to ensure their brand equity is not only strong, but aligned with current market and customer needs and reflect any recent changes in the company. To ensure your brand is positioned to support your business, it might be time to conduct a rebrand or evaluate key areas.

Marketing strategy

Target Personas

A buyer persona—also called a target, user, marketing, or audience persona—is a fictional profile of your ideal customer based on market and audience research. In other words, it’s an imaginary person that embodies the most important characteristics found within your broad audience.

A buyer persona should have a demographic and psychographic profile, behavior trends, values, desires, pain points, and affiliations. Though the persona is fictional, the profile should be as well rounded as possible. Generating buyer personas isn’t about describing a potential customer or a vision for business expansion. The buyer persona should reflect individuals who already exist within your target market to help marketing, sales, and product departments make better decisions.

Why are buyer personas important for business? After an initial market assessment, creating buyer personas is the next logical step for businesses. This step allows businesses to understand their target market thoroughly before making significant investments in product development, marketing strategies, and sales infrastructure.

Working with buyer personas can help:

Guide product development
Inform content generation efforts
Provide insights for lead follow-up
Improve customer acquisition and retention strategies

When businesses begin with the customer in mind, the end results tend to be positive. Among other things, personas lead businesses toward higher-value customers, better leads, and higher conversions and customer retention rates.

Strategic Marketing Plans

Unifying a team’s efforts with a detailed marketing plan is essential to success in any business. Once a product or service is ready for market, we can assist to develop a strategic marketing plan to reach your target customers. If you are developing a strategic marketing plan, understanding which steps to take and tracking your progress may help you achieve your goals.

The major steps required to develop a well-crafted, strategic marketing plan include, setting your marketing goals, conducting a marketing audit, conducting market research, analyzing the research, identifying your target audience, determining a budget, developing specific marketing strategies, developing an implementation schedule for the strategies, and creating an evaluation process.

Brand Rollout Plans

Creating a new brand is a major milestone. We have assisted hundreds of organizations through the process including having gone through it ourselves with multiple brands under management, we know how challenging it can be. But you’ll find the rewards to be well worth the challenge. The key is to roll out your new brand properly.

A relaunch letter and announcement. Your customers should be first to know about your rebrand, M & A consolidation, acquisition, etc. and how it enhances your company and brand.

Following this all-identity items should be updated including letterhead system, electronic components, literature and print collateral, signage, vehicles (if applicable), logo wear or uniforms, website, social media. Put your best foot forward in the process!

Product / Service Launch Plan

The launch of a new product or feature is a stressful time for an organization, particularly for Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers. A successful launch should act as a springboard for new deals and help the sales team move leads into the pipeline. For that to happen, your team needs to decide which strategies to execute and which to ditch.

How to create an effective product launch plan? We’re support you through the actionable steps that will help you prepare for the launch and keep your whole team on the same page. The plan should include customer research, actionable goals, a visualization of the product launch timeline, roles and responsibilities, a product launch checklist, and the ability to be somewhat flexible to address changes needed along the way. This is especially import in agile work environments of today.

OUR WORK

Serving organizations globally and locally.

By partnering with organizations large and small to embed purpose in the process, we design more relevant brands that unite technology, business strategy and human values (desirability) making the approach more holistic. In the process we provide a clear framework and actionable roadmap for authentically communicating your brand story and building mutually beneficial and transparent relationships with your key audiences.

Brands who seek to be agile and endure, know that this is more about the future than the past.

OUR CLIENTS

Together we are collaborators and co-creators.

Our clients have included local, national and global brands. We serve leaders who desire to define new ways to grow and build the plans and capabilities to get there. Together we have improved strategic execution, commercialized new ideas, launched new products and services, refreshed existing brands and fostered cultures of innovation—all designed to drive growth for our clients