Our Brand Consultancy services cover all aspects of best-practice brand management. Most marketing strategies fail to deliver the results they should because they simply don’t follow the three basic steps required to maximise brand growth and marketing success; Research, Strategy and Tactics.
Working with us will make your marketing budget go further and will set you on a path to short term marketing success and long-term brand growth, increasing your market share and making you more profit.
All effective programmes of marketing success and brand growth are founded on a successful diagnosis of the current situation. You need an understanding of the customer, of the competition and of the market. If you don’t have the right information to inform your marketing strategy or your tactics, then you’ll likely waste money doing the wrong things.
We’ve supported global super-brands and local business heroes with programmes of brand research that ask the right questions of the right people, in the right way to give you the insight you need to grow your brand. We use a two-stage research process to ensure we have the right information.
If you already conduct customer research, we can provide a fresh appraisal of your existing data and methodology. If you’re new to it we’ll lead you in the construction, implementation, management and analysis of a research study that will tell you everything you need to grow your brand.
We use Qualitative Research to understand the fundamental associations that customers make with you brand. We need to know why they buy it and what they think of it – both the positives and negatives.
We do that through a variety of methods such as one-to-one interviews with brand loyalists and internal employees, customer focus groups, secondary research and by looking at the history of the company. This will give us a good understanding of the market and of the associations that consumers make with your brand.
Qualitative Research is essential for really understanding the strengths and weaknesses of a brand, of what mental structures it has built within your market. However, unless your customer base is extremely small, it won’t necessarily be wholly representative.
So, that’s when we move to Quantitative Research. Taking the key associations we established at the Qualitative stage, we’ll then test how strong they are using a representative sample of customers. This will tell us exactly how your brand is perceived in the marketplace, along with what brand associations are driving purchase for what groups of customers. On top of that we’ll also measure fundamental brand awareness for all customers in the market.
This one survey will give us everything we need to produce a simple and clear strategy to market your business for the next 12 months and grow your brand over the next few years.
Your Brand Strategy is where you make choices about what you’re going to do, once you have a clear understanding of the customer, of your brand and of the market, and once you know which market segments are most attractive for your short term marketing activity. Strangely, strategy is far more about what you choose not to do, than it is about what you choose to do because you’ll almost always have many more options than your resources will allow you to cover.
This phase of work takes your research and identifies your most desirable immediate targets for short term marketing success, whilst establishing a parallel brand strategy for longer term brand growth. It will cover the following 6 elements.
1
Who you are going to target, what their market size is and what their current disposition is towards your brand.
2
What tactics you are going to use to target them and what they cost.
3
What targets you are going to set for the next twelve months.
4
Current customer perceptions and what (if at all) you want to change them to.
5
A clear Brand Positioning Framework, compared against your current market Brand Image.
6
The budget required for the next twelve months to meet your objectives of both short term marketing success and long term brand growth.
At the end of this phase of work, we will agree and confirm a small number of clear, measurable, and achievable brand growth objectives for the next 12 months based upon our agreed strategy.
Once we have a clear strategy, we move to tactical implementation. This involves both execution of the plan and a wider assessment of how the brand impacts consumers beyond just your marketing.
With years of experience in planning and implementing marketing campaigns specifically designed to deliver short-term sales success and long-term brand growth, we’ll support you in developing and executing a campaign to achieve your objectives, aligned specifically to those outlined the strategy.
In doing so, we are happy to work alongside your existing agency partners, or if you don’t have any in place, we can bring in trusted creative, media and channel partners who can help to execute the campaign.
Every engagement with the customer is both a brand building opportunity and a brand-dilutive risk. And marketing often accounts for a smaller number of Brand Touchpoints than you think. Our Touchpoint Analysis tool will show you your brand as the customer experiences it, and will immediately highlight any areas of inconsistency, which may threaten your brand growth. With this knowledge, we’ll create a plan with you to craft a compelling and uniform brand experience with your business around a simple yet clear Employee Value Proposition.
We work to 5 Key Branding Truths which will maximise your brand growth.