Brand Strategy

Brand Identity

Do your buyers love you? Do you make them feel happy? Do your products and services make them relaxed and confident? You’d better hope so. Buyers’ emotions have a huge impact on the purchase process. In fact, CEB reports that when B2B companies connect with buyers emotionally, they have twice the impact of brands that just sell on business or functional value. A successful brand strategy nurtures an emotional connection with buyers. It recognizes their needs, speaks their language and gets them excited about what you offer. From there, it’s easy to guide them from awareness to conversion. Yes, that takes work. It takes commitment. But if your brand connects with buyers, draws them in and keeps them there, it’s more than worth the effort.

Positioning

A brand is your buyers’ idea of who you are. It’s their split-second gut reaction to your company. That reaction isn’t logical. It lives in the emotional part of the brain. It’s the most powerful decision-making force there is. And it’s in buyers’ control — but the right branding approach and positioning can guide and influence it.

To claim that valuable, emotional brain-space, your brand positioning needs to be:

  • Differentiated: It creates a difference of kind, not of degree, so you can resist commoditization and sell on value.
  • Simple: It distills a company’s value down to what really makes it matter.
  • Resonant: It makes the buyer the center of the universe, and it keeps its messaging tightly aligned.

How We Get There

To make your brand positioning differentiated, simple and resonant, we follow a framework called the Persuasive Process. This tried-and-true method for developing a branding strategy gets to the heart of what buyers expect from a company — and what strategic execution will deliver it.

Our Persuasive Process helps you feel the love from your market by taking a buyer-centric approach to brand strategy.

Phase 1: Insight Gathering

To deepen our understanding of the market’s needs, we take a unique approach to research. We interview internal stakeholders to crystallize your industry knowledge. We perform competitive research to understand the forces at play in the market. And we interview buyers in person and online, getting a valuable look into their mindset.

Phase 2: Strategy

We use those insights to decide which aspects of your company will resonate best in the market. Then, we build a brand definition around those key aspects. The brand definition spells out what your company will represent in the marketplace. It’s our flag on the horizon, and it will guide all branding work moving forward.

Phase 3: Creative Execution

Our team goes further than defining your brand strategy — we bring it to life, too. We’ll give you distinct, realized creative concepts based on your brand definition. Together, we’ll discuss and refine the direction, then roll out the chosen concept into the marketplace.

We help companies master branding strategy, including brand identity and positioning, but we don’t build brands. That’s because companies don’t create brands. Buyers do.

Ready to refresh your brand strategy and claim your rightful place in buyers’ brains? Connect with us!