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Blog Posts by Joanna Schull


Building Brands with 5 W’s and an H

Building Brands with 5 W’s and an H

The other weekend I went for a walk in Golden Gate Park with a friend and her stroller-bound daughter. It’s been quite a few years since my own kids were young, and while the experience was familiar I could also take it in from a fresh perspective. As we walked along the shores of Stowe Lake, her daughter gave us a lesson in how children take in the world: “Mommy, why is that bird sitting on one foot?” “Where do you think the geese sleep at night?” “How did the big rock get all the way up the hill?” While this form of inquiry is familiar in children, it’s also a big part of how we learn as...
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Category Leadership: Branding at the Edge

Category Leadership: Branding at the Edge

The thrill of discovery One of the more exhilarating aspects of working with emerging technology companies is helping them map new ideas, evolving business models, and innovative technologies onto the existing brandscape. Sometimes there’s a clear way to position their offerings that gives them unique ownership of a positioning territory. But there are many times when a company’s offering is unique, original, or revolutionary to the degree that an existing category doesn’t describe them. We call this “branding at the edge” and it requires reframing the brand landscape in a way that allows...
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Your Brand’s Competition? The Last Great Brand Experience Your Customer Just Had

Your Brand’s Competition? The Last Great Brand Experience Your Customer Just Had

When creating a brand strategy the competitive landscape audit is an essential part of the process. You must know your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and understand consumer perceptions in order to effectively differentiate your brand and create a compelling brand experience. A competitive audit of your immediate competitors only tells half the story. Your Real Competition Is The Last Best Brand Experience Your Customer Had While your customers will always compare your products and services to your direct competitors, they’re also constantly comparing the experience they’re having...
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Need Purposeful Brand Transformation? Let the Data Be Your Guide

Need Purposeful Brand Transformation? Let the Data Be Your Guide

Re-Imagining and Evolving Your Enterprise Brand for Its Next Phase of Growth There comes a time in most companies’ growth cycle when they realize they’ve evolved from a company into an enterprise—and that the brand positioning and messaging that got them to where they are today isn’t going to allow them to make the transformation to where they need to be tomorrow. In some cases, the ‘1.0 brand’ is actually doing the enterprise a disservice by not accurately representing their new or emerging position in the marketplace. The challenge, of course, is that evolving a successful brand can be...
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Building an Agile Brand

Building an Agile Brand

The notion of ‘business agility’ — the ability to quickly adjust business resources and assets in a way that enables your business to prepare for or react to shifting markets and global conditions has always been important — but the experience of COVID-19 and the past 12 + months have driven that point home relentlessly. As we enter into this next phase of ‘the new normal’ one thing is certain: the world and how we work is forever changed and will keep changing — building a brand that enables your business to respond is the new opportunity. What’s required? The ability to adapt to...
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