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Strategy


Business and Brand Strategy: Separated at Birth

Business and Brand Strategy: Separated at Birth

Peanut butter and jelly. Abbott and Costello. Disco and dancing. Some things in this world simply go together. So why is it that business strategy and brand strategy don’t always get invited to the same parties? Growth is the Goal We’ve written a lot about the importance of aligning business and brand strategy. Leaders intellectually get this, but many organizations fall into ways of working where business and brand strategy represent two different schools of thought. Delivering on financial goals (business) versus understanding customers and their needs (brand). Defining winning through the...
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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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How to Get the Most Out of Strategic Messaging

How to Get the Most Out of Strategic Messaging

Traditional Messaging Isn’t Working For as long as people have communicated, we’ve had messaging. Many of the most well-known messengers are religious figures — the usual suspects like Moses, Muhammad, and Jesus. In business, messaging has always been part of some corporate function like marketing, communications, or investor relations. Messaging is not going away. What’s changed is the way we communicate. We and other agencies have for years delivered messaging in a one-page, multilevel framework. While still useful, these one-page grids are no longer valuable tools on their own. So we’re...
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Why Brand Positioning is Critical to Sustained Growth

Why Brand Positioning is Critical to Sustained Growth

The Power of Brand Positioning Strong brand positioning has a great impact on the success of your business. But many high-growth companies struggle with how best to position themselves and communicate why they matter. Getting this right is hard, but critical. And if you fail at this, your customers won’t know whether to buy from you or your competitors. In short, positioning is the process of distinguishing your brand from your competitors in meaningful ways. It’s about what you offer, what value you deliver, and what place you hold in your target audience’s mind. Defining...
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Mission, Vision, and Values: But First, Executive Alignment

Mission, Vision, and Values: But First, Executive Alignment

Start with Executive Alignment Vision, mission, and values give a company direction. They describe what a company stands for and what it doesn’t. Solid mission, vision, and values statements give guidelines for a brand’s behavior, help distinguish a company from its peers, and serve as a foundation for the brand’s ultimate personality. Without them, a company is rudderless. So, when’s the right time to write these statements? Some companies don’t launch before they have a mission, vision, and values. Others develop them when time allows. With COVID-19 changing so many things from the way we...
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Navigating Between Good and Bad Failure

Navigating Between Good and Bad Failure

Silicon Valley loves the idea of failure. In the world of tech startups, messing up is practically a religion. People wield that Samuel Beckett quote – try again, fail again, fail better – like it’s a Louisville Slugger. As Adrian Daub writes, “People take jobs and lose them, and go on to a new job. People create products that no one likes, and go on to create another product. People back companies that get investigated by the SEC, and go on to back other companies. In Silicon Valley, it seems, there is no such thing as a negative experience.” But the thing is, not all types of failures are...
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The Fusion of Strategy and Design

The Fusion of Strategy and Design

The Best Branding Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts Since its founding in the 1950s, branding has largely been divided into two distinct disciplines: strategy and design. Strategy’s traditional role is to research, understand the competitive landscape, distill the meaning, and establish the market opportunity into a well-formed creative brief. At this point, designers typically take the brief and visually communicate against the strategic objectives. The handoff from strategy to design is not without its pitfalls. Oftentimes, key information gets lost. Strategists can work in intellectual...
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Stop Worrying About Getting Attention and Start Paying Attention

Stop Worrying About Getting Attention and Start Paying Attention

The most valuable currency in the world is the fact you’re reading this right now. Your attention is like a scarce mineral and companies will blast mountains with dynamite for the tiniest trace element of it. It’s safe to say we live in the attention economy. In exchange for everything being “free,” we have transitioned from being customers to the product. The phrase “time is money” has always rung true, but never before has it been so monetized or measured. As a result, naturally, brands desperately want to know one thing above all else: how do we get attention? How do we differentiate, go...
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