Topics

brand strategy

Does your Business need an Updated Brand Narrative?

May 7, 2015 —

Does your Business need an Updated Brand Narrative?

Does your brand need a Brand Narrative? Your brand does if it faces any of these situations: Differentiation: Does your brand have a sober, unexciting, or blurry identity in an increasingly competitive and perhaps commoditized market? Are you able to cut through the clutter in ways that matter? Growth: Is it getting harder to increase market share, drive sales, and improve profit? Are new markets and products growing quickly enough? Talent: Is it getting increasingly difficult for your brand to recruit the talent you need? Is your top talent leaving? Are competitor’s hiring the talent you...
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Meaningful Brands Keep Promises

April 20, 2015 —

Meaningful Brands Keep Promises

Meaningful Brands are not so easy to come by Is your brand strategy working as hard as it could be? Or is it being held back by these all-too-common corporate traits: myopia, narrow-mindedness, and self-centeredness? Does your brand strategy focus only on the “what” and “how” of your offering? Does it mostly talk to senior management in the cryptic language only MBAs understand? If so, your brand isn’t hitting the right notes in today’s marketplace. Today’s most innovative and successful brands are built upon a different premise. They seek to forge meaningful connections with people, not...
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April 3, 2015 —

Getting Employees to Live Company Values

“People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou. The goal of employee engagement is to drive employee attitudes, behavior, morality, and ethics in such a way as to improve their productivity, morale, satisfaction, and usefulness within the organization. However, many companies have struggled with converting their proclaimed values into compelling, work-changing experiences for their employees that reach through to their brand strategy. Often, the problems have been that the values are typically expressed...
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Give People Meaningful Reasons to Innovate

March 24, 2015 —

Give People Meaningful Reasons to Innovate

We often come back to the Fast Company blog post by Seth Kahan, a change specialist and author of, “Getting Innovation Right”, published in 2013. Many of our clients are looking for help creating a brand strategy and developing corporate values that will help create a culture of innovation. Seth presents three practical secrets for the innovative leader. We were particularly struck by his second secret: Secret #2. Articulate the Way Forward People rely on their leaders to craft a vision of the future that makes sense and can guide their everyday decisions. Most of the leaders I...
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Brand Persona: Know Your Audience, Know Yourself

March 13, 2015 —

Brand Persona: Know Your Audience, Know Yourself

Do you know your target audience? We mean, not just whom you need to reach, but what they need, want, and feel? Do you know what makes them anxious, alarmed, or scared? Do you have any idea what they think? What fires them up? What they’ve tried before and liked, or completely failed? What makes them assured, calm, trusting, or confident and bold? Hmmm. Maybe you don’t know your target audience. At least not well enough to connect on a meaningful level. We recently read an enlightening blog post from Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator, the renowned start-up incubator. In the...
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