Thursday 2 June 2011

Don’t mention the ‘B’ word! - BrandPrint™

BRAND. How can a 5-letter word trigger so much positive and negative emotion – all at once?

Business people understand the importance of how their products and services are perceived, but often dread the process of fixing something or aligning themselves to make the most of their opportunities.

Why?


“It’s smoke and mirrors”
“Budgets that look like telephone numbers”
“Great, but impractical ideas”
“Lack of engagement”
“Arrogant people”
“Takes too long to implement”
“Anal"

Do you recognize any of the sentiments above? Probably.

That’s because everybody who has ever had anything to do with the subject of ‘brand’ has had a bad experience at some point. The evidence is that these experiences often leave scars of skepticism, cynicism, mistrust and paranoia.

But it is fair to say that our industry hasn’t done itself any favours along the way. Almost overnight, every design consultant, advertising agency and digital agency claimed they had become a brand expert and - lets be honest - provided some pretty bum (would prefer ‘poor’) advice along the way.

You have to make the mistakes and learn from them, but the market will tell you that as an industry, we simply don’t learn fast enough! We all wonder why there’s still a pitch culture; why we don’t ever get treated as the true professionals we believe we are and why we have to go through a 100 hoops and several stages of Spanish Inquisition!

We wanted to set the record straight; to demonstrate that a daunting task could be made both simpler and more engaging; and that we could achieve consensus by removing some of the subjectivity but still retaining the excitement and creative process.

BrandPrint™ was born out of 2 years of development and refinement, and after asking the market what it needed from the process of defining, developing or managing brands. We know that, in these austere times, the smart investments are being made in improving the customer experience as opposed to media purchase. We also know that every man and his dog has a process that helps define a brand. But not every man and his dog can apply it to all of the TouchPoints a brand has with its markets and customers.

You can consider applying a TouchPoints Analysis in three ways:
  1. To engineer a new customer experience
  2. To audit existing experiences and identify strengths and weaknesses
  3. To audit potential purchases in support of an M&A process
We know we have something special that has worked for Princess Yachts, Simple, Kenwood, Honeywell, De’Longhi and Fitness First to name a few. We’ve been told: “It’s engaging, powerful, pragmatic and will achieve consensus” – and that’s the holy grail when managing businesses and brands!

But the real value in our process is the achievement of business wide consensus – shifting brand value away from the influence of the few to becoming a belief system of the majority.

Why not see how we can help you and give us a call.

Posted by James Surridge


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