Helping B2B brands stand out in a mass of generic, function-based product messages
If you ask ten different people what your company does you’ll hear ten different answers. Ask a hundred and you’ll hear a hundred different answers. They all have their own version of your truth. And that’s just your staff.
Have a clear vision, a consistent promise, a single voice, one message
Unless your Brand Strategy clearly defines and guides the perceptions of the various internal and external audiences, there will always be multiple versions of the truth. Having a clear vision, a consistent promise, a single voice and one message is not only important, it’s crucial. Once you have the story, if it’s the right story, strong enough and believeable, then consistently re-enforcing the message will lead to respect and then to trust.
Having people trust your brand is what brand managers dream of. First they must respect it. A brand that does not listen to and adopt the views of its customers is exposed. If the customers aren’t getting the experience they want, they’ll go somewhere else. So make sure you listen to your customers.
How we build brand strategy
To help build your brand strategy, we first need to understand your business. We’ll research your business and market, but that’s not what we meant (you can do that bit yourself). We’re interested in the parts of your business you’ve never seen. Your internal team will be able to give us a valuable insight. We make sure they do. Extracting the information can take time and cross continents, or it can be achieved in a day. Either way, we use the information to form a hypothesis for the Brand Strategy. Sometimes that’s enough.
With the right internal support you’re ready to roll. Sometimes the exposure and risk is too high to rely on the hypothesis without testing. Time and budget permitting, testing the proposed strategy with broader internal (staff) and external (customer) audiences provides reassurance and allows fine tuning to support the initial findings.
Our job in revealing your brand strategy is to find the right people (your staff and your customers), ask the right questions, understand how to interpret the answers and capture the information once and for all in a way that can be used for commercial advantage in the creative development of marketing communications. That’s all there is to it. The output should keep you busy for a lifetime.
It’s hardly Rocket Science
Don’t you just hate that? ‘It’s hardly rocket science’. It’s a phrase that almost every marketing person with corporate brand responsibilities will have had thrown at them in a typically disparaging manner.
It’s a tricky business – Rocket Science. But it’s not nearly as tricky as putting a man on the moon. The difficulty isn’t the complexity or ‘science’ of the process, it’s the recognition and willingness of the participants to believe in the process and, crucially, to join in – because that requires a Brand Strategy, which is an art.
Rocket Science played its part at putting a man on the moon, but the goal was achieved predominantly with a coherent brand strategy. It required a single, clear vision (to put a man on the moon before the commies did) and multiple audiences (internal and external) believing in a common goal – including government, crew and, ehh, the whole world. Plus a badge that would carry the reputation of the endeavour and all that it stood for – NASA. Without wishing to draw too many comparisons, Birddog puts a rocket up your ass.
Strategic consultancy and creative thinking
Our Brand Platform is a combination of strategic consultancy and creative thinking at a brand level. It is audience-centric – your internal audience and your external audience, your customers, suppliers, the media.
The brand platform is about planning in context. Brand planning needs to be evidence-based, not finger in the air best guess type stuff. A brand strategy is not the end. It’s the beginning and you have to do something with it. It’s not the creative work – it’s the understanding that informs the behaviour of the brand and guides creative development.
All organisations and brands are different, even though it often doesn’t seem like it. Some companies have a corporate brand whilst others have multiple product brands or divisions. That’s why we scale the Brand Platform at product, divisional or at a corporate level; enabling us to develop needs-based and bespoke solutions for our clients.
What our clients have to say
Birddog have worked hard to achieve our vision of procuring a new brand strategy to address our needs. The new creative reflects our brand perfectly, which has enhanced the effectiveness of our branding materials. The Birddog experience has been fantastic; they have been extremely supportive and delivered exactly what we wanted. Their professional and friendly approach was invigorating, it was a pleasure to deal with the team.
David Chalmers, Director, Business Development, Macro 4
Want to know more?
Read the Brand Platform Q&A or contact us.