Expertise
Brand Strategy
"If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything"
How we do it.
We create a set of principles for the business, place or organisation building from the inside out. A process of co-creation between staff, executive and customers is used to develop purpose, confirm business assets & translate these into benefits for the target consumer. This all helps to unify staff and stakeholders behind a simple purpose, inspire those you work with (or want to work with), creates efficiencies over time and builds resilience to internal change.
Why?
Business gets side-tracked with detail, deadlines and timelines. Brands have set of principles to live by, innovate to and communicate with ensuring they stay consistent and valuable. (No matter what the flavour of the month is).
Difference
We examine all aspects of your organisation, your category and the world around to unlock your brand opportunity.
- Our process has an experience led outcome not a logo led outcome.
- We use Archetypes to help create your brand character & brand lexicon.
- We translate strategy into creative expression and provide tools to activate your brand.
Are we right for you?
We believe:
- Brands are emotional promises built on provable truths & communicated through actions
- It is more important to be distinctive than it is to be different (although its nice to have both).
- Enduring brands are built from the inside out.
- World class brands provide value wrapped in archetypal stories.
What Makes a Brand?
From Strategy to Implementation
Your brand is a franchise of emotions, memories, stories, things, people and experiences. It creates your .......'ness. It creates an intangible difference, a reputation for something that's worth paying more for. As consumers we see brands most often as advertising, symbols, labels, social media posts and editorial stories.
As brand practitioners we see brands as ideas, products and experiences created to express a business purpose and benefit the consumer.
Brand Positioning & Creating your own Brand Disciplines
Who you are and how you will compete in the market place is a result of exploring your future vision, current competitive performance, consumer needs, cultural shifts and core strengths. When this is analysed a strategic opportunity will emerge and that's where your brand journey really starts to take shape.
See ExamplesBrand Research
Insight is THE vital ingredient to a successful brand strategy. It helps straighten out what you need to change or dial up or down in order for you to move towards your vision. We conduct:
- Internal stakeholder research through depth interviews and surveys
- External research with consumers, influencers and customers through depth interviews, focus groups and on-line forums
The on-line forum experience is designed for rich, detailed, multi-media feedback that can create critical consumer engagement within your organisation and at C-Suite Level.
See ExamplesBrand Implementation
There is nothing sadder than a great brand strategy lying dormant as a paperweight. We help you breathe life into the strategy with the right next steps.
WALK
This is about creating experiences to bring your brand disciplines to life and power up social media.
Our Brand Starter workshops help you bring your brand to life through experiences created by your own staff as part of their brand on-boarding process.
TALK
Internal: Taking it to your people.
Launching to staff, stakeholders and the industry is an important step in the adoption of the brand. If staff don't believe in it – you’ll be hard pressed to get consumers believing.
Our Brand Launch Kits help on-board your new Brand Disciplines.
External: Taking it to the people
Within your disciplines will lie the basic narrative streams for your communication and marketing activities.
Our Brand Communication Frameworks help you get started with your Marcomms.
"Brands that firmly and consistently inhabit one single archetype outperform the market by 120%"
via Havas Worldwide
What are Brand Archetypes?
Archetypes are a way to paint a picture of what a brand could be – its vision, character, personality, tone. It uses the universal psychology of storytelling to help breakthrough thinking. Archetypes are based on Jungian theory and provide a language of storytelling with familiar character types. There are 12 foundation archetypes built around universal human need for control vs freedom and belonging vs independence.
iSPY’s Brand Character Compass
By answering a few simple questions, we can reveal your archetypal candidates. You will find out whether you are better placed to evolve your brand to be a Creator, Hero, Jester or even the Lover! With this tool, we are able to help simplify the process of developing your brand purpose personality to create something aspirational and distinctive.
Character & tone
Archetypes help simplify the process of developing brand personality by drawing on timeless character traits to create an organisational language that shapes ‘brand voice,’ ‘tone,’ ‘how we behave and don’t.’ They are an integral part of your Brand Disciplines.
How we use them
Archetypes can be used in Brand Strategy in many ways:
- To provide guidance regarding Brand Purpose
- To create brand storylines
- To provide tonal guidelines
- To brief creative partners
- To inspire creative thinking
