Brand strategy and positioning​

Consumers expect a lot from brands. It’s not just about delivering exceptional products, services, and experiences – it’s also about authenticity and transparency in values and delivery.  

When crafting your brand strategy and undertaking brand development, understanding the complex factors influencing consumer decisions is vital. We combine human understanding with strategy to help you create a meaningful positioning that resonates deeply and stands out in the market.  

This is our recipe for success in brand strategy and positioning work: 

• Deep human insight: We support you in understanding consumers as humans. From functional, emotional, and societal benefits to consumer resonance and higher order goals, we help you decode what is meaningful and what influences behaviours.  

• Business strategy and competition: Our team of top-notch experts and brand practitioners fuse deep human insight with an understanding of your business strategy and competitive landscape. 

• Stakeholder involvement: Engaging stakeholders is crucial in activating and embodying the new brand positioning. Through our comprehensive suite of activation techniques, we ensure stakeholders are not just informed but inspired and aligned every step of the way. 

 

Marketing and communications​

Great brands deliver great marketing and communications. The key to effective communications is understanding and connecting consumer needs to a brand’s purpose and value proposition, creating brand communications that resonate and stand out from the competition. 

Our mission is not just to help you communicate, but to captivate – integrating brand narratives into brand communications that resonate deeply with people on an emotional level. By delving into core human needs and beliefs, we help brands like yours connect with people in profound and lasting ways. 

 We help you grow by: 

• Laying the foundation of a purposeful communication strategy: We help you define your target audience, value proposition, positioning and messaging pillars. 

• Unlocking and activating cultural insights: Using semiotics and cultural scanning, we identify visual and linguistic cues that resonate with your target audience, ensuring your communications are culturally relevant and impactful. 

• Testing communication messages: Through qualitative or quantitative research and co-creation techniques, we test your messaging, allowing you to optimize communications so they resonate deeply with those you’re trying to reach. 

• Developing activation assets: We develop activation assets, such as playbooks or commercialization decks , to support internal and external implementation. 

 

Performance Tracking

Just as humans are complex and evolving, so too are brands. To ensure your brand remains healthy and stays ahead of the curve, a tailored performance tracking approach is essential. It helps you understand how people perceive your brand, evaluate your brand performance, and measure the impact of your marketing efforts. 

Yet, traditional brand trackers are often not dynamic enough and lack actionability. Our three-stage approach is designed to transform your brand tracker into a strategic management tool.  

Here’s how we do this: 

1. Align and customize: Through our ‘Brand Key’ and ‘Brand Philosophy’ workshops, we tailor your tracker and define KPIs that align with your marketing strategy and competitive situation.  
2. Measure and unlock: Using a modular approach, we combine performance tracking with topical content and qualitative plug-ins to uncover the ‘why’ behind brand equity. We capture critical incidents in real-time via our QR-code, geofencing or CRM-triggered app. This helps you improve the consumer experience, brand activation, (new) product performance, point-of-sale and shopper marketing effectiveness. 
3. Contextualize and advance: To enhance the actionability of your tracker, adding context is crucial. This can be achieved by integrating complementary methods such as an online insight community or ‘Consumer connect’ sessions. We use advanced analysis techniques such as growth modeling and driver analyses, along with performance dashboards and workshops, to boost effectiveness. Additionally, we swiftly escalate critical incidents by delivering qualitative and quantitative reports directly to stakeholders. 

Our performance tracking approach empowers you to measure and predict the impact of marketing activity on brand health, improve ROI on marketing investments and gain insights into the competitive marketplace.