When our client EMC Insurance told us early on that they wanted to include unique “experiences” for employees at the brand launch event, we were not only energized by the team’s vision but also excited at the prospect of what we could ultimately create.
The client team had already done tremendous work in organizing a historic event for the company. As a national insurance carrier, the workforce was spread out across the country, making opportunities for the majority of employees to gather in person logistically challenging. The team dug in and did the work, organizing a launch event dubbed “One EMC” where over 1,700 employees would gather at the headquarters in Des Moines to hear a keynote from the CEO and other leaders, an inspiring presentation from Scott Hamilton and other events.
For the brand experiences, we partnered with the tremendously talented team at Aardvark Studios (formerly FKB), and the journey to conceptualize and create the installations was inspiring and challenging. Ultimately, we created four distinct experiences, all completely custom-designed, programmed and fabricated:
An old school photo booth, that both gave employees branded, printed keepsakes but also sent digital versions of the pictures to a 20-foot-long interactive video wall
An immersive game called “Trusty Bubbles”, where teams of participants gathered on an area of the floor to dodge projection-mapped “trust eroders” or land on and collect “trust builders”
Two large scale, old school 8-bit style video games with full size standing gaming consoles and custom designed screen graphics, all geared around insurance scenarios and concepts
Apart from the ability to expertly craft seamless digital and physical installations, the team at Aardvark Studios were as passionate about brand as we were. This led to one of the most interesting parts of the project, and one I challenge anyone crafting unique experiences for employees or customers to take to heart: embrace the opportunity to “bend” your brand.
If your brand has been built the right way, you’d be surprised where it can take you. The task of figuring out how the new brand identity for EMC could adapt to 8-bit style animated characters, consoles and “Bouba/kiki”-inspired shapes that chased participants around the floor was demanding but incredibly rewarding. Far more than simply “sticking a logo” on some pre-built installations, the full integration of brand identity and personality into the entire experience not only made it more memorable, but also helped seat the concept behind the new brand firmly in employee’s minds.
Needless to say, the launch event was a huge success, the buzz of which is still being felt more than six months later. Taking the extra effort to be creative with the spirit and expression of your brand – bending, but not breaking, it – as you infuse it into immersive experiences keeps it alive in more ways than on
Credit unions—by definition member-owned, not-for-profit organizations—are charter-bound to put the interests of customers and communities first. That’s an extraordinarily powerful promise that goes far beyond mere marketing.
For customers, knowing that a financial institution is truly on your side and looking out for you is a compelling value proposition that, arguably, should be a cornerstone of a credit union’s brand. However, in today’s fast-evolving financial services landscape, that may no longer be enough for a credit union to capture and retain market share. As mainstream banks and agile, non-traditional financial technology companies (fintechs) continue to reshape the industry, credit unions must adapt to remain competitive and grow.
In our ongoing work with credit unions as well as traditional banks, Tenet Partners has identified four critical areas where credit unions can focus their efforts to scale successfully. If you’re part of the team charged with making your credit union grow, making the most of these opportunities opens the door to a new brand narrative that combines traditional credit union strengths with a bold, forward-looking point of view that can secure your place in the future of finance.
1. Lay the groundwork for scaling your credit union—and your brand
Credit unions, especially smaller ones, often struggle to match the resources of larger financial institutions when it comes to technology, marketing and product development. However, this doesn’t mean they can’t compete effectively.
To grow efficiently, make the most of what’s available to you:
Instead of going head-to-head, focus growth initiatives on niche markets or specialized services where you can differentiate, and make that part of your brand story
Forge strategic partnerships with fintechs to gain access to leading technology without massive capital investment; this can help position your brand as a leader
Consider mergers or collaborations with other credit unions to pool resources; a merger is a great opportunity to rebrand and raise awareness
Invest in solutions that can scale efficiently as you grow, such as cloud-based offerings
By finding ways to do an end run around scalability challenges—and more importantly, make them part of the conversation—you can punch above your weight class and compete with larger institutions.
2. Embrace personalization to differentiate your brand
Today’s consumers expect service providers to provide an experience that aligns with their needs and expectations: a trend set by tech-driven enterprises and embraced by fintechs, and one that’s raising the bar. For credit unions, personalization is not just a feature—it’s a necessity for attracting and retaining members, especially younger, digital-native customers who may never set foot in a branch at all. A focus on meeting members where they are can also be a powerful part of your brand story.
To build strong relationships, make personalization a central part of your brand offering:
Leverage AI and machine learning to analyze member data and offer tailored product recommendations
Implement predictive models to anticipate member needs and offer proactive solutions
Create personalized financial wellness programs based on individual member goals and behaviors
Use data analytics to customize brand communication and marketing efforts for different member segments
By offering more personalized experiences and leaning into them as part of your brand, you can deepen relationships with existing members and appeal to new ones who value individualized attention.
3. Boost member engagement to build your brand
Engagement is crucial, particularly as younger consumers—whose relationship with a credit union may exist entirely online—show a willingness to switch financial institutions. To stay at top of mind, credit unions must strengthen their brands. That means finding effective ways to build loyalty, increase product adoption, and turn members into advocates.
To show that you’re an invested, caring financial partner, stay close to your members:
Look beyond the technology table stakes of “me too” mobile and online banking experiences by branding around financial insights, education and interactive planning tools that help members visualize and achieve their goals
Use gamification elements such as dashboards and progress trackers to make financial management more engaging, especially for younger members
Improve the online banking experience with responsive, effective AI-driven chatbots and efficient, easy-to-use self-service account management tools
Strengthen the human side of your brand by fostering a culture of service, collaboration and personal relationships
Be present in local communities by creating programs that align with your members’ values and interests, to raise local awareness of your brand
By focusing on engagement as a key brand differentiator, you can get closer to your members and become an integral part of their financial lives.
4. Take inspiration from fintech brands
Fintechs have set new user experience standards in financial services, emphasizing simplicity, speed, and innovation. In a very real sense, they’re changing the way people think about working with money. To scale successfully, credit unions should consider adopting a similar mindset while leveraging their unique strengths to tell a brand story that stands apart.
To compete in a fast-changing landscape, create a streamlined experience:
Foster a culture of customer-focused innovation within your organization to continually improve and adapt, while remaining focused on member needs
Streamline processes to offer quick loan approvals and account openings, and use those advantages in brand communications
Develop intuitive, user-friendly branded digital interfaces for all your services
Implement features such as peer-to-peer payments, budgeting tools, and automated savings programs, and associate them with your brand
Explore emerging technologies such as blockchain for more efficient operations
By aligning fintech-style experiences with traditional values, you can offer the best of both worlds to your members—a unique brand value proposition that can set you apart.
The bottom line: Stay grounded as you grow
Scaling to succeed is not just about getting bigger—it’s about becoming better at serving your members and community. With the right strategies and a commitment to your brand’s core values, you can turn the challenge of scaling your credit union into an opportunity for growth, impact, and most importantly, differentiation.
The future belongs to financial institution brands that can offer the efficiency and innovation of a fintech with the trust and community focus advantages of a credit union—and tell a compelling story about why that matters for customers. By striking the right balance you can stand apart, attract new generations of members, and continue to fulfill your vital role in the financial ecosystem—and not just survive, but thrive.
Whether to rebrand is not a decision to be made lightly. Factors such as if your brand is setting you up for success, how much equity your brand has and if you have permission from target audiences to change all come into play. But one element that often gets overlooked are the real, tangible costs associated with introducing and maintaining a new brand. For a new company, these are simply the cost of doing business. In the case of a rebrand, however, you need to consider whether you can fully support a new brand. If not, now may not be the time for a big change.
Costs can generally be grouped into one of four categories:
Creation: cost to create a brand platform, name and logo
Protection: cost to file and maintain the trademark(s)
Promotion: cost to build awareness and engagement with target audiences
Governance: cost of ongoing, required brand management
Creation: Cost to create a brand platform, name and logo
Even the largest companies with the deepest marketing and creative benches frequently look to outside help—namely, branding agencies—when the need for a new brand arises. Once engaged, diligent agencies will follow a tried-and-tested process to take you from your starting point to a solid brand foundation.
A typical creation process begins with a robust discovery phase that may include qualitative research alone or, if budgets allow, quantitative research and social listening. The next step is a strategy phase, to develop a brand platform that can anchor all creative development and communications.
Next comes creative development, the process of generating and clearing names, including knockout IP searches, developing logo options and look-and-feel designs, and wrapping all that up in usage guidelines.
At this point, some also choose to conduct validation research, to test concepts with target audiences and refine as needed before fully launching the brand.
Protection: Cost to file and maintain the trademark(s)
If a company is fortunate enough to have a legal department capable of trademark clearance and registration, out-of-pocket costs may be kept to filing fees. If not, you are also looking at consultative legal fees. As for those filing fees, there are application fees for each trademark, name and/or logo, for a single class of goods in either the US only or internationally through the Madrid Protocol. Those costs can increase, sometimes significantly, if you are:
Filing in multiple classes
Filing in multiple countries (called “contracting parties”)
Not actually using the brand commercially yet (filing on an “intent-to-use basis”)
Missing requirements in your application
Maintaining these trademarks brings another set of fees. In the US, every ten years you must file to show you are using the brand commercially (or explain why you are excused from doing so) as well as to renew your trademark. Similar filings are also required under the Madrid Protocol. And if, after five years of use, you want to claim “incontestable rights,” that involves another fee.
Promotion: cost to build awareness and engagement with target audiences
Promotion is, without a doubt, the costliest part of the equation. It is also where companies have the most discretion as to where, and how much, to spend. However, insufficient investment can cause a brand to wither on the vine.
When launching a new brand, there are both the implementation and launch costs as well as the year-over-year marketing spend to consider. As a point of reference, the average annual marketing budget is 9.2% of revenue according to the Fall 2023 CMO Survey.
After the basic building blocks—brand platform, name, logo, look-and-feel—have been developed, usually the next step is to create a library of templates and marketing assets—such as PowerPoint presentations, brochures, product sheets, email templates, etc.
Next comes launch planning—essentially introducing your new brand and what it stands for to internal and external audiences.
You will likely also need either a new or redesigned website for your brand. Most brands only have a “brochure” site, but consumer-facing brands may also need an e-commerce component. A website may also require one-time search-engine optimization (SEO) keyword research as well as ongoing costs for hosting and maintenance, SEO monitoring and optimization and search-engine marketing (SEM).
You also may want to develop a content marketing strategy. This is all about delivering the right messages to the right audiences, in the right place, at the right time. SEM would likely be factored into this plan, creating a slight overlap in budgets. This content market strategy is in turn implemented through things like advertising, PR, thought leadership and other marketing activities appropriate for your brand.
Finally, you may choose to develop a suite of data science tools to aid marketing decision-making. Common tools include predictive/prescriptive modeling, NLP/text analytics and advanced forecasting.
Governance: cost of ongoing, required brand management
There are two aspects to governance: internal management, to ensure the materials you produce are using the brand properly, and external management, to ensure others are neither misusing nor infringing on your trademark.
Internal enforcement usually starts with an ounce of prevention in the form of employee engagement training. Often, a portion of this training is specifically targeted to a group of brand ambassadors who can help champion the brand internally and answer questions that arise. Larger, multi-office organizations frequently also opt for a brand center, a digital repository of guidelines or standards, training and assets. A brand center also requires ongoing hosting and maintenance—which can likely be bundled with website hosting and maintenance for cost savings. Brand training and brand centers are particularly helpful if you have any external partners who create content or materials for you.
For external management, some turn to active trademark monitoring. There are a variety of software and service options available, and prices vary based on how frequently you check, how in-depth the check is and how much analysis is provided. The second part of external management that can incur costs is legal action for trademark protection. Costs can again vary widely based on what action is required, from filing a Letter of Protest with the USPTO to trying a lawsuit. One important factor to keep in mind: if you do not take action against trademark infringement, it can damage your ability to maintain that trademark.
_____
As all of these costs make clear, the decision to rebrand is a large commitment. If there is a strong enough business case though, you may decide it is the right move for you.
The aerospace industry, long dominated by established players with proprietary systems, is facing an unprecedented shift. New entrants from Silicon Valley are rewriting the rules of the game, leveraging open architectures and open-source models to drive innovation and disrupt traditional aerospace brands. This transformation isn’t just technological—it’s existential, forcing aerospace brands to rethink how they operate and differentiate themselves in an increasingly open and collaborative environment.
Historically, aerospace companies have thrived on proprietary technologies, creating “black box” systems that ensured ongoing revenue streams through long-term contracts and locked-in customers. However, much like the tech industry in the 1990s, when companies like IBM were forced to adapt to the rise of open-source software, aerospace brands must now contend with a similar wave of disruption. Silicon Valley firms are bringing a fresh mindset, using open-source principles to outpace traditional competitors in speed, flexibility and cost-efficiency.
Take Anduril, a startup from California that has already secured significant defense contracts. By combining open architectures with cutting-edge AI, Anduril has positioned itself not just as a technology provider, but as a mission-critical partner by embracing open architectures. This approach mirrors the rise of open-source software in enterprise IT, where open systems allowed new players to innovate faster and more effectively than incumbents.
For legacy aerospace brands, the implications are clear: the days of relying solely on proprietary systems to generate value are numbered. The future lies in open ecosystems, where collaboration and flexibility drive competitive advantage. This means evolving business models to focus on services, partnerships and integration, while still leveraging legacy strengths.
Brands that resist this shift in both organizational culture and business model design face the risk of becoming obsolete, outpaced by faster, more agile competitors. Aerospace companies must learn from past disruptions, applying foresight to understand how the future will demand new ways of thinking and operating. By embracing new positioning to reframe attributes that underpin their business strategy and brand personality, they can stay relevant in an industry increasingly defined by innovation and collaboration.
The challenge is not just surviving this wave of disruption but thriving in it. Brands that successfully navigate the transition will be those that redefine what it means to be a leader in aerospace, much like Silicon Valley companies have done in technology.
What is data tolerance™, you might ask? At its most simple, it is the type and amount of data required to facilitate decision-making within an organization. And it differs for every organization.
When establishing the research plan that will support a brand effort, it is important to consider not only the core decision-makers, but leadership and executives, who may ultimately have to sign off on any changes … or even, just the idea that there is a need for change.
The best brand research plans consider data tolerance, as well as research objectives and organizational resources. A combination of qualitative, quantitative and advanced analytics should be considered. Often times, an interconnected research model that incorporates elements of multiple methodologies is the best answer for any organization.
As you begin to develop your research plan to support brand development, evolution or implementation—or work with an external agency to do the same—here are a core set of topics to think about:
Qualitative vs. Quantitative
While most research plans integrate qualitative and quantitative methods, there are indicators that demonstrate which is most appropriate for the task at hand.
Qualitative research, such as in-depth interviews or focus groups, traditionally allows for more nuanced insights and the ability to explore unexpected or surprising opportunities. It’s most beneficial for conducting broader exploratory or validation, and often times may be used to fuel a bigger quantitative study by providing key themes and hypotheses to be confirmed by a larger audience.
Quantitative research, such as an online survey, offers larger sample sizes, most often provides statistically significant and projectible data, enables longitudinal comparisons and as earlier indicated, is quite helpful for testing initial hypotheses. Additionally, because of the larger size of quantitative studies, it is easier to segment and analyze data across multiple variables (e.g., geography, function, customer type, etc.).
Quantitative studies can also provide sufficient data—both structured and unstructured—to conduct advanced analytics, such as sentiment analysis, drivers of important organizational KPIs and brand valuation. Additionally, analyzing quantitative studies using data science techniques can provide actionable insights around marketing and brand ROI, profit by segment, high-growth products, attributes that drive growth and even predictive variables around marketing spend. In other words, brand research not only may inform brand decisions, but business decisions, as well. At a minimum, it can ensure that you are developing a brand designed to help your company meet its strategic business objectives.
Gut decisions vs. Guided decisions
Being realistic about how decisions are made in an organization is key for determining the most appropriate research plan. While all organizations contain institutional knowledge and market expertise, few rely solely on that knowledge to guide decision-making around brand.
For those organizations that lean toward “gut” decision-making—relying more on that institutional knowledge and market expertise than data—qualitative research is often sufficient. Often times, we see this scenario for early-stage companies or those in unique industries with a limited universe of customers or potential customers.
On the flip side, many organizations contain that same internal knowledge, but rely more on projectable data to make brand decisions. A detailed understanding of customer preferences, purchase-drivers, company perceptions and competitive comparisons is required either by the core brand team itself or as a tool to sell decisions to senior management. Often times, these types of organizations appear in regulated industries or have recently been part of a financial event, such as M&A or PE investment. Here, quantitative research informed by qualitative research is often the best approach.
Short-term input vs. Long-term output
At what point will you conduct research? Traditionally, companies use data to inform brand development by obtaining an understanding of company, customer and competitive perceptions. It may also be used to validate brand decisions, such as positioning, names, taglines or even logos. While we don’t always recommend brand validation research, as it’s difficult for non-marketers to evaluate these types of elements, those companies that are highly data-driven will inevitably require such research. Either way, both of these types of analyses are short-term in nature.
However, research cannot only be used to inform brand, but to measure its health over time. By building in benchmark assessments of your brand, such as reputation, satisfaction or NPS, at the onset, companies are able to demonstrate how brand moves the needle over time—and adjust messages and campaigns according to shifts in the market. Brand health studies are best conducted annually with static questions that can be compared longitudinally over time. Here again, for those companies with a lower data tolerance, bi-annual studies may be more suitable.
Whenever Tenet undertakes research for a client, we will always discuss data tolerance in advance of making recommendations. For the best results, we suggest you do the same.
An iconic name is a tremendous asset, but it can also create a real challenge when the company that bears it needs to turn the page. The Campbell’s Company seems to have gotten it right.
The Campbell Soup Company was founded in 1869 and adopted its now-familiar name in 1922. Its best-known consumer brand is practically the definition of “iconic:” the instantly recognizable red-and-white can famously immortalized by Andy Warhol in the early 1960s and TV spots that bring back fond memories of childhood, such as the melting snowman ad that ran for years.
That’s the kind of equity and name recognition that’s well worth preserving. And a week or so ago, the company made a move that did exactly that: It dropped the word “Soup” and will now be known as The Campbell’s Company.
In a mid-September letter to investors, Campbell’s CEO Mark Clouse hit the nail on the head: “This subtle yet important change retains the company’s iconic name recognition, reputation and equity built over 155 years while better reflecting the full breadth of the company’s portfolio.”
He has a point. The $9.6 billion company has been far more than a maker of soup for many years… a diversification journey that began in 1948 with the acquisition of V8. Its consumer brand portfolio now includes many other familiar American staples: Pepperidge Farm, SpaghettiO’s and Swanson to name just a few.
It’s evident that the company sees the greatest growth potential in continued diversification and expansion beyond its traditional soup – ahem – base. By changing its name, Campbell’s is telegraphing its intentions to the market and showing confidence in its future direction: a powerful message. The ongoing shift in focus towards meals (including but not limited to soup), beverages and snacks is a trend that’s not going away.
It’s an astute move that shows Campbell’s has done its homework, listened to its customers and assessed the market before making a change with strategic implications. The company has concluded – rightly – that it cannot walk away entirely from its storied name, and yet there was a clear need to make a change.
The answer couldn’t have been simpler: a non-disruptive tweak that honors Campbell’s legacy while freeing the company to pivot. There’s a clear – and compelling – thread running through its brand story. Dare we say, the name change strikes us as Mm! Mm! Good!
Today marks the official launch of Tenet Partners, a brand innovation and marketing consultancy, which represents the combined entity of two established firms that joined forces earlier this year — Brandlogic and CoreBrand.
Yes, we are now presenting ourselves as one with a new name, logo, go-to-market strategy, brand voice and look and feel. We are expressing ourselves via a new personality through a verbal and visual expression that externally brings credibility and energy to our customer-centered growth strategies. But before any of this could even begin to take place, we had to take the time to evaluate the key internal components of the two separate entities that comprise what is oftentimes referred to as “the back room” or back operations of the firm and determine how to launch a successful integration process.
Any acquisition or merger regardless of how big or small requires that the daily operations continue to run seamlessly while, at the same time, a core team evaluates all operations closely to determine the best practices that will provide clients with an experience they not only expect, but deserve.
We know that how we are viewed externally is contingent upon how we operate internally. From our phone system to our email address and signature, from scoping, estimating and managing projects to billing and invoicing individually and collectively reflect upon what it is like to work with us every day. With four primary office locations from east to west that needed to be synchronized, we took a close look at a range of touchpoints that impact customer experience:
Finance, including financial software, budgeting, forecasting, financial reporting, billing, and AP/AR to ensure compliance, accuracy, responsiveness and flexibility. We have successfully simplified the process for both our team and our clients.
HR resources and competitive employee benefits/policies to ensure we retain and attract the best talent
Facilities and technology such as office locations, phone, IT and CRM integration to enable constant connectivity among and between locations to successfully service clients around the globe
Project management, tracking and scheduling to keep our team and our clients on track, on budget and on time
Talent and areas of expertise to instill confidence that we can deliver against our value props and customer-centered positioning. This included assessing our talent across disciplines and identifying growth opportunities.
Shaking up our corporate structure, transitioning from a “flat” structure to one that incorporates various levels of talent and career growth, providing our clients with expertise from vast backgrounds and branding experiences. Our new org chart fosters an interdisciplinary environment that supports a range of possibilities to help uncover unique opportunities for clients.
Go-to-market strategy–ensuring that our own marketing and digital content and how it applies to messaging through our pitches, website, social media, blogs, books and white papers, public relations and speaking engagements instill confidence in our staff, clients and prospects that our knowledge, experience, know-how and innovative approach will result in solutions that will help make our clients think differently about their businesses.
All of this needed to be accomplished within a set time frame, while taking into consideration how to best blend two cultures. Our emphasis is on our first applying our customer-centered business strategy with our own customers–our team members. Achieving a successful balance between what we need to do in order to be effective day in and day out by putting our team at the center of our thought processes helped to ground us in many of our decisions. The key was communicating often, and there is no such thing as communicating too often when it comes to staff. While for many of us the acquisition brought feelings of excitement, optimism, renewed energy, career growth opportunities and endless possibilities, for others there were feelings of anxiety, fear and apprehension. Recognizing and balancing the two sets of emotions was critical to our achieving success in launching our new brand.
Being new to M+As, no one could have prepared me for how integral and challenging this process would be. It is after experiencing a company integration firsthand, that I have now come to understand and appreciate the core attributes for M+A success – optimism, patience, understanding, time (allow for double the amount of time you think will be required), realistic expectations, a dedicated and committed team with a “can do” attitude and making sure that you put one of your key principles for growth at the center of all you do – your employees. While the daily operations and processes that have been identified will help our firm run smoothly, we know that our team is a unique point-of-difference and makes Tenet Partners stand out from all others.
To say that we have all of this 100 percent figured out would not be 100 percent true; it is still evolving every day. What I do know is that we are confident that we’ve built a strong brand and marketing consultancy that is running smoothly and is comprised of a team of experts who work really well together and are ready to help our clients uncover and develop customer-centered growth strategies.
Digital is having a profound impact on business strategy, branding and customer experience. It’s clear that organizations need to take a fresh look at how to embrace the shift. But how to innovate successfully in this highly connected environment requires more focus than ever before.
Over the past two years, I have been steeped in a broad-based management program at Harvard Business School that focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship. The experience has left a permanent imprint on my thinking about how to drive success in a rapidly changing business landscape. The primary theme is focused on making choices. The argument, achieving strategic and executional clarity requires many tradeoffs. In the works of Michael Porter and Earl Sasser, the takeaway can be summarized in one thought. ‘Business strategy’ is about choosing what you won’t do and ‘service excellence’ is about choosing what you won’t do well. It took me a bit of time to grapple with that one, but once I wrapped my head around the idea, it’s a powerful way of thinking. And, let’s face it, making choices is the toughest part of business.
So, how do leaders build better business strategies and deliver powerful customer experiences? I believe the answer is brand-led innovation.
For our firm, brand embodies key elements of business strategy, especially the articulation of competitive advantage. Every business has a strategy, whether planned or unplanned, that which at its core is a set of attributes and activities that you have decided to pursue to create distinctive value in the market. If you understand what those activities are, you have made the first step to understanding how to achieve differentiation with your brand. If you understand why customers choose you and how they think of you, you have made the second step to building and managing brand perceptions around your competitive advantage. Unfortunately, and all too often, companies are unclear about their business strategy, their brand, and how to deliver a great customer experience to the right customer. Usually, no one has stopped to look at the big picture and to do the hard job of making choices.
A central theme of innovation is how to incrementally improve or create new products or services, business processes or new employee behaviors. Increasingly, innovations come through new ways of connecting and communicating with customers using digital and related technologies. For example, something as simple as a mobile app for travelers is using a suite of digital and technology elements to redefine the customer experience. This can have a big impact on the bottom line or fall flat due to a lack of alignment to your strategy and brand.
If the innovation does not create value for the customer, it will surely be a miss. Again, more often than not, companies pursue innovations for the sake of chasing a fad, and as a result are having a hard time finding the return on those investments. The outcomes don’t produce as much value as possible because the innovations are not intrinsically or extrinsically aligned.
Enter brand-led innovation. Leaders can create strategic clarity and enhance value by creating alignment with a comprehensive branding program. Brands help people see what a company stands for, their unique capabilities and how they deliver value to customers. Most importantly, an organization gains a better understanding of what customers want, need and value through the branding process. Developing and managing a brand requires companies to look at their business strategy, study their competition and dive deep into the needs of customers. That journey ultimately involves making choices that inform strategy, defines the brand, identifies opportunities for real innovations, and drives value creation. Powerful stuff.
Organizations that are crystal clear about their strategy, their brand and their customer have the basis to ignite growth.
Brand is a set of experiences delivered, not just promises communicated. When you embark on a strategic rethink of your company’s brand it is critical to keep this in mind from the outset. It isn’t just about capturing the language of repositioning; it’s about engaging your organization to deliver a set of intended, distinctive experiences across customer touch points. This has never been more true than it is in today’s environment.
Technology is opening up new opportunities to both differentiate customer experiences and establish new or additional incentives for trial, selection and loyalty across nearly every industry. It is accepted that these changes should become factors of business strategy, but they must also be reflected in the definition of brand strategy, experience design and even corporate purpose.
Mastering the interplay of customer experience and brand strategy is becoming a crucial test for marketers. With brands built more and more through orchestrated experiences, an omni-channel review of customer experience as part of discovery is vital. Without it, no brand team can provide guidance that unifies the direction for brand communications and service delivery in ways that heighten relevance, attraction and the loyalty of customers.
Integration is the key. Only when you rise above historic patterns to integrate disciplines and processes can you create new value through a customer-experience-centered brand. In today’s digital world, isn’t it time to stop thinking about brand strategy, customer experience, and corporate purpose as related but separate disciplines?
Recently I drove by a billboard advertising a pharmaceutical and swore I recognized the woman in the ad. I can’t remember the name of the advertised drug, but I certainly remember the handsome, gray-haired woman. I couldn’t instantly place her, but I knew I’d seen her before. And then it finally dawned on me. I recognized her from many hours of searching for royalty-free stock images. I’d seen her in all sorts of situations—from boardroom meetings to intense one-on-one conversations with coworkers. And now here she was walking on the beach!
A great deal of time, effort and money is spent on building powerful, unique brands. From research and strategy to logos and websites, companies clearly understand the value in creating memorable experiences for customers. So, it makes me wonder why bland, generic stock images are becoming the norm.
As I continued to think about photography and its role in brand building, I started exploring companies that are clearly investing in creative photography and companies that are clearly NOT. I think we can learn a lot from looking at two very different brands that are certainly getting it right when it comes to their photography style.
The first is charity: water, a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing countries. With a truly distinctive tone, the photography charity: water uses to tell its story is authentic, captivating and always emotional. With far too many non-profits relying on user generated photos that tend to lack consistency and quality, charity: water stands out in a bold and memorable way.
The second is John Deere, an iconic brand with a long history of using photography that perfectly captures its personality. The quality of the light, the expansiveness of the landscapes and the scale of the machinery is instantly recognizable. The John Deere style is just what it should be: Strong, filled with pride and thoroughly American.
All brands should be impactful, memorable and distinctive. The right photography can certainly help get you there.
Headquarters 11 West 42nd Street Penthouse Floors 31/32 New York, NY 10036 212 329-3030
