Tenet Partners recognized in Gartner® Market Guide for Brand Consultancies

New York, NY (December 10, 2024) – Tenet Partners has been named among a select group of brand consultancies in the latest Gartner® Market Guide for Brand Strategy Agencies*. This recognition is a continued acknowledgement of the services, capabilities and insights that Tenet brings to brand leaders as they seek to elevate brand strategy, architecture, activation and identity.

The guide notes Tenet’s strong focus on data-driven insights and trend forecasting through predictive analytics to inform brand strategy along with marketing, creative and brand management, and to tie brand investments to business outcomes. The guide also highlights Tenet’s brand consulting capabilities that span corporate and consumer branding, including insights, advanced analytics, brand architecture, naming and identity.

The Gartner report points to the fact that brand strategy agencies are experimenting with and adopting AI—an area in which Tenet has been making significant investments for the past five years. It cites consideration of the role of AI as one of its top takeaways, noting that AI use, values, expanding agency capabilities, and deep understanding of the client’s industry are key differentiators that can help inform agency selection.

The report, which contains extensive guidance on how to go about selecting the right agency for the client’s needs, concludes with specific recommendations on fostering a strong and productive agency relationship—valuable advice that Tenet believes can help CMOs make a smart decision when choosing a vendor.

This guidance is timely, given the authors’ findings. CMOs struggle to find the right brand strategy agency due to the overlap of capabilities with traditional management consultancies, advertising and digital marketing agencies. Brand strategy agency capabilities, once primarily focused solely on brand positioning and visual identity, have evolved rapidly to include internal communications, increased insights capabilities, and experiential brand identities. Selecting the right partner is critical, given that CMOs also report brand strategy and activation as a large budget allocation across marketing programs and operational areas.

Read the full Gartner report, Market Guide for Brand Strategy Agencies, (accessible to Gartner subscribers ID G00804877).

*Gartner, “Market Guide for Brand Strategy Agencies”, By Analyst(s): Julie Reeves, Jay Wilson. Published 6 November 2024

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Tenet Partners

Tenet Partners is a brand innovation firm that transforms organizations through a blend of insights, strategy, design and AI technology. Our mission is to help companies create brand value and open possibilities in today’s digital-driven and customer-focused world.

For more information, please contact:
Jessica McHie
Business Development and Marketing
Tenet Partners
+ 1 212 329-3166
jmchie@tenetpartners.com

Tenet Partners recognized in Gartner® Market Guide for Brand Consultancies

New York, NY (February 5, 2024) – Tenet Partners has been recognized by Gartner® in its Market Guide for Brand Consultancies for the second year running, making specific mention of our focus on data-driven insights and forecasting. This recognition is a continued acknowledgement of the services, capabilities and insights that Tenet brings to brand leaders as they seek to elevate brand strategy, architecture, activation and visual identity.

Industry Report: Tenet Partners recognized in Gartner® Market Guide for Brand Consultancies

The Q4 2023 Market Guide notes that CMOs continue to recognize the links between brand investment and business value, resulting in prioritization of brand projects. This aligns with other recent Gartner research: According to the 2023 Gartner Brand Leaders Survey, 82% of brand leaders are pessimistic about the ongoing economic and business climate impact on their brands, but more than 50% would fight to keep their brand spending steady even when faced with the prospect of cutting performance marketing.

Brand strategy and activation were among the top three areas where surveyed CMOs reported significant capability gaps that stand in the way of achieving business goals. 46% of respondents reported in increase in budgets for brand strategy and activation across marketing programs and operational areas.

Turning to emerging trends that are transforming branding and marketing—and helping to address, at least in part, the capability gaps uncovered in the Brand Leaders Survey—the Market Guide encourages CMOs to “recognize the evolving and widespread capabilities of GenAI in order to best determine how the agencies are responsibly using GenAI internally and to support client deliverables.”

In our opinion, this Gartner guide offers useful framework for key considerations and action items for CMOs as they begin a brand consultancy search. This includes critical AI capabilities across generative, machine learning, natural language processing and advanced forecasting needed for consumer insights, optimizing ROI and enhancing brand management.

We believe that the statements in the guide accurately reflect Tenet’s own views on the role of brand consultancies. “The consumer climate is becoming more challenging for brand owners, and they will continue to need help developing and refining their brands to stay competitive. The importance of brand to attract and retain customers, potential employees and investors is growing.

CMOs are increasingly responsible for managing brand and the role it plays in conveying an organization’s purpose and priorities, and recognizing that internal capabilities to deliver deep brand strategy work are lacking. Thus, reliance on brand strategy agencies should continue to grow.”

Read the full Gartner report, Market Guide for Brand Consultancies, (accessible to Gartner subscribers ID G00770939).

*Gartner, “Market Guide for Brand Consultancies”, By Analyst(s): Julie Reeves, Jay Wilson. Published 25 October 2023

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Tenet Partners

Tenet Partners is a brand innovation firm that transforms organizations through a blend of insights, strategy, design and AI technology. Our mission is to help companies create brand value and open possibilities in today’s digital-driven and customer-focused world.

For more information, please contact:
Jessica McHie
Business Development and Marketing
Tenet Partners
+ 1 212 329-3166
jmchie@tenetpartners.com

Digital Living Network Alliance

Digital Living Network Alliance

Highlighting the real-world value of industry standards

OVERVIEW

The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is an industry-led consortium of consumer electronics, telecommunications, computing and mobile device companies focused on creating seamless interoperability and connectivity for consumers. Looking to drive membership and consumer engagement, the organization brought in Tenet Partners to help.

CHALLENGE

DLNA was having difficulty gaining consumer awareness and visibility. With little articulation of the organization’s vision and value in evidence, an important opportunity to help the industry grow was going largely untapped.

HOW WE HELPED

Given the natural complexities of a member-driven standards group, DLNA’s Board needed help setting a clear course for advancement of the brand and mission. Through a series of facilitated workshops, Tenet unearthed a critical gap in brand positioning, and at the same time established a series of strategic imperatives for brand development including clarification of the DLNA value proposition and helping manufacturers leverage the brand in helping consumers understand the value of interoperability and its impact on the products they buy.

Tenet conducted field work including visits to trade shows and retail stores, along with one-on-one interviews with consumers and industry professionals. We observed pockets of interest in DLNA, but not broad-based enthusiasm among many of the key participants. Explicit support for DLNA was evident in select manufacturers’ communications—LG and Samsung, for example—but by no means all. While other member companies acknowledged support for DLNA, most had little visible presence of the certification in their communications. And the largest challenge was that few people could articulate DLNA’s benefits clearly.

Diving deeper into the challenge, Tenet conducted a global quantitative research study that focused on understanding the issues consumers had expressed during the qualitative interviews. Part of the study tested visual and verbal concepts and assessed the brand equity of the DLNA Certified mark. Building on the resulting insights, Tenet then led a collaborative process to articulate a clear brand strategy, messaging and design approach, and to build consensus with the DLNA membership.

OUTCOME

The program helped DLNA regain momentum as a vehicle for achieving a common objective in delivering a better consumer experience. Key to that success was a deeper level of engagement with all stakeholders to embrace and support the organization and its mission.  By June 2015 the organization claimed membership of more than 200 companies, and over 25,000 device models had obtained “DLNA Certified” status.

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