The funny thing about brands is that you can't control them. They tend to defy the neat definitions in your slide decks and guideline documents, because where they really exist is in people's minds, which are changeable and unknowable places.

But there are still plenty of ways to encourage your brand to work for you.

For starters, for the brands we work on, we focus on making them:

coherent: all the elements under your control need to fit naturally together, so that individual parts, and the edifice as a whole, make sense and can be easily grasped
authentic: it must have the ring of truth, by being grounded in some essential reality about your business, in something that matters (to you and to your customers)
emotive: business decisions are still being made by people, and even in the B2B space they aren't 100% rational, so make them feel as well as think
consistent: unglamorous but essential, this takes discipline and attention to detail; and the patience to resist tinkering or reinventing unless there's a genuinely compelling reason to do so

There's a lot more that goes into building a brand, but these are fundamental. And they apply whether your brand is well-recognised and respected, or newly-minted and unknown.

BRAND CREATION AND DEPLOYMENT

Marketing strategy

Ultimately, a brand is only valuable if it makes you more effective in taking your product or service (or the business itself) to market.

This commercial reality drives our strategic marketing work. And the starting point for this is to understand the objectives of your business and the challenges it faces.

We'll typically kick off by asking a bunch of questions about your customers and competitors, sales volumes and values, market dynamics and trends. Depending on where you are in the life-cycle, we’ll look at short, medium or long-term aims.

Once we properly understand the context, we'll work with you to build a strategy (and a plan to execute it) that concentrates the effort where it will deliver the greatest return.

Communications programmes

With the strategic foundations laid, the focus shifts to communicating your value proposition to the relevant audiences. This is all about the story you want them to hear, and the channels you use to reach them.

We are skilled at taking complex and technical ideas, cutting through to the heart of the message, and articulating it in a way that is both graspable and motivating.

We work across all elements of the marcomms mix and understand where money and effort will be best spent. (But we are not experts in everything, so we have a network of technical and creative partners to call on when specialist input is needed.)