A new approach.
We’ve pioneered an innovative new approach to brand strategy that works for today’s experiential world. We combine the best aspects of traditional brand strategy with modern design thinking to create a set of tools that help anyone bring a brand experience to life. Our strategy offering encompasses deep customer research and insight generation; experience assessments; bought/owned/earned media planning; and digital product strategy.
Naming
Customer research
Traditional planning
Digital product strategy
Social media strategy
Messaging and positioning
Bought/owned/earned media Strategy
Our strategy offering encompasses deep customer research and insight generation; customer experience assessments; digital product strategy; brand & identity design; and brand experience planning.
What we do.
Fundamentally, Brand Experience Strategy helps a company answer some very important questions: Why do we exist as a company and what do we value? What kind of company are we and what do we aspire to become? What makes us different from our competitors? What do we offer to our customers and why is that of value? What unique promises do we make to our customers? What kind of personality do we have as a brand? How do we have to sound and act, and what do we have to actually do in order to deliver on our brand promises?
We describe our process for Brand Experience Strategy as an approach rather than a methodology because we only rarely execute it fully from beginning to end in the same way. Many clients come to us with some pieces of a brand strategy or philosophy already articulated. We adapt our approach to complement and fill in the gaps around the thinking that our clients have already done about their brands.
A phase of work that helps ground us in the current state of the company and its culture; the customers and their needs; and finally the competitive landscape for the brand.
Here, we bring design thinking to bear, letting designers and strategists imagine the possibilities for how a brand might come to life. From this divergent thinking, we select the best ideas.
Here, we create the foundations of the brand and how it will be communicated internally. Depending on the company culture, this might be a presentation, book, video, or poster.
When we are clear on how to articulate the elements of the brand, we then move into Practice, where we build the tools required for us and our clients to bring their brand to life in the real world.
With a clear picture of the brand and the tools to bring it to life, we lay out a roadmap of projects, processes, and change management that are all required to make the brand promise real.
Our approach begins with Examine, a phase of work that helps ground us in the current state of the company and its culture; the customers and their needs; and finally the competitive landscape for the brand. Next, our Imagine phase brings design thinking to bear, letting designers and strategists imagine the possibilities for how a brand might come to life. From this divergent thinking, we select the best ideas and in our Craft phase we create the foundations of the brand and how it will be communicated internally. Depending on the company culture, this might be a presentation, a book, a video, or even posters.
When we are clear on how to articulate the elements of the brand to ourselves, we then move into Practice, where we build the tools required for us and our clients to bring their brand to life in the real world. Finally, with a clear picture of the brand and the tools to bring it to life, we need to Plan, laying out a roadmap of projects, processes, and change management that are all required to make the brand promise real. Then we get to design!
Our Brand Experience Strategy approach involves a number of innovative tools and processes, including something we call Moment Mapping. Based on the idea that a brand experience is made up of many connected moments, we endeavor to map these moments in order to understand their relationships and importance in the overall brand experience. We often perform moment mapping twice—first to understand the current state of the brand experience in conjunction with customer research, and then later to design the new, ideal brand experience.
