Insight
Competitor Landscape
Your brand doesn’t exist in isolation and your customers usually have a choice of provider, so it’s useful to have a clear understanding of the relative positionings and trajectories of your competitive set and related parallel worlds to help guide future positioning and creative work. Our Competitor Landscape model is built upon a mix of desk research and retail safaris in order to gain a first-hand user perspective - particularly important at the point of purchase be it physical or digital. The deliverable is a clear breakdown of each competitor, highlighting their actual/assumed positioning, core identity equities and communication assets - to include typeface, colour palette and balance, photographic style and messaging.
Brand Evaluation
Our Brand Evaluation helps businesses understand the risk/reward of any potential acquisition from a consumer/brand perspective. This approach is used to either supplement a more traditional M&A report, or to provide an early heads-up to a potential target, thus saving your business both time and money. These reports typically run to approx 25 pages and are normally commissioned either prior to engagement of management consultants, or used to cross-reference their recommendations. Our approach is based upon case-studies and desk research, using a SWOT analysis to help identify potential pit-falls and/or opportunities. If required, our approach can be combined with a more analytical financial valuations.
Brand Musketeers
A challenge often faced with traditional focus group methodology is the essential imbalance of power (characterised by those behind the screen vs those in-front) which can result in posturing and false readings. This is why we favour our Brand Musketeers model (a development on the Triads methodology where the power of three is brought to the fore, but with the additional build that your best friends won’t let you get away with false boasting and posturing). Using your segmentation or brand target, we recruit a brand advocate and interview them in a safe/comfortable environment (e.g. their home), we then re-run the interview with two of their best friends in a brand relevant environment (e.g. their favourite bar if we were researching beer). As we re-cap their answers, we gain a much deeper insight into the real/hidden motivations, wants and needs, as the friends challenge the given response.
Brand Portraits
A brand needs to connect with all stakeholders, but getting non-marketers to Our Brand Portrait methodology is used to help non marketeers speak about a brand and it’s positioning at a conceptual level. The exercise is divided into three distinct parts, starting with the relatively straight-forward Passport exercise, then becoming more esoteric/projective with the Party and News exercises (to include a brand obituary). This is a light touch, but easily accessible tool that quickly paints a very clear picture of either the current, or desired state, making an instant impact without the need to wade through huge presentations.
Brand Safaris
As marketeers our thinking can sometimes become tunnel-visioned as we get all-consumed by the brands we work on. Yet this heads-down approach doesn’t reflect the real world of the consumer who usually have other things on their mind (their loved ones, their job, the meaning of life etc). Our Brand Safari’s are designed to lift you out of the daily grind and to view the world as if for the first time, with eyes and minds wide open.
Brand Workshops
Whilst team collaboration is encouraged throughout every stage of an assignment, there is nothing to beat a well-run workshop to meet face-to-face, share findings, push thinking and gain inspiration. A workshop with Brand Guardians is the perfect way to blend the Right and Left brain together (even if the subject is highly analytical we believe it’s important to bring the session alive through creative input). In addition, careful attention is given to everything from the agenda and attendees, to the venue and even refreshments.
Future View
The marketing world is cluttered with futurologists and trend analysis, but often the real challenge is one of context – how to interpret the findings in a way that is relevant and digestible to your specific needs. After seeing numerous brands grapple with this, we created Future View, a Client-specific approach that combines insight, strategy and creative to paint a picture of the future landscape which draws upon quant and qual data, then stitches the findings together into one coherent narrative. Depending on the brief we can either source the material through our collective subscriptions and/or conduct our own primary research. Our findings are always delivered in an engaging and usable format – ranging from animations and films to PowerPoint and pamphlets.
Lovers & Haters
We are constantly baffled at how many brands only chose to research consumers who are already loyal fans, since in our experience, you can learn just as much from those who actively reject in favour of a competitor. Our Lovers & Haters methodology builds upon this thought, by stimulating groups with two conflicting views into actively defending/promoting their brand preference. We’re not exactly talking about Jerry Springer, but the essential premise is similar.
Semiotics
We’re really big fans of semiotics because the insights always add meaning and depth, as well as reduce the subjectivity behind creative concepts – saving you time money and effort. By uncovering the hidden cultural and design codes of communication, and identifying core themes ranked by Residual, Dominant and Emerging corridors, we’re able to connect with the target audience at a deeper, more emotional level in a way which can inform everything from product development to packaging and communications. We have used Semiotics to help Ford understand the automotive cultural codes in Asia, SGS to set than standards for a better world, and YoTel to develop a globally relevant identity which resonated with their guests. In each case our reports make the complex simple, delivering the findings in a usable and easily understood (though no less thorough) document, supported by visuals and product samples, where appropriate. In this instance…
Strategy
Brand Architecture
We believe a well organised brand architecture should become the central organising structure that specifies the relationship and purpose of your brands within the overall business portfolio. We have created successful brand architectures for Clients ranging from Yotel to GN Group, helping to increase demand in increasing and emerging business categories by facilitating cross-selling and providing corporate endorsement, in addition to providing competitive advantage in product parity battles as well as giving new products and markets the edge in introduction. Internally our approach helps to reduce brand confusion and optimise cost efficiencies, aligning resources to the drivers of growth and value. In deciding the correct architecture model we tend to break the process into external and internal influences. The first focuses around sources of growth, the competitive brandscape, audience diversity, purchase critera, channel strategy and geographic footprint. The second explores ownership, role, performance, permissions and structures.
Brand Clinic
Our Brand Clinic tool is a powerful performance diagnostic used by Clients wanting to identify barriers to, and opportunities for, growth. The format is a two-day workshop encompassing all key stakeholders from across the business (not just marketing) and requires two weeks of intensive analysis beforehand, looking at everything from product format/formulation, pricing, consumer targeting, channel strategy/distribution, brand positioning, communications, and key performance measures to include sales, margins, attribution, preference and loyalty etc. In this instance…
Brand Manifesto
Whilst we’re great believers in short-form (Winston Churchill was right on this), there are times where, to fully appreciate the potential and sentiment, longer-form copy is necessary - particularly where creative minds are concerned (otherwise the strategy may live and die on the page alone). This is why we often bring positionings to life in manifestos, a declaration of a brand’s full intention, written to motivate and inspire. The construct of our manifesto’s borrow heavily from the grand tradition of the art manifestos of the early 20th Century, setting-up the tension which the brand aims to counter, and being produced both in construct and content, with the mind to inspire change (that the art manifestos mimicked the political manifesto is no coincidence). As a result, our manifestos can take the form or a song, poetry, or even a work of art. In which ever form they a written, they always presented in a way where the graphic treatment works in harmony with the strategic content.
Brand Positioning
At Brand Guardians we believe the brand positioning should be one and the same thing as the creative platform, providing a unifying story that galvanises and unites the entire business behind its power - providing you with a far better return on investment. In marketing terms this means no more comms agencies running rough-shod over the brand, re-inventing the strategy at each touch-point and over successive campaigns (with the increased fragmentation of the media landscape, this type of joined-up approach is more important now more than ever). Most other branding consultancies talk about being media-neutral, but in reality this is not enough, too often this term is used to hide media-ignorance (which is why comms agencies so often feel the need to tinker). So whether you want to talk about vision and missions, purpose or beliefs, our positioning process drives meaningful change.
Brand Typologies
We believe consumer segmentation is a useful tool based on who is currently buying your product, but for us, it rarely provides clear enough direction about who you should be selling to - the difference between a sales and brand target. Our typologies combine both quant and qual segmentation data, with more psychographic analysis, to provide a much richer picture of who you should be aiming the brand toward. These can then be further validated and market-sized, should the need exist, and then brought to life in a highly visual manner, so that marketers can engage and empathise from both a strategic and creative perspective. Depending on your brief and approach to brand building, we are also able to take centrally developed typologies and then build local nuances, ensuring the business thinks globally whilst acting regionally/locally. What’s of added interest, is that we are able to cut across demographics with a single, well crafted typology, saving you time, focus and money.
Brand Values
Increasingly businesses are recognising that purpose-led organisations tend to outperform the market, but in these challenging times with workplace and workforce fragmentation, landing on a set of meaningful values which will help galvanise your employees is increasingly hard. At Brand Guardians we have developed a set of tools and methodologies to address this challenge, working either remotely or in workshops to develop meaningful values that will deliver against your business mission.
Creative
Brand Book
Our brand books are created for an audience who are more interested in the strategic vision, rather than it’s detailed implementation (which to our way of thinking, differentiates them from guidelines). As with our brand films, the trick is to balance the ability to impart information with moving the reader emotionally (essentially, engaging hearts and minds). Depending on your brief, our brand books can be beautiful perfect-bound coffee table publications, or simple and cost effective aid-memoires.
Brand Films
The relationship between a brand film and a strategy is, generally speaking, the same as a 60sec tvc and a 360 campaign – if well done, they have the instant raw power to move an audience emotionally. The trick is to avoid the trap of creating a film that makes the hair’s on the back of your arm stand-up, but actually tells the audience nothing about the brand itself. At Brand Guardians we have a wealth of experience in creating brand films - ranging from £100k + budgets for original footage with film-grade production values, to stealomatics for internal audiences. What unites them all, is the balance between education and emotion, engaging both hearts and minds to align the audience behind the new vision.
Brand Guardianship
Whether you call it Logo Cops, or Creative Curators, our brand guardianship function has been designed to ensure the brand expression is correctly applied to all successive touchpoints; ranging from advertising, PR, third party sponsorship and events, to NPD, portfolio expansion, corporate applications and annual reports. Depending on the SLA, we can provide a dedicated help-desk to service global enquires within two hours and track each request, or simply respond on an ad-hoc basis within a pre-agreed timeframe. By analysing the enquiries, we are able to identify areas of strength and weaknesses, targeting individual people/agencies/countries or even regions. Whatever the level of resource required, our belief is that your brand should be applied consistently in order to build levels of trust, recognition, recall and attribution.
Brand World
A Brand World is a visual and, sometimes physical, projection of a brand or creative strategy that adds colour, depth and meaning to the words on a page. Our BrandWorlds help test understanding and alignment from multiple stakeholders in a non-confrontational environment. In each case we tend to push further than the current status quo, so that the thinking can be future-proofed as far as possible, using our Innovations team to imagine new products and services, as well as look and feel. A useful advantage of our BrandWorlds is that non-marketers can also contribute, to include consumers. As a result, they are often used when a Client would like to test a proposition or positioning with consumers.
Brand Identity
We have an incredibly strong track record of creating refreshed and new identities for the private, public and third sectors; ranging from retail, food and drink, to consumer tech, large corporates and hospitality. What sets our work apart is that each asset is created from a strategic point of view rather than a creative whim (if there isn’t a strong rationale for it’s existence then its most likely subjective clutter). This cuts-out a huge amount of wasted energy and emotion at the implementation stage, and ensures our guidelines are written based upon a point of principle, so that the end-user can instantly grasp the overarching creative direction without having to constantly refer to a manual. As a result, our guidelines are usually a framework for the imagination, rather than a straight-jacket for creativity, gaining consistency and coherency without requiring a slavish cookie-cutter approach.
Brand Style Guide
Our style-guides are created to demonstrate the potential of a refreshed or new identity, showcasing the art of the possible, rather than being restrained by reality. In practical terms what this allows us to do is flex the brand muscle, you’d like a building-wrap on Times Square? No problem. A tail-fin onf a 747? Consider it done. A Paris-plage take-over event, we have the film already. Our style-guides help marketers start thinking in broader terms, using the brand to direct where to look, but crucially, not what to look for. In this way we engage, excite and educate.
Creative Conscious
One of the hardest parts of communications is telling an ever-unfolding story whilst being consistent, a challenge made increasingly difficult with the fragmentation of the media landscape and ever evolving agency networks. Irrespective of whether you want consistency through matching-luggage or coherency through a creative idea, the notion of remaining true to your core values is still an essential part of building trust and gaining a meaningful ROI. Our role as your creative conscious is a combination of strategic creative and creative strategy, working with your agency partners to ensure the idea and execution is true to your brand.