We are in the new era of branding where brands are built from inside the organisations, they also can fail from inside too. Improving how brands are delivered and how they are used to focus business activity has been a part of our mission for over a decade.

We've spent more than a decade, working with clients to develop a way of working that helps them to deliver their brand promises where it matters the most, when they are up close and personal with their customers, the brand experience.

To do this we have developed a way of working that involves a 4 stage, fully aligned, process that blends flexibly into the way our client works. The stages are Exploring, Visioning, Aligning and Measuring.

Exploring

Because great Brand Alignment requires great knowledge, insight and foresight this is a vital stage to discover where your brand currently sits in the minds of its customers, where it can go and where the leaks in its current position are. Now you can often get this from market research, but we call our research Exploring because is has to be bigger than just straightforward market research. It has to look inside the company and outside the company.

We have developed two types of Exploring - on the one side we've got Zoo research, this is the traditional types of research that we all know: Qualitative research, focus groups, depth interviews. But also it requires Quantitative research - the numbers that go behind the insight.

But on the other side we have something we call Jungle research - Jungle research goes much wider than the normal Zoo research. It goes out to speak to people where they're actually experiencing the brand. And we also experience the brand ourselves, in fact sometimes we even become the brand. It also means we talk to people who've got other insights - wider, lateral insights and perspectives, about what the brand might mean, why it's succeeding, or why it's failing.

All this Exploring results in a robust and rigorously argued Brand Standing Report – the foundation of great Brand Visioning

Visioning

A great Brand Vision is built through the collaborative efforts of a senior team of people, all of whom have a direct influence on developing, managing and delivering the brand. In some cases the team members haven’t previously seen their role as having an impact on the brand, but being a part of this process not only helps them understand their role but also their influence.

A great Brand Vision will truly differentiate your organisation by establishing a clear space for that brand in peoples' heads.

No two visions are ever the same; we create them in different ways to suit your organisation, your brand and its environment after all it is your brand and not ours.

We help you develop the essential building blocks of a great brand.

Positioning – a clearly defined brand positioning that describes the unique space you will own in the market and the minds of our customers, it is not a tag line or piece of advertising speak, it is a commercially focused statement of intent.

Uniquely defined Brand Values - expressed in a way that drives on-brand behaviours in order to differentiate your brand from all the others in the market.

A well-articulated Brand Personality – to help your team understand the tone of voice the brand will need to consistently deliver throughout the customer experience.

A clear and simple brand essence that encapsulates the whole brand vision in English and not marketing speak.

Once we this is agreed and has been rigorously tested we can turn the vision into reality via Alignment.

Aligning

This is the next dynamic stage in the process that provides the active support and experience in order to support clients to turn their Brand Vision into reality by engaging the whole organisation and supporting its people in the delivery of the Brand Vision throughout the customers’ brand experience.

Our experience tells us that no two brands or organisations are the same so we have built our Brand Alignment process to be flexible enough to work with the grain of the organisation, but there are some important Alignment principles that really help and support the client and this is where we turn the Brand Vision into reality.

We have developed our own skills and capabilities to not only enable clients to envision the successful delivery of the Brand Vision but also to do it in such a way as to improve how this is done throughout the customer journey. Not just looking at some of the softer aspects of brand delivery but the harder nuts and bolts of process and business efficiency.

Working with teams from across the business we work out the Brand Critical Success Factors - the big things that are imperative that they are done absolutely right over time. It may involve processes, innovation, services, behaviours, and of course communications. These will be totally unique to your organisation and getting them right will be driven by the Brand Vision.

We empower and train small teams to take each Brand Critical Success Factor and build individual route maps, showing the starting point, the ultimate outcome and the milestones along the way. All the plans can then be consolidated into one Alignment Plan giving the management team complete transparency of what needs to be done over what time period.

The benefits of having a clear well-articulated and rigorous plan are very clear - people can get engaged with the brand because not only do you have a vision that's based on the reality of customer need and the marketplace they also have a practical plan for its delivery - and that's a great thing to have, to get overall organisational commitment to the whole process.

But the real benefits are for customers, because when the customer experience matches the promise of the brand it drives customer satisfaction and loyalty and that builds advocacy and repeat purchase - and that's the ultimate outcome of the Alignment Process.