Brands
FOR BRANDS
Your brand isn't a media plan. It's a place in someone's life.
Most brands are optimizing their way to "average" or "incrementality." How about a better strategy?
The way most brands approach media — brand strategy handed over to advertising, advertising handed over to media — is a cascade of dilution. By the time a message reaches a consumer, it's lost the thing that made the brand human.
Our version of strategy is "Brand Behavior". It is a framework that creates a different way of thinking holistically about what a brand is encountered in the world. We call the alternative Brand Behavior: the intersection of what you need to achieve, what your brand contact looks and sounds like, and how channels can amplify — or define — those qualities. It's not a framework. It's a different way of thinking about how, where, when and WHY a brand is encountered.
What this looks like in practice
Get Noticed and Stand out: Command Attention and steal Share. We can work directly with Brands, or with your Agency to audit, assess, collaborate, improve your Strategy, Planning, Activation, and BUSINESS OUTCOMES:
1) Brand / Advertising / Media alignment & synergy: The “One Word Brief”
2) Immersive “Build / Borrow / Buy” Blueprint (Connections Planning & Effectiveness)
3) A new way of thinking about audiences
4) Frequency-Based Planning
Our Philosophy & Approach
“Hand-Offs” or Cascading from Brand Strategy to Advertising Strategy to Media Strategy is antiquated, discounting the importance of Audience channel and context preferences and the ability to leverage those
The intersection of these three areas is simply described as Brand Behavior. It is the result of understanding :
1) What You Need to Achieve
2) What Brand Contact will look, feel, and Sound like
3) How Channels and Context can amplify those or affect how they’re defined
4) Does your brand / should your brand have a higher purpose?
5) The interplay between them and need to craft a holistic brief or Statement of Brand Behavior that describes the Brand’s Current Positioning, Desired Positioning, Personality, Voice and Characteristics (Social Media & CRM / long-term brand relationships)
What we Do: Work Directly
with you or your current agencies to…
1) Mine Insights to create or strengthen Brand Strategy
2) Create Focus with the “One Word Brief”: What does or should your brand REALLY stand for and mean to consumers?
3) Revise or modify Brand and/or Advertising Strategy to be MEDIA ACTIONABLE, allowing where, when, and how the Brand is encountered to amplify Brand attributes and accelerate towards Brand Goals
Working directly with Brands or in partnership with Agencies, we can facilitate and moderate a workshop to bring Brand Behavior to life.
Our “Three B’s” (Build, Borrow, Buy) construct creates a roadmap to drive channel strategy or influence Channel weighting and/or tactics, with additional ways to activate your brand.
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BUILD
The brand experiences we create to inform, entertain, provide opportunities to sample the product, sample the product’s values, or directly purchase your product or service
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BORROW
There are Brands from other categories that occupy the same place in consumers’ hearts where you want to be. “The Company You Keep” says a lot about a person, and a lot about a Brand. We’ll find unique co-marketing partners and work to create partnerships with minimal "cash currency exchange”, creating a value exchange of “alternative currency”, i.e., you need eyeballs, they need eyeballs, you have owned media (packaging, aisle displays, a website) as do they; there is a value to those things that may be used to boost each others’ brands.
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BUY
We can look at Channel Plans and recommend re-weighting based on ideas we think will help your brand stand out and be noticed. We can recommend a contextual placement strategy to align your brand with environments that leverage consumer mindset, environments that extol the brand values you want your brand to extol. And what do creative units say about your brand? Frequency drives action; can being big and bold or innovative make more of an impression than ubiquity? We can recommend how your brand shows up for consumers to build on your brand strategy.
A Different Way of Thinking About Audiences
Demographic targeting is now rarely used, replaced mostly by Behavioral Targeting. But we think audience definition is missing something vital in how Brands should think about reaching people and becoming meaningful to them, going beyond mere behavioral targeting: Tribalism.
Tribalism's basic premise is this:
People are more defined by WHAT THEY LIKE, not what they ARE LIKE.
People are driven by their passions and self-identify as members of communities:
“ I’m a “Car Guy/Gal!” “ I’m a sneakerhead! “
“ I’m a Metalhead!” “ I’m a Gamer! “
“ I’m a Tech Head! “I’m a Movie Junkie! “
We Believe Brands need to mean something to people and be meaningful in their lives to increase purchase and, as importantly, create advocates, social sharing, and re-purchase or cross-purchase of other products under a Brand.
We like to identify the most appropriate communities within your larger audience strategy and think of ways to “enter the conversation” with respect and relevance, leaning into creative iterations and creative units, Social Media Community destinations, tactics, and created experiences that will galvanize these tribes behind your brand and become your most passionate and vocal advocates.
Frequency-Based Planning
Most Agencies believe in maximizing Reach. But FREQUENCY is what drives action. How do you know you’re not over-investing in Reach and missing minimum Frequency thresholds to drive results?
Ongoing digital Optimization gets you to that threshold eventually. But why burn your investment prior to that point? Would you start a long drive in a gas-guzzler, solving for the inefficiencies along the way and, after burning up a large portion of your fuel, eventually get to optimal Miles Per Gallon? Absolutely not. Why should your advertising investment be any different? We will work with your Data Science Team to test ideal Frequency thresholds before a campaign launch, allowing your optimization to free up investment to add additional Reach, but only after you’ve started a campaign that yields immediate results; it doesn’t have to be re-tooled and fine-tuned to start yielding ROAS.