Advice after 30 years of strategic branding agency experience
First, ask, are you treating the symptom or the problem that is holding you back?
After developing over 300 brands in the market across three decades, for companies of every size (private and public) across dozens of industries, I can confidently state that at least 33 percent of the time, companies are only treating the symptoms, holding back their brand development and business growth strategy goals.
What drives a brand's growth?
To answer this, let's clarify why companies and brands typically reach out to BrandExtract for brand strategy consulting. The challenges fall into one or more of these three brand development and growth categories:
Net New Brand Innovation or Expansion - They seek to create and launch a new brand. The brand could be a product/service line extension (moving up or down the value ladder), a standalone, or even a spin-out. The brand may be leveraging equity from a house of brands or starting completely from scratch in a red or blue ocean.
Legacy Brand Refresh and Brand Transformation - They wish to transform an existing brand through comprehensive brand transformation services. The brand is aging out, improved upon, disrupted by a competitor, suffering from a crisis that damaged it, or the brand needs new life before emerging from bankruptcy. The need could be the result of an acquisition or merger to demonstrate its not the same old ownership, and now offers the buyer more options or a new direction. In all of these cases, something needs to change with the existing brand strategy.
Profit or Brand Market Growth - The brand and company is seeking to accelerate revenue, defend price points, increase margins, steal competitive market share, or recruit talent through strategic brand positioning services. Typically, sales have slowed, markets may have shifted (as was the case during COVID for many companies), and new markets or territories are opening up where there is no established brand equity. In most cases, the brand is generally considered solid, and the company is focused on brand awareness, communication channels, marketing lead generation, or recruiting programs to reach their varied business growth strategy goals. They assume the brand and company operations are aligned and delivering on the brand promises.
In each of these cases, time and time again, I have encountered underlying issues to achieving the brand's goals that alone cannot be solved with a new brand identity (rebrand), fresh website, PR or marketing campaign.
The following are a few real-world examples to challenge your thoughts on what it means to build and grow a brand through comprehensive brand strategy consulting. So I ask again, as you read further, are you treating the symptom or the problem of growing your brand and revenue?
Example #1: Technology Branding Challenge
A technology service provider approached BrandExtract due to lagging sales performance. They were unhappy with the performance of previous brand and marketing agencies and marketing managers. The initial request was to develop a new marketing lead generation program to drive leads. But with just a few discovery conversations and brand assessment work, we quickly revealed the company had underlying problems resulting in an eroding brand reputation. Their client attrition was double the market average. Adding new clients was like bailing water and not plugging the leak, and only compounded the problem.
Operations was underdelivering, and to make matters worse, we learned that their tech branding and service offerings, while once leading, had fallen behind the competition. The net result was that treating the marketing challenge only treated the symptom. They needed a new brand strategy for the service offerings to once again lead the market, new operational processes and quality controls, and a new sales playbook. After rolling out changes to the brand's strategic offerings, shifting operational efforts from reactive to proactive, implementing comprehensive brand transformation and rebranding the company and service line messaging matrix, the attrition was dramatically reduced, loyalty scores increased, sales cycles reduced, win ratios increased, price points increased, and net margins grew dramatically. The initial marketing program request was not even needed; it was merely a symptom.
Example #2: Manufacturing Branding and Brand Experience Issues
A well-established, specialized manufacturer reached out to develop a new advertising campaign. The current creative team was not generating leads like they once did. Leadership felt that a fresh outside brand strategy consulting approach was needed. Within one day of discovery conversations and brand audit work, we learned that sales were lagging as a result of a slowdown in their delivery times. Lagging delivery was leading to lagging cash flow. Customers were complaining, and as a result, they had started to take their business to the competition and spread the word that the manufacturing branding promise could not be kept.
Before embarking on a new campaign, we sought to know more about why the company was no longer delivering on its brand promises and customer experience expectations. So we spoke to Operations, and they mentioned labor shortages on the shop floor. This led to a conversation with HR, which claimed that without enough raw material and components on the manufacturing floor, there was no reason to retain the day labor. This led us to speak with Purchasing, who shared that there was not enough capital and credit available to purchase the raw material on time, which led us to Finance and the CFO. The CFO shared that they were overleveraged from a recent expansion. In the end, what the company needed was a new bank with an attractive credit line, not a fresh advertising campaign, SEO or PPC program.
Buyers often talk amongst themselves, and a brand's inability to deliver on consistent brand experience promises spreads quickly. So, before we even considered launching a new campaign, we introduced them to a new banker.
Lagging sales is often a symptom and not the real brand challenge to solve. Most advertising agencies survive on ad and media commissions. They rarely talk clients out of spending media dollars, as it costs them commissions. However, the best strategic branding agencies are channel agnostic and do not take media commissions. This holistic brand strategy consulting approach to understanding what drives the brand generally results in more focused efforts with higher returns, faster results, and lower expenses. Brands built properly through comprehensive brand development can last for decades, while ad and media campaigns need constant refreshing and investments.
Example #3: Professional Services Branding and Internal Brand Challenges
A very old and prestigious law firm struggled to recruit attorneys and land new clients. The firm's leadership wanted a new recruiting strategy and professional services branding program. Within a week of brand assessment and discovery, we uncovered major cultural issues affecting the brand's recruiting ability and new business generation.
First, their attorney turnover was higher than the industry average for legal branding standards. To make matters worse, the attorneys leaving were in large part going to work for prospective client companies. Typically, when a happy employee is recruited away, they turn into a strong referral and revenue source to bring the professional services firm into their new company. But when they leave unhappy, they create barriers and tell all their friends and new professional associates not to hire their old law firm. This brand reputation damage spreads and compounds as they move up the ranks, and it can take years for those feelings to fade. Companies often don't even realize it's happening as it creeps up slowly.
In this case, several root causes were behind this form of attrition affecting their law firm branding. One, their partner track was substantially longer than that of competitive firms. Two, while they had a reasonable level of diversity in the associates, they had never made a minority a partner. Third, as a result of this and slowly over a decade or more, their ability to recruit from the premier legal schools was sliding from the top 10 percent to the 50th percentile of talented attorney graduates. The compounding long-term effect was fewer skilled legal minds who could not make partner, and as a result, clients were unhappy with the constant firm's attorney turnover. This further led to higher unnecessary recruiting costs, onboarding, and development expenses. Plus, the loss of mid-tier legal associates' billings (as newer, less talented associates cannot bill at the rate of established 4 to 6-year associates) adds up significantly. For the firm, the cultural turnover costs were creating very real professional services branding and business growth challenges. While we worked on repositioning the brand and streamlining the marketing budgets to a few practice areas that drove the most margins, the firm's leadership addressed numerous realities that could not be fixed with a new recruiting or business development program alone. A brand's culture and history can significantly impact a brand's ability to grow. How well do you understand yours from an outsider's and an employee's perspective?
Conclusion: Strategic Brand Strategy Consulting Makes the Difference
In summary, even a strong brand cannot rest on its laurels. Brands are constantly evolving from pressures within and out.
A brand is more than a logo, product name, brand guidelines, website, ad campaign, or reputation. And yet, while these creative brand identity elements can and do have a substantial impact and have proven to drive business growth strategy results (when properly aligned through comprehensive brand development), there is so much more to understand when developing and growing a brand through a strategic branding agency partnership.
To better understand and meet your brand development and growth goals, view your brand from the lens of inside out. Connect the dots on what drives customer value and retention through brand experience optimization. Ask the hard questions:
- Do you know what your employees, recruits, clients, and prospects truly believe your brand stands for?
- Where are the operational gaps and opportunities to address before you embark on brand transformation or launching a campaign?
- What channels and budgets will be the most effective for your brand awareness and lead generation goals?
- Can you do more with less through strategic brand positioning services?
For advice on these and more critical brand strategy questions, call BrandExtract. We are happy to offer a second opinion, as we have hundreds of client brand development experiences like the above to draw upon quickly.
We promise to treat the problem, not the symptom, through comprehensive brand strategy consulting that drives real business growth.
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