PROCESSES

Creating, building, and managing great brands require exceptional insights, great creativity, in-depth analysis and ultimately, a highly focused communications strategy. While brands are unique, there are certain common qualities for success.  These include appealing to both emotion and reason, they inspire loyalty over time, they demand organization-wide commitment and support, and when managed well they inspire all stakeholders – customers, employees, partners, and the investment community. I draw upon theories of management, persuasion, psychology, and small group communication which are proven to work for creating success. 

Analyze your own company’s Brand Positioning, strategies and challenges as we work with you to develop, define, refine and build your brand strategies

Branding your products and effectively communicating is essential in determining success in building value for your products.

Structure and Goals

The McCann Group’s Branding and Developing Brand Communications Strategiesprogram

In this session, you will learn how to:

• Create your brand, define your position and understand the strength and potential for your brand

• Communicate the value of your brand

• Use competitive strategy and research to identify, define or redefine your brand

• Identify customer behavior/needs insight

• Discover purchase and loyalty drivers

• Identify, develop and define meaningful and actionable market segments

• Examine competitive brand positioning

• Conduct competitive brand assessments

• Use design to enhance brand identity

• Identify, select and enhance brand building communications

• Use new, creative brand management tools

• Select and understand relevant brand value measurements

• Use marketing research and analysis to track and react to changes in brand perception and markets

• Learn from case studies of historically successful brands

• Integrate social marketing into your brand building strategies

Art Direction: All the work on my site I’ve art directed with full concept creation, mood boards, pitching, even making costumes, designing lighting set ups, installs, mockups, illustrations and technical drawing, design, layout

Production: Everything from hires, locations, permits, negotiations, contracts, budgets, schedules etc

Business financing: I wrote business plans, raised financing. CSR: My two year absence was fueled through developing an immersive response environment and installation with CSR financing from Deutschebank

1. Setting strategic objectives within Brand Communications with emphasis on making Corporate work, seen traditionally as dull, come alive.

2. Increase work on projects like gigapixel pano displays and related (Print based installations).

3. Visual consultation and strategic brand development including on photographic content (or media that meets a variety of verticals - brand = photo development that takes stock of investor relations, stakeholders etc) — How can this be taken further? I think by moving beyond the photographic content and using it as a link or base for going forward. I consider the production of visual strategy documents — and here, there is a lot of psychology and neuroscience research that is interesting and useful — to be part of this process. Maybe developing a structural break down of services (for internal and external use) would aid in really looking at what areas can be developed or added?

4. Talks on visual communications and history of brand identity.

5. The publishing/books is great because it’s tactile and for people working in an office, looking at computers a lot, it’s a pretty nice reprieve but it’s single strand so is great as part of something more holistic. It’s also expensive. Or last I did anything with it, it was. tell me different if otherwise. Is there another way?

6. Pushing names. The more advertising anyone gets, the better it is for everyone IF it’s done right. Here I feel it can be redundant if not done well. To do it well, to link out (to linked in, sites, etc, can be useful — so, creating a mesh - maybe a database akin to Shots — where every person on the job’s name links back and then provides a list of all jobs they’ve been involved on through ORE. Or, to be used as a contact network in itself.)

7. Make sure to separate focusses between lucrative remuneration and image. ‘Corporate’ is a style but then ‘corporate’ covers any corporation with ad spend and that money can go absolutely anywhere. So, we need to define what ‘corporate’ means for ORE.

9. Pitch decks: Cool — Really heavily linked in with 3. 

10. Branding journeys: Really like this! I loved what you did design-wise. Looks great! Feels good and makes the brand feel special. Have you seen the document done for Pepsi’s logo that was released on Reddit in 2012? It’s one of the most detailed branding journeys I’ve seen. I have a copy if you want to see it. For this, have you thought about reffing psychological studies within the document? 

11. Internet spend: Digital is a freaking massive and pretty much loose term to cover anything made primarily for online.  So, I’m thinking it’s worth looking at where the spends are likely to happen next.

12. I really like your sustainability work - and I see this in your 100 series. Starbucks was probably one of the most well known first companies to ‘track the journey’ but this has been used in a variety of campaigns and independents http://www.ecouterre.com/durated-offers-tracking-transparency-from-cradle-to-grave/ is time/geographical story in data visualization. But this was done really nicely by  a few agencies last year.

13. The  word sustainability was voted one of the most overused of 2013. We ran a series of (filmed and not-filmed) symposiums last year looking at Sustainability, bringing in CDs and etc to see how they felt about the word. We determined that it doesn’t mean anything. This is why it’s been a great word to use to get anyone to do anything. But it has also lost traction since being made fun of in big publications. So, is there another word that we can use to be on the fore?

12. The Future is in biointegration - and for now, it looks like we’ll start with full immersive integration. Fun can be had here in CSR where concepts are developed that then attract sponsors (or sponsors are sought) - Tiger beer is sought out for arts… Stella etc, ideas can be developed in tandem (artist + agency) like say, Jam/Engine group works with artists, in-house boutique events or any combo is possible. This is the beauty actually - with the right idea that is familiar and novel - any number of surprising corporates might jump on board. A lot of this I see as PR not lucrative.

Thoughts here: Obviously this is great for hotels, restaurants, but work can be garnered through association with interior design agencies and architects as potential for income stream where only initial intros are required.

The way the industry is going is integrated. You will still find, and I believe the, you know, approximate number is around 20, photographers working in each sector and majority work goes to them with some ‘trickle’. This isn’t really the issue though, the bigger issue is that stock, social media, UGC, and integrated are all competing for the budgets that would have gone on traditional media spend like photos, film etc. The cost of gear is also used as an opportunity to bring budgets down as is easier entry to market for new photographers, filmmakers and etc. 

So… integrated… Integrated in the deep end of awesomeness happens in all different forms - from something like Outbrain and Wired pairing with Brands for invisible, integrated marketing on PPC to Redbull’s Inhouse team that does some of the coolest events and viral vids for X-sports. Really, we can do anything here. And this is a nice way to go with a lot of hidden extras - 

We haven’t actually discussed integrated… but I simply see it as an expansion on visual, film, design work that is used across different verticals. You’ve done great integrated so far.

On the subject of banners, this. Because it’s in BI and there are a few other studies on success rate, I do feel citing the stats on banner ads and proposing something better (being ‘ahead of the curve’ may be the way forward)  http://www.businessinsider.com/eye-tracking-heatmaps-2014-7?utm_content=buffer94ca3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Question: More FTSE companies….is this an aim?

Probably don’t emphasize music vids

One thought not related to anything discussed is the website on mobile. The menu is not intuitively located. It should just say menu or something similar — and probably stand out from the page!