Helping you make your brand work

Cup of tea version:

I regard myself as a business strategist, and all successful business is about ‘marketing’.

By this, I don’t mean the fluffier areas such as “careful selection of a paper size for our new trade brochure”. I mean selling things. At a profit. And, preferably, to people who like the look of what they’re buying and would like to buy more.

Of course that’s what brands have been doing for their owners ever since Coca-Cola offered us “the pause that refreshes”.

What’s different in 2024 is that the relationship continues to change and that may mean the way you define and present your brand must, too.

I’m not sure we all noticed at the time but until recently a lot of companies, (B2B as well as consumer,) have had their branding heads wedged firmly where the sun does not shine.

Think I’m being harsh? I worked on a well-known UK manufacturing company whose ‘company values’ ran to 75 words. I don’t know about you but my daughter won’t listen to me past about 10.

Marketing became all about crafting our offer, our personality and then beating people over the head with it. Agency people spoke breathlessly about defining “brand worlds”, strange places into which communications would presumably herd the moist-eyed, grateful public.

The mistake did not lie in the fact that consumers aren’t interested in brands. They are very interested in feeling good or feeling excited - they just aren’t willing to work hard at it and, most of all, they want the relationship on their own terms.

The latter tends to mean some emotional warmth, combined with total rational simplicity, if indeed they require rational messages at all.

Spring Thinking can rapidly help you strip down the essence of your brand to this level.

If you do so, you’ll soon be able to brief communications more consistently across disciplines and achieve a far greater synergy of output. This particularly applies to PR, which is in my view one of the most important and cost-effective disciplines you have available.

Making your brand lean and fit for the modern market doesn’t have to involve an expensive, West End design agency. Just call or e-mail today for a no-obligation discussion.

Brand Standout

Thinking about it…

Sure, analyse your brand, but understand where it’s all going to end up.

My theory is that consumers will learn to associate, at most, a couple of emotions with a brand. They might also learn to associate it with one or two specific ideas, preferably clearly expressed.

So that’s how you need to brief your communications, your NPD and your CRM. Everything else on your brand analysis becomes the equivalent of a mathematician’s working out in the margin - you might as well rub it out and forget it.

© 2024 Spring Thinking (Central) Ltd