About Your Brand

Your brand is simply a reflection of what’s true about your organization.

In the age of radical transparency, it’s obvious when there is a gap between your “brand promise” and reality. For that reason, it’s important to be authentic. It helps if you have a genuine commitment to doing the right thing, and a purpose that serves the greater good, not just your bottom line.

It’s also crucial to differentiate your organization from the crowd.

Differentiating Your Brand

I work with you and your team to differentiate and position your brand in a way that resonates deeply with your audiences. The core discipline in this work is the competitive differentiation.

In a competitive differentiation, we conduct a dispassionate, in-depth analysis of your strengths and weaknesses vis a vis your peers worldwide. Then we use a structured process to articulate the strongest positioning and most compelling messages for your services.

These messages are unique, credible — as in true, real, authentic — and also relevant to your audience.

The competitive differentiation offers enormous strategic value beyond the development of the strongest, most refined positioning as it typically surfaces new, valuable information on the competitive playing field, your real strengths and weaknesses, what your clients really want and need, and changing market dynamics and trends.

The insights we glean from the competitive differentiation typically reveal risks and opportunities that inform your strategy.

As part of this work, I do an audit/analysis of your online presence and often find rich assets we can use more effectively to strengthen your narrative or tell your story in a more engaging way.

Once we have developed the most refined positioning and strongest messages for your organization, service, or product, we work with you to develop internal and external communication strategies to broadcast these messages.

When to Re-Brand

Major branding work is needed if your organization is a new venture or if your brand is out of sync with the times and no longer relevant.

Otherwise, there are good reasons for not investing in a major rebranding initiative every few years.

Consistency is good for brands. Also, if you’re an established organization with a proud history, you don’t want to “throw out the baby with the bath water” by changing a visual identity you’ve invested in and that speaks to people.

For many organizations, the work is to keep the brand relevant and fresh by making refinements to the positioning and messages (and sometimes the design) without diluting the core attributes that engender trust and loyalty.  We do the following:

• Conduct a dispassionate analysis to evaluate what’s working, what may be getting in the way, and what may be missing in your branding as it appears in your online presence.
• Ask you questions and listen, knowing you have the “organizational intelligence” needed to articulate your purpose, mission, and values in an authentic, credible way.
• Look at how you’re telling your narrative and share ideas on engaging ways to bring your story to life.
• Recommend refinements to make sure your website and online presence reflect your true essence in a fresh, relevant way.

It can be “a marathon, not a sprint” to increase the brand awareness of your organization, achieve a greater leadership position, and perhaps even become the preferred provider. It requires having clarity about your brand’s unique competitive advantages and clearly communicating your key messages in both internal and external communications day after day over an extended period of time.

There’s a big payoff for organizations that get their branding and communications right: greater visibility, a higher ranking on the leaderboard, increased sales and revenue, and the ability to fulfill their purpose on a larger scale.

Projects

I have conducted competitive differentiations for:

• A joint venture and mergers/acquisitions in global banking in the United States, Canada, and Europe
• The purchasing outsourcing and procurement services business of a major consulting firm
• Non-profit organizations and branding/communication companies
• Business lines, products, and services in global banking, technology, and commercial real estate

Services

Core services:

• Competitive differentiation research and analyses
• Audits/analyses of your online presence
• Positioning and key message development
• Providing the strategic input your team needs to strengthen your website and online presence

Additional services:

• Development of internal and external communication strategies and global thought leadership programs
• Refinement of your purpose statement and core values to reflect the imperatives of the moment
• Training (for your team) on core branding disciplines such as competitive differentiation and message platform development