True craftsmanship behind branding
How to develop a brand & communication platform and make your brand future proof? In this article, we share some insights where to start, how to build a strong market position and how to keep all important marketing tools in place. Let your brand journey begin!
Why a brand platform?
The brand and communication platform is about making the brand clear, relevant and attractive by finding the brand essence and defining your strategic value position. A successful communication platform lets you rest in your brand position and enables you to be agile yet keeping focus on doing the right thing. It lets you unleash creativity within the frames and helps you keep order in your marketing toolbox concerning the visual and key messaging of the brand. It is about creating clarity rather than haze – launch quality rather than quantity.
It’s not about the money, it’s about the process
The ambition steers the budget, but a good outcome is always the result of the process. How is this done then? It all starts with understanding your brand’s primary battlefield, consumer segments or simply the reason to exist. We need to answer the questions “What’s our point?” and “Why should anyone care?” as well as understand future trends and drivers influencing our industry. After that is in place, you can formulate a positioning statement that will be the key for the brand story.
Involving is the key
Our mantra is that implementation of a new brand platform starts at day one by involving key stakeholders in the process. To be successful in the brand building you need to have the organization behind you, or else the risk is obvious that you will have some know-it-all patronizing the whole idea and the implementation will be a much longer path to walk. We need to connect the internal values with the external and the key here is to involve stakeholders like market companies as well as sales, product managers and central management in the process through interviews and workshops.
Brand benefit conceptualized
When the brand position is in place and the organization is behind it, the conceptual outlines needs to be developed, tested and evaluated. You need to develop a concept that strikes the nerve with a unique essence of the identity of the organization that inspire to interact with your brand. Before launching it also has to be tested, with the stakeholders’ creative feedback taken into account, to create a concept that your company can feel passionate about and feel proud to drive for a long time. Good concepts last over time! This means being creative, but consistent. Customers tend to value relevance and consistency over originality.
Involve, interact and connect!
Last but not least, to communicate the new platform and concept we need a relevant campaign planning with a number of appealing integrated concept-guided campaigns and of course tracking the results. Find the most relevant window of opportunity based on the media consumption of the target group. To be successful, focus on a limited number of windows and dominate them, be it social media, fairs or outdoor campaigns, there are different windows to meet up with your target groups. Be clever and creative, create loops and partner up with related brands, influencers and target groups: Involve, interact and connect!
A strong branding and communication platform creates clarity to where you are heading. Its tools promote agility and saves cost when the key messages, key visuals and templates are all in place. In the end, it helps you keep the toolbox in order for you to create great marketing deeds.
Bona Brand Book – Taking a brand one step further
To take the Bona Brand one step further Adentity did a full analysis of the brand together with the Bona teams in Sweden and US. Target groups, conceptual expressions, colour analysis, and visual language discussions, were all thoroughly researched through interviews, workshops and material to find the optimal conceptual route which the new Brand Book was based upon. Read more
Brio Communication platform – Connecting generations
What is at the heart of the Brio Brand? To find that out we did in-depth interviews with consumers and trade partners across three continents landing in the insight that Brio connects generations. Read more
Tetra Recart – Open up to the 21st century alternative to canned food
When Tetra Pak introduced Tetra Recart it was a complete new, innovative packaging and processing system for food. Analysing parameters of the core positioning for the company, customers and competition the value position was established which marked the basis for the brand and communication platform for Tetra Recart. Read more
Alfa Laval – Extending the Alfa Laval experience
To show the unique value and commitment of Alfa Laval’s aftersales support and service department, we connected the brand reason with the product benefit and created an umbrella strategy. Identifying customer profiles across different markets, together with identifying core characteristics that Alfa Laval value, a platform was developed. With a target group focus, a clear concept with reason why, a balance between brand and product and securing communication loops with theme campaigns on regular basis we brought the conceptual statement of Extending Performance alive. Read more
Adentity has more than 15 years of experience as a full-service agency that strengthens brands through integrated media communication. We work closely with some of the world’s highest ranked global brands such as Sony Mobile, Alfa Laval, Axis, Brio, Kinder and Tetra Pak.
Our passion is to strengthen companies by building consistent value-based communication in line with corporate ambitions. Adentity’s mission is to create business impact through attractive and intelligent communication, building strong market positions for our clients.