How to Develop & Grow Your Brand Post-30-year strategic branding agency advice

Having created in the market, over thirty years, three hundred and more brands of all sizes (small, medium, and large) in dozens of industries, I can unequivocally say that at least one-third of the time, the companies do not go beyond the symptom treatment phase, withholding their business growth and brand development objectives.

To respond to this, it would be important to explain the reasons why companies and brands usually turn to brand strategy consulting. The challenges can be either of the following three categories of brand development and growth:

Net New Brand Innovation or Expansion

They aim at developing and launching a new brand. The brand may be a product/service line extension (up or down the value ladder), independent or even spin-out. The brand can either be riding the equity of house of brands or even beginning entirely green or blue ocean.

Brand Transformation and Legacy Brand Refresh

They would like to have an existing brand refreshed by considering an in-depth brand transformation service. The brand is either getting old, enhanced, disrupted by a rival, or the brand is having the crisis that harmed the brand, or the brand requires a new life to come out of bankruptcy. The necessity might be the consequence of the acquisition or merger to show that it is not the same old master and now has more options to offer or a new direction to the buyer. In all these, there must be a change with the current brand strategy.

Profit or Brand Market Growth

The company and brand is pursuing growth in revenue, price defense, growth in margins, competitive market share stealing, or talent recruitment with the help of strategic brand positioning services. Generally, the sales are decreasing, the markets can change (like in the case of COVID in many companies), and new markets or new territories are emerging where the brand equity has not been established yet. The brand is typically solid in most instances and in terms of attaining the diverse goals of their business growth strategy, the company is oriented to brand awareness, communication channels, lead generation in marketing or recruiting programs. They presume that the brand and company operations are consistent and performing on the promises of brand.

A technology service firm contacted because its sales performance was falling. They were not satisfied with the efforts of former brand and marketing agencies and marketing managers. The first one was to come up with a new marketing lead generation program to push leads. However, after a small number of discovery discussions and brand evaluation engagements, we soon found out that there were underlying issues with the company, and a declining brand reputation. Their loss of client was twice the market rate. This was putting new clients on like bailing water and not sealing the leak and made the problem worse. Their business was not delivering and to make the matters even worse, we heard that their technology branding and services that were at the top of the pack, were lagging behind the market. The overall effect was that the management of the marketing problem was merely a symptom solution. This required:

• A different service offering brand strategy to reclaim the lead in the market
• New operation processes and quality controls
• A new play book in sales Once the changes to the strategic offerings of the brand were implemented, the reactive operational efforts were shifted to proactive, the overall brand transformation was done, and the company and service line messaging matrix were rebranded, the attrition decreased by an enormous margin.

A well-established specialized manufacturer contacted them to create a new advertising campaign. The existing creative team was not coming up with leads as they used to before. The leadership believed that a new external brand strategy consulting model was required. In a matter of one day after the discovery conversations and brand audit work, we came to know that they were facing the issue of underperforming sales due to a decrease in their delivery time. Sluggish delivery, in turn, was causing sluggish cash flow. The customers were grumbling and due to this, they had begun to divert their business to the competition and communicate the message that the manufacturing branding promise was not being honored. Of interest to us before venturing into a new campaign was to understand the reasons behind why the company was failing to deliver on its brand promises and customer experience expectations.

The Discovery Chain

We talked to the Operations, and they said that there were shortages of labor at the shop floor. This created an argument with HR who argued that there was no point keeping the day labor when there was no sufficient raw material and components at the manufacturing floor. This brought us to Purchasing who notified us that there simply was not sufficient capital and credit to make the purchase of the raw material in time, and we went to Finance and the CFO. The CFO informed me that they were overstretched due to a previous expansion. Ultimately, the company required a new bank with an enticing credit line, rather than a new ad campaign, SEO or PPC program.

A very ancient and upscale law firm had a problem recruiting attorneys and acquiring new customers. The company management desired a new recruitment strategy, and professional services branding program. On brand evaluation and discovery, we revealed significant cultural problems to the brand recruiting capability and generation of new business within a week.

The Cultural Issues Discovered

To start with, their legal branding standards had a high turnover of lawyers compared to the industry average. To add to the problems, the departing attorneys were in great numbers going to work with potential client firms. Generally, a recruited employee who leaves as a happy employee becomes an effective referral and revenue generator to introduce the professional services firm to their new employer. However, upon departure unhappy, they put fences up and advise all their friends and new workplace peers not to employ their former law firm. The damage to this brand reputation becomes multiplied and accumulated as they climb the ranks and it may take years to undo such sentiments. Businesses do not even notice when it is occurring as it slowly creeps up.

Root Causes Identified

In this scenario, this kind of attrition was the result of a number of root causes related to their branding of law firm:

• Their track with partners was significantly longer than that of competitive firms
• Although there was reasonable diversity degree in the associates, they had never made a minority a partner
• Their capability of capturing the best legal schools was slowly drifting out of the top 10 per cent to the 50th percentile of bright attorney grads due to this, and gradually progressing over 10 years or so

The Cumulative Impact

The cumulative long-term impact was the number of few skilled legal minds who were unable to become partners and consequently, there was dissatisfaction in the clients with the attorney turnover in the constant firm. This also contributed to:

• Increased unnecessary recruiting expenses
• On boarding and developmental expenses
• Reduced billings of the mid-tier legal associates To the firm, the cultural turnover expenses were posing very tangible professional services branding and business expansion issues. As we went and repositioned the brand, flattened the marketing budgets to several practice areas with the highest margins, the leadership of the firm met many realities that could not be resolved with a new recruiting or business development program.

In short, a good brand cannot afford to relax. The pressure on the brands is always changing both internally and externally. A brand is not a logo, product name, brand guidelines, a Web site, an advertisement campaign, and reputation. And yet, despite the ability and ability of these creative brand identity to play a significant role and have been shown to produce a business growth strategy outcome (when well coordinated using a comprehensive brand development), there is much much more to learn in developing and growing a brand using a strategic branding agency relationship.

The Inside-Out Approach

In order to surpass your brand development and growth objectives, you can look at the brand through the prism of inside out. Tie the threads on what customers value and retain by optimizing their brand experience.

Ask the Tough Questions

• Do you really know what your employees, recruits, clients and prospects think your brand really represents?
• What are the loopholes in operations and what can be done to mitigate them prior to embarking on brand transformation or going out on a campaign?
• Which are the best channels and budgets to use in terms of brand awareness and lead generation?
• Can you do more with less? These and other vital brand strategy questions could be used to continue with your decision making process. An analysis of hundreds of previous experiences in brand development of clients would be valuable in overcoming such challenges in a short time. Real business growth is achieved by treating the problem, but not the symptom, by undertaking comprehensive brand strategy consulting.