Brand management
Skilled brand management drives the strength of your brand and the equity it offers. It comprises your brand salience – the portion of the market that knows you exist and recalls you when relevant – and your brand image – what they think of when they think of you.
Too often, brand is treated as a strange combination of ‘arts and crafts’ and unaccountable cultural claims, disconnected from strategic choices that inform investment. Brand should underpin your marketing strategy and deliver the ‘long’ of the ‘long and short’ of marketing – or the 95 of the ‘95-5 rule’.
Marketry guides clients at all stages of brand management, for start-ups through to deeply established brands, in for profit, non-for-profit and public contexts.
Brand strategy development
Effective brand management starts with a brand strategy that sees the brand through the market’s eyes. It can be frustrating to leaders as it demands consistent investment with challenging attribution to business effects. Marketry helps organisations diagnose, develop and design a confident path to success.
Key activities:
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Understand your brand’s history and context
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Facilitate leader workshops to inspire or challenge thinking
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Develop a staged strategy that minimises consultant dependence
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Guide or support tactical execution including high-level design engagement
Brand architecture definition
Brand architecture focuses on the optimal structure and proximity/distance for brands – from a house-of-brands to a branded-house and those between. Marketry’s method uses principles not preferences to help clients define an architecture that will empower M&A and marketing investment decisions.
Key activities:
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Understand your long-term business strategy
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Provide a desktop or workshopped analysis with market orientation
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Define the most efficient course to guide phased execution
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Connect decisions with your wider brand strategy
Brand distinctiveness discovery
Building a distinct brand forms most of the effort of mature marketing. To strengthen the mental and physical availability of your brand, this discovery process looks at creating a strong, familiar identity (primarily but not solely visual) and identifying clear buying contexts to connect your brand to over time.
Key activities:
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Work with marketing leads to understand your context
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Review brand, marketing and/or business strategies to ground logic
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Facilitate a workshop to clarify, gap-fill or improve thinking
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Define a development or improvement program for in-house execution
Brand position definition
Differentiation is the lesser but still important partner to distinctiveness. It is best captured by defining a tight set of ideas you want to be known for in the minds of your market – not just now (reactively), or this year, but enduringly. Marketry’s process considers and challenges options from a 360º perspective.
Key activities:
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Deeply review your brand history and existing real or proxy position
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Facilitate exploration sessions for open-minded thinking
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Develop approach, ideally closely working with in-house teams
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Guide execution and embedding efforts including beyond marketing
Brand codes and visual style development
Brand codes can span our senses to great effect but the most common are visual codes. They are also the necessary start. Marketry helps clients reduce, refine and/or extend their suite of brand codes into a vital business asset able to increase mental availability and market cut-through.
Key activities:
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Understand your brand history, and actual and potential codes
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Explore and test code options with designers, using proven frameworks
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Develop a tight brand code palette and sample applications
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Guide teams on execution disciplines
Employee value proposition definition
Employee value propositions (EVPs) are popular and yet immature as a practice. They easily derail by lacking brand skill and being treated as an HR effort. Marketry offers the mix of skills to HR and marketing leaders to inform a quality EVP that complements your brand position and is authentic over aspirational.
Key activities:
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Learn about your context, people strategy and brand strategy
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Deliver scaled employee research (surveys, interviews, workshops)
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Facilitate leader sessions to ensure commitment and alignment to strategy
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Craft copywritten concepts and guide creative, brand-led execution
Get in touch today to connect with world-leading training, evidence-based methods and proven skill in applying and scaling best practice
