Your brand is more than just your logo, awareness, recall and consideration – it is the narrative that surrounds the organisation.
Our methodology has been developed, together with Literally Brilliant, to systematically take research findings, mine them for key customer insights and then reconcile those insights against leadership goals, mission and staff values to develop a well-articulated Brand Story, using key message strings. This becomes the heart of the brand research.
A logo is not a brand
How do consumers perceive your organisation? If someone is asked to describe a brand, they generally talk about the size of the company, what they do, what the stand for, positives and negatives about a brand… but they don’t describe the logo.
A brand has a narrative
A brand is a narrative that surrounds and organisation. It incorporates:
- company mission
- culture (how leadership and employees talk about the company)
- stories that are told by stakeholders about the company
Who’s in control of your brand?
The challenge is to be able to take control and develop a well-articulated narrative around the organisation, who it is, what it stands for, what it does and why it does it. This is an organisations brand story.
Develop and articulate your brand
Develop and articulate your brand through its story. Brand story embodies company mission and values, collective values of employees and the overriding experience.
Brand Research Methodology
Mentoring ensures that plans are owned, skills are transferred and tacit knowledge is retained throughout the process
First stage in the process is to develop a mentoring plan that is tailor made to the needs of the internal team. Organisations have a wide range of expertise, experience and resources. They are all unique so our programs are designed to compliment and build on existing skill sets.
The mentoring stage will be run by Literally Brilliant, with key input from your organisation and newfocus.
This stage is to agree project scope, objectives, and determine knowledge gaps.
This stage reviews and consolidates existing brand plans, collateral and research assets to identify key knowledge gaps. It pulls together existing narrative assets to identify key messaging and detect inconsistencies.
Research is conducted to understand the current brand positioning and fill any additional information gaps
Working in partnership we ensure brand strategy is evidence based through high quality strategic brand research. Our approach ensures that the investment in research builds on your current body of knowledge and doesn’t re-invent the wheel and is focused on generating actionable insights.
Using insights from research, message strings and overarching brand story are developed
This stage involves taking insights from previous stages and developing the Brand Story. It addresses key themes arising from the research by articulating them in message string form. Strategies are developed top reverse negative message strings. These key message strings are then synthesised into one coherent brand story.
The Brand Story is validated through testing
The scope of the testing stage is subject to the outcome of the previous discovery, research and narrative development stages. The testing could be a simple sense check with internal stakeholders or something more in-depth based on external research, and may include creative execution testing where appropriate.
At this stage Brand Story informs all layers of brand strategy implementation.
We provide guidance to an internal team or external agency to help implement the new (or enhanced) brand strategy. Our level of assistance is based on the assessment of needs and resources at the beginning of the project. We are flexible and can provide as much or as little input is needed.