Do you have a clear brand vision? Do you need to refresh the brand?
Thinking Through “Brand DNA”
Informing Arts helps clients define the strategic principles that drive brand strategy. We do so via a discovery process that helps clients to answer some of the key questions that shape their brand strategy.
Key Brand Drivers
We reveal patterns, disconnects and opportunities via a 360° stakeholder review process.
- Do you know what your brand stands for in the eyes of customers, employees, partners or other stakeholders?
- What is their frame of reference?
- What do you want people to think or feel when they react to your brand?
- How do you want your brand principles and associations to evolve over the next several years?
- What’s the gap between your aspirations and today’s reality?
Informing Arts can advise you on where and how to tap into marketplace and stakeholder insights and perceptions.
- Do you listen to what people say about the brand in blogs or social networks? Are you actively monitoring user-generated content?
- What do your customers or key influencers say about the brand? How long has it been since you asked them?
- Have you identified all the brand touchpoints — the key situations where customers or partners experience your brand?
- Do you have a plan for how you want to evolve brand perceptions over time?
As a strategic marketing consulting firm, Informing Arts will help you distill the essence or “zen” of your brand. When the time comes for creative expression in logotypes, brand imagery, taglines, etc., we can work with your creative team or outside agency.
We can also help you think through the best ways to leverage social media and social networking, so you can engage your market and meet customer expectations for a more conversational relationship with your organization.
Informing Arts’ Role in Brand Strategy
We help client teams plan and then execute the up-front work of crafting or evolving brand strategy. We can help you with primary research, or social media monitoring tools. Or stakeholder interviews.
We can also advise on brand hierarchy (brand architecture and/or nomenclature issues). These challenges emerge when companies grow via acquisitions, or lack a coherent strategy for naming products and services. As a result the brand portfolio becomes too confusing to customers.
When to Engage Informing Arts
Informing Arts focuses on the truly strategic inputs to branding. The results of our client engagements will set the strategic context — the directional inputs — for the “identity strategy” that will be crafted by your in-house creative team or external brand agency. Our services are complementary to theirs, rather than duplicative.
We partner with dedicated market research firms when significant primary resarch is required, such as quantitative surveys or extensive qualitative work. (We’ve also partnered with contextual research and ethnography firms.) We’re well equipped to help with stakeholder or customer interviews.
Once the up-front work is done, we will help you provide directional input to the creative teams who will bring your brand to life.
