Toolbox
Experience
codified.
Our greatest asset, as you might expect, is experience. Something which enables us to move faster than others. But beyond that we have a host of methods to get to interesting spaces swiftly.
Many of these we apply highly collaboratively with client and agency teams to get to answers that are both right, innovative, and fresh.
A selection is below.
Brand Positioning platform: How does this brand compete?
Business school competitive positioning options
FOCUS: What is the fundamental competitive business positioning? Is it clear?
USE: Helps to define how brand and communication can help.
CMO/ Senior management interviews
FOCUS: Getting CMOS and members of the senior management group members to confess their understanding of the business and what brand and comms need to do.
USE: gain greater clarity and focus.
‘The Right People In The Room’ one-day workshop
FOCUS: Forces the right senior people in the room to gain consensus on the core components of the brand ‘s competitive strategy.
USE: Provides the backbone for a communication strategy, avoids any nasty misunderstandings later on in the process, gets management buy in early.
Past - Present - Future
FOCUS: Gets team members to think about the bigger picture and how the category has evolved over time and is likely to do so in the future.
USE: Helps ensure that the brand strategy developed is future, rather than backward facing.
Headwinds - Tailwinds
FOCUS: Gets team members to think about the bigger picture and how their business and strategy are likely to be affected by the larger political, economic, and social trends in the market – from both a positive and negative perspective.
USE: Helps ensure that the brand strategy developed is mindful of these factors.
Communication task:
What are you really trying to do with brand communication?
Binary choice brief
FOCUS: Gets team members to boil down their strategic choices to the three fundamentals of share vs growth, new customers vs old customers, brand or product led communications.
USE: Purposeful oversimplification in pursuit of clarity.
Four box model
FOCUS: Gets team members to be specific about the campaign business objective, marketing objective in terms of the audience behavior change required to deliver, consumer barrier and resulting campaign objective.
USE: Forces clarity around the ultimate role of communications.
Engage - Persuade - Convert
FOCUS: Breaks down the overall communication plan into streams of work according to whether they are long, medium, or short term in their business objectives.
USE: Ensures that individual strands of communications are not expected ‘to do everything’ and that each has a clear and measurable role.
Agreed future metrics
FOCUS: Sets in place future yardsticks for communication effectiveness.
Use: Forces clarity on communication purpose and sets in place performance metrics.
Customer focus: How to define who they are and how they think
Top 3 audiences
FOCUS: Create a common understanding of who the key audiences are for a company and prioritize them.
USE: Allocation of resource in terms of focus and financial spend.
Leaders and followers
FOCUS: Create a common understanding of who the key influencers are within the prioritized audiences.
USE: Understanding of who to talk to / engage with first.
The six types of brand consumer effectiveness
FOCUS: Explores what a brand is trying to help people to do.
USE: Tighter focus for communication messaging.
Fix, for me, flaunt.
FOCUS: Think through what the brand fundamentally offers consumers.
USE: Purposeful oversimplification in pursuit of clarity.
Empathy map (Simon says....)
FOCUS: Unpack everything the team knows about the target audience(s).
USE: Gets beyond standard definitions with real life - empathetic – understanding to get to better solutions.
Types of dissatisfaction.
FOCUS: unpacks consumer dissatisfaction opportunities and threats (brand, category, specific competitor, life frustration).
USE: can create a definition of what the brand is an antidote to, or for.
Brand examination: How does the brand fit into the competitive landscape? Where and how does it compete from a consumer perspective?
Category definition
FOCUS: explores new or alternative category definitions, for brands in existing competitive categories.
USE: can open new communication space and competitive positioning.
Brand authenticity model
FOCUS: examines specific areas and opportunity definitions for a brand’s authenticity.
USE: helps to drill down on the right kind of ‘reasons to believe’ that can make communication credible, competitive and tightens up focus on a brand’s core competence.
Brand leadership model.
FOCUS: explores types of leadership stance a brand can/should adopt.
Use: engenders communication focus for style, tone of voice and personality.
Fighting for - Fighting against
FOCUS: Gets team members to unpack their brand purpose or company mission in vivid, highly emotive terms.
USE: Helps build a more dramatic, cut through brand strategy.
Creative development. How can we expand the creative possibilities of ideas and explain them?
The idea expansion tool
FOCUS: Looks to see how a core creative idea can flex across audiences / media / moment.
USE: Test out the adaptability of new ideas and generate multiple executional opportunities.
The storytelling archetypes model
FOCUS: Helps team members write their brands ‘story’ using an easy-to-understand process.
USE: Helps to bridge between fundamental brand strategy and creative expression.
‘Nine ways to say hello’.
FOCUS: Helps understand how other brands are positioning themselves within a category and what the opportunities are for the brand being worked on.
USE: Helps explore how a brand can best express itself in a fresh manner.
True – Relevant – Distinctive
FOCUS: Helps team members access how strong a new creative idea (or brief) is
USE: Rigor around idea and brief approval.