Brand & Messaging

Identifying, focusing efforts on and tailoring messaging to the “right” target companies and the most relevant and influential members of the buying committees within them helps drive marketing efficiency, foster consensus and accelerate purchase decisions. We create, refine and optimize ICPs and audience personas to develop a clear understanding of different segments—and the differences between them that make a difference—including their motivations, preferences and watering holes.

Regardless of preferred buyer journey model, a data-driven, shared understanding of buyer interactions and behaviors uncovers opportunities to enhance marketing efforts. We use buyer journey mapping to reveal insights into buyers’ behaviors, preferences and pain points—and use that intelligence to identify meaningful experiences, lower buying friction, inform campaign planning and guide personalization decisions.

Analyzing the competitive landscape can offer guidance into must-play (and don’t bother) channels and uncover white space opportunities to make an outsized impact. We help clients understand, prioritize and undermine competitive threats and capitalize on opportunities in their category, examining everything from publicly available annual reports to competitive spend and activity in digital channels.

For a brand story to connect and stick in the hearts and minds of its audience, it needs to be relevant, resonant and sustainable over time. Corporate and product marketers call on us to help them uncover and articulate what is special about their offering and why audiences should favor their brand or product over all others. Using qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate and understand buyers, the company or offering and its competition, we seek to reframe the buying conversation and position brands to challenge the status quo. 

Brands–particularly for offerings that are complex or relatively hard to buy–can't simply sell; people need a compelling reason to buy. The Unique Buying Proposition® (UBP) turns the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) on its head to pinpoint the most important and motivating reason to buy that only our client’s brand can deliver.   A core component of a Brand House, which captures foundational brand strategy decisions on a single page, the UBP is best arrived at through deep customer insight and is often expressed in the customer’s voice.

With more decision-makers in the mix than ever before, marketers need to have nuanced conversations with a dynamic group of buyers. Product and brand messaging services provide essential connectivity between brand strategy and market-facing copy and content. Drawing on the brand strategy, we identify the key messaging pillars that differentiate the brand and substantiate the UBP, often dimensionalizing matrices by audience, vertical, buying journey stage and more

A brand or product name is a foundational asset of an identity. But naming is increasingly complex and fraught with subjectivity and legal hurdles. Our approach to naming is to balance the possible with the practical without losing touch with aspiration and emotion. We work with clients to agree on criteria, including use cases and trademark needs, diverge and shortlist, and vet names in publicly available trademark databases to kick-start legal clearance and move toward approval.

So much more than a logo or a tagline (though of course we do those, too) a brand’s identity comprises a holistic set of visual and verbal assets that inform and connect all brand activity.  Armed with foundational brand artifacts like brand architecture and a UBP, our craft experts bring brands to life across all dimensions of identity, including logo, color, typography, tagline, boilerplate and key messaging.