Service Snapshot: Branding

Controlling your brand is virtually impossible but you can create an innovative framework that helps you guide it in the right direction – both externally and internally – to ensure a sustainable future.

Challenge

Standing out in today’s crowded markets and media is a real challenge for organisations.  This means that organisations have to reflect constantly on their brand strategy in order to win the battle for customer hearts and minds.

The value of a brand is taken seriously right up to Board level.  This importance has encouraged a surge in learned articles, books and so on about branding.

However, like so many strategic business initiatives, many branding exercises fail to fulfil their promise. 
Recent research found that:

• 62% said senior management failed to support the brand

• 75% of business professionals did not support their organisation’s branding initiatives

These findings suggest that much of the failure is down to an inability of the brand strategy to engage people – particularly those who work in the organisation.

When it comes to brands engaging people there is often a disconnect between the sophistication of the brand thinking and the quality of the advice given for gaining employee commitment.

What is needed is a means of connecting great brand thinking with the way people are supposed to behave to bring the brand to life for customers, in a measurable and scientific manner, with the aim of creating a sustainable advantage.

Service Solution

Our approach to branding strategy is different to most in that we place as much importance on peoples’ behaviour as we do on the actual brand strategy and realisation.
Even if employees know what their brand values are, the management struggle to ensure that people behave consistently in accordance with the behaviours required by the values.  At Penumbra we use a validated behaviour diagnostic called Eclipse that enables clients to achieve amazing results.
Our overall approach to branding encompasses five elements:

Research and Insight

Winning strategies are built on robust analysis which provides real insight to guide the strategic thinking. 
Our capabilities cover both qualitative and quantitative aspects:

Qualitative

• Focus groups

• Depth interviews

• Experience simulations

Quantitative

• Surveys

• Customer/market/segmentation

• Competitor analysis

• Market forecasting
  

Strategy

Our service includes

• Brand mode

• Competitive positioning

• Brand positioning

• Brand personality

• Portfolio strategy
  

Visualisation

The best strategy will not work if the creative interpretation is not well done.  At this point we will help you create a good brief for the creative teams and we have strategic alliances with a number of proven agencies who can do brilliantly effective corporate identity, communications, web sites, retail design, tradeshows and exhibits.

Realisation

This is the danger point for most brand strategies, particularly for service businesses. 

Defining the customer experience and the employer brand is the aspiration.  Organisations then need to be able to look at their employees’ behaviour.  That's the reality.  Only then can they look at how to close the gap between current reality and their aspirational targets for customer experience.  At Penumbra we can deliver this with our Eclipse behaviour diagnostic.

Brand Risk

As the importance of brand as a driver of shareholder value goes on increasing so it will become more important to manage and mitigate risk.  Our approach to risk is enterprise wide and comprehensive.

Benefits

• Key aspects of brand are covered

• An innovative and robust approach that can deliver the right behaviours for your brand