Be It a Redo or a Refresh, Davidson Belluso Can Restore Your Brand to Relevance.
Photo by David Pisnoy
Given all that goes into creating a brand — competitive analysis, market analysis, consumer research, creative development and testing — it’s surprising how little some companies put toward maintaining and evolving their brands.
Result: brands that are no longer relevant to the very consumers on which their survival depends.
To keep this from happening to you and your organization, here’s a quick guide to see if your brand is blah-bound.
1.
Assess your brand: Evaluate it against your competitors. Are you differentiated from them? Or simply parroting the same narrative? If you look similar and sound similar, your brand is blah-bound.
2.
Look at the calendar: How long has it been since you made any enhancements to your brand tool kit? Given how fast consumer needs change and competitors enter the market, if it’s been more than three years, your brand is blah-bound.
3.
Get help: Okay, so you’ve determined your brand is blah-bound. What to do? Get professional help with an agency that knows branding and has helped organizations similar to yours assess and reinvigorate their brands.
4.
Be involved: Great brands aren’t created in a vacuum. They are developed through the hard work of research and creative sweat. And the demands of client expectations. If you don’t demand great, you won’t get great. And your brand will be blah-bound.
5.
Create. Create. Create: There’s more than one way to skin a brand. And finding out which is the best way means you have to explore myriad solutions. At Davidson Belluso, we use an iterative approach using a creative prototyping model to get to a select few viable brand solutions in front of our clients to ensure the direction taken is in line with their vision and values. Otherwise, their brand will quickly become blah-bound.
6.
Test. Test. Test: So, you like the new brand. But what about the people for whom it matters most: your consumers? We believe in testing brand concepts via consumer focus groups to ensure that what we (client and agency) think works actually does. This too prevents brands from becoming blah-bound.
7.
Establish brand discipline: As said at the beginning, if you don’t maintain and evolve your brand to reflect the wants and needs of your consumer and, more broadly, the times they’re living in, your brand can quickly become blah-bound. Create the internal discipline within your organization to monitor your brand over time. Demand it also of your agency, Davidson Belluso or otherwise.
