Congratulations!
Your brand is a CREDÂ Fixer.
Youâre on the way to building a strong brand â and perhaps youâre a bit of a perfectionist? You have high standards for your brand and thatâs wonderful, but it can sometimes make you feel like everything youâre doing is never quite good enough, right? You may feel pulled in different directions.
Your goal is to get forensic and focused.Â
Donât aim for a perfect score on all of these CRED measures. What will make a difference is getting deep into the one or two areas that are going to make the biggest difference.Â
There are three that most people struggle with:
1. Internal cohesion
If thereâs a gap between what youâre saying outside and how well itâs being delivered from the inside, itâs time to partner with HR and work with leaders to align on what needs to stop, start and continue to make the brand strategy reality to drive the growth the business craves.
Warm them up by sending them the first chapter of Rebrand Right because it walks them through the principles of CRED and explains how brands drive growth (click here for the free download).
Then turn your focus to chapter 5 â implementation and engagement. It covers what it takes to embed a brand within a business. It explains: how to get leadership to drive the change; how to engage colleagues to make the brand how you all do things every day; the core team and partnerships you need; what to focus on in the employee and buyer experiences; and how to inspire everyone to use the brand identity cohesively and creatively.
2. Marketing cohesionÂ
Your job as a marketer is to grow future revenue by making your brand easy to mind and easy to buy for buyers. We call this brand to demand but youâll also hear it called performance, growth or activation marketing.
Often brand and demand are planned and executed separately, as if it wasnât one journey for the customer. Identity, messaging and experiences are not cohesive across touchpoints. Executions and media arenât effectively localised, customized and integrated. The split between short and long term investment isnât right.Â
If this is what youâre struggling with most, chapter 6 in Rebrand Right guides you through the 8 decisions you need to make in your marketing strategy and the 8Â components of an integrated marketing plan that drives brand to demand.
Weâll help you structure your plan into programmes and journeys, allocate your budget effectively, sequence and test the work, create cohesive messaging that ladders, understand how to get tactics working together and so much more. Â
3. A brand built on lots of logic and little emotion.
Emotion is just for those B2C brands â chocolate bars, retail stores, fashion â right? Wrong. And itâs one of the problems facing many brands today. Understanding how buyers feel then tapping into an emotional insight thatâs meaningful to them and rooted in a strength of your product or company can help you become more relevant. Research identifies that a more relevant brand is a more valuable brand (get chapter 1 of Rebrand Right for the data on this).
If your brand is missing emotional resonance then either the creativity of your campaigns isnât working hard enough to generate that emotional response, and/or you need to go one step further back and actually define an emotional area you want to stand for.
Not convinced? Hereâs the other reason you need to get more emotional:
Emotion helps get the attention of your buyer. There are five different types of attention. The right hemisphere of the brain is occupied with four of them. Itâs vigilant, alerting us to new experiences and it prioritizes what the left side of our brain, which is all about focused attention, should concentrate on. And to get our left side focusing on a brand and its message, weâve got to get the attention of the right side first. So, what gets the attention of our right hemisphere? Emotion. Emotion helps to embed associations in our minds, place experiences in our long-term memory and helps us feel whether or not something is right for us - which is key at that point of purchase for brands. Read more about this and brands that do it well in chapters 1, 2 and 3 of Rebrand Right.
YOUR SUMMARY:
Get forensic and focused.
Donât get distracted by trying to improve something thatâs working well enough. What do people get most distracted by? Differentiation measures. Your brand doesnât need to be âuniqueâ. It just needs to be perceived as relatively different: better or more associated with something that matters to your buyers. Yes - you have to help it be noticed and recognised. But if you have Distinctive Brand Assets already then please donât mess with them! Changing these can actually lose you money (read more in chapter 4).
Get forensic about your brand and focus on the areas that will make the biggest difference. Itâs usually one of those three areas above.
Onwards!
Weâre cheering for you!  đ˘ đ đĄ
MEET THE AUTHORS
We're Sarah & Rachel
We've dedicated our careers to strengthening brands. Close to 100 at last count across the A-Z of industries. We've worked as marketing leaders and brand strategists in some of the world's largest businesses and branding agencies. But in the early days we weren't always sure we were making the right changes to drive business growth.
What we always wanted was a clear, step-by-step process identifying why and how to make successful changes to a brand within a business, with all its politics, idiosyncrasies and resistance to change. But weâve had to figure this out ourselves â the hard way.
We hope this book will make it easier for you. Itâs really clear and practical. It draws on our breadth and depth of brand-building experience and the latest thought-leadership on how brands actually help businesses grow. It shares specific and practical details of how to diagnose, define and deliver your rebrand.
Contact us here