Insights and Ingenuity

One of the things I love best about marketing communications is that a brand is never staid.  It moves, it flows.

There’s A lot To Consider.

A brand’s position is always evolving and even migrating within an organization and also in the minds of its customers.  There are line extensions, new formulations, and public mishandlings- these change the dynamics of things.  The forces and variables in play determining a brand’s position (and ultimately, precipitating reactive responses and proactive planning) are almost innumerable:  market opportunity, operational weaknesses, economic trends, audience awareness, strength of distribution channels just to list a few.  I think good marketing is both an art and a science because intuition, category knowledge, and relating to core audiences are as important as adhering to methodical, sequential, planning/process.  You have to understand those forces and variables in order to apply them.

When you have raw material (like a ball of yarn) and you know your end goal is to have put together a cohesive finished product that can stand on its own (like a knit dress),  where do you start? Is it entirely a linear process (back to that methodical, sequential part)? Or do you sometimes have to ‘chunk’ the work into manageable projects which ultimately can come together to form a larger, better whole?

Carte Blanche.

It’s rare that a marketer is permitted to strip down a brand and start fresh from the foundation up, working through all those steps and checklists.  After all, there’s equity to consider and an existing customer base to avoid alienating.  But what about building that strategy, you ask? Without strategy in place you can’t execute with any degree of success!

Well, yes and no.

I think that team collaboration to arrive at big-picture, all-known-issues-considered strategy is certainly critical.  Stakeholders have to determine where they need to be, the areas they must focus on in order to get there, how they can measure success, and what strengths (brand attributes) they have available.

What I’m suggesting is that sometimes you have to go through those exercises in order to get folks on the same page, working toward a common objective.  Strategy is often lofty (“…grow 135% this year…”) and can’t be achieved in a fell swoop.

Half-Baked, Not Half-Assed.(there’s a difference)

By systematically breaking down components of an overarching strategy, cross-functional work groups (who, BTW, likely have full plates with their day job) can more easily assume individual tasks or assist with whole projects.  This helps, too, with just getting something (anything!) done that is remotely in the Strategic Plan arena.

Right now, I’m working with someone to develop a mail piece. We want to take advantage of certain inventory and make an easy incremental sale (or 400) with an incentive reward.  All of the puzzle pieces are not in place with this brand – we have opportunities to strengthen our values messaging, deploy some creative engagement tactics, and tighten the overall brand experience. But we can’t move on all of that just yet, in one lump – so we’re taking our chances and establishing what could be a few key design and messaging elements that we’ll be able to build on when we tackle the next leg of the overall strategy.

Perfect? By no means. Practical? Yes. Potentially valuable? Provided there IS continual discussion, discourse, and an identified end position, I say it’s a plan for incremental success.

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On the tactical side, I’ve found it tremendously helpful to dedicate a wall (or a huge cork board) to posting samples of communications pieces as they’re finalized/published. The wall can include press releases, product brochures, print ads, case studies, logowear, fact sheets, data sheets, you name it. It’s a great way to verify that everything produced “hangs” or “families” together.  It’s even more important if there are multiple designers or writers working for the same brand, or one person manages online and another manages offline for the same brand.

Inevitably, you may find that while what you created early on pretty much works, well it’s just not quite a perfect match with the middle and last bodies of work. That’s okay – I think that’s what will keep you on the straight and narrow moving forward.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.