Below is a segment of our proprietary Brand Elevation™ process.
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GOING UP?
Branding today is as important as ever – but most brands continue to struggle with their place in the world. By “most brands,” I’m not talking about the brands that everyone uses as examples of great brands. Apple. Nike. BMW. McDonald’s. Starbucks. Yes, those are famous, powerful brands. Their logos are instantly recognizable to almost everyone on the planet.
Chances are, you’re not marketing one of those brands.
More likely, you’re working in, for, or with one of the 99.7% of businesses with fewer than 500 workers. And therefore, you don’t have millions of dollars of market research and hundreds of millions in media spend to put it to work.
Over the last 18+ years at The S3 Agency, we’ve worked with brands of every size and situation. We’ve had the honor of working with some of the best-known brands (see our automotive reference above), but we’ve also been in the trenches with small- and mid-sized brands. The latter brands advertise because they know they need to, but they (and their campaigns) struggle because they lack the basic foundation of a well-defined brand. Different stakeholders – from the CEO to the director of sales to the marketing team – may have entirely different ideas about where their brand is, where it should be going, and how they’re going to get it there.
Realizing this early on, we developed a proprietary process to help companies of all sizes get their brands moving in the right direction – without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars that they don’t have or that are better allocated elsewhere.
We call our process Brand Elevation. It’s fast, it’s easy to understand, it’s cost-effective, and it works really, really well. A completed Brand Elevation process provides a clear, actionable path to a differentiated positioning rooted in authentic thought leadership.
3 THREE PHASES OF BRAND ELEVATION
Our Brand Elevation process consists of three key phases:
- Definition,
- Activation, and
- Amplification.
We put together a complete guide that will help you define your brands. First, we will focus on the Definition Phase, which is 100% foundational about the brand. That means we’re not going to spend time talking about logo designs, color schemes, font selections, or any other top-level aesthetics choices. Not to say these things aren’t important, but rather that they should come later and stem from the Definition Phase. If a brand isn’t sturdy, at is core, it doesn’t matter how well you dress it up, because it won’t be going anywhere.
When The S3 Agency performs a Brand Elevation, the basic pricing is set based on how much and what type of research we will be doing, how many client stakeholders will be involved, and a few other factors. It ends up with a typical price range that’s orders of magnitude lower than what members of the Fortune 100 pay for just a tweak to their logo design, but it is still a little out of reach for many small businesses – and those businesses can really benefit from defining their brands in a truly differentiated way. That’s okay, because in this guide we’re going to take you through the basics, so you can do an effective version of the Brand Elevation Definition Phase for yourself. And of course, we’re always here if you need us.
The S3 Agency
The S3 Agency is the fastest-growing, woman-owned, omni-channel marketing agency in New Jersey. Our team of fearlessly creative thinkers turns big ideas into expertly executed campaigns. And our experience across some of the most demanding industries – automotive, CPG, hospitality – ensures the latest key insights are at our fingertips.
Learn more about our proprietary Brand Elevation™ process here.
