For many professional services firms, international expansion, especially in emerging markets, represents the greatest opportunity for growth.

Accounting Today recently published an interesting article pointing to different approaches that firms are taking to connect with international prospects – joining the right networks and associations, incorporating new services onto a company’s website, and leveraging social networks, such as LinkedIn, to connect with a broader set of prospects. All important channels for success.

But focusing on marketing strategy first is putting the cart before the horse. Simply adding a new section to your firm’s website about international capabilities is not enough to establish the credibility you need to engage international audiences.

The above channels are just vehicles; that’s a marketing strategy discussion. But first you need to make sure you’re communicating the right messages about your firm in a way that is both authentic and compelling to your new targets. That is a brand strategy exercise.

You may see a great opportunity for growth by looking abroad – but you need to determine if your current brand supports such a move. How does the expanded offering fit into your firm’s overall value proposition? And what makes your firm uniquely capable of handling the specific needs of international clients? These are all important questions to address before reaching out to prospects.

Remember a brand isn’t what you say — it’s what your most important audiences say and think about you. To get an accurate reading on your firm’s current brand, you need to conduct the right research. A brand audit can be an especially helpful tool for uncovering any gaps between where your firm’s brand stands today and where it needs to go in the future to resonate with new audiences. If your brand is a completely new player in the market, an audit of the existing landscape can help you identify the right positioning opportunity for your brand.

Keep in mind, too, that the positioning and key messages that helped build your firm may not resonate with new audiences – and this is not always an easy pill to swallow. But as your business strategy evolves, so too must your brand. As the Accounting Today article suggests, leveraging the right communications channels is critical for professional services firms looking to tap into the growing opportunities in international markets – but only when these outreach efforts are backed by a solid brand foundation. With the right positioning and messaging in place, these channels can work together in a synchronized fashion to help your firm foster meaningful dialogue with prospects and standout in a competitive market.

IPOs represent a time of unique opportunity and challenge – the chance to make a meaningful first impression with prospective investors, partners and even recruits; to take the company to the next level and achieve major growth goals; and to go head to head with more established players. Not surprisingly, IPOs can be deeply unsettling for a company’s customers and employees, many of whom will struggle to understand how the new public status impacts them.

These days, the hottest trend in enterprise technology – Big Data – is fueling the IPO market. A recent Fortune article points to a long line of recent and upcoming enterprise technology and Big Data IPOs, including visual analytics provider, Tableau Software, which raised $254 million in its initial public offering and was lucky enough to get the ticker symbol “DATA.” While much of the media attention tends to follow sexier, consumer-focused tech firms – i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pandora – B2B is having its day.

While the Big Data wave may rise all boats, those companies with a strong corporate brand will be best positioned for a successful public offering. Brand building forces a company to articulate its promise clearly and succinctly, thereby breaking through the technology clutter in the financial markets.

We saw this first hand when one of our clients, a technology start-up with a revolutionary solution for life science research, went public. To attract investors, the company had to create a brand that translated its highly complex technology platform into a bottom-line focused value proposition. We developed a message map that provided the firm with key messaging for all its stakeholders, including investors, clients, employees and the media. This empowered the firm to communicate its unique story with clarity and consistency to all key audiences. The new brand creates a bridge between technology and the C-suite, emphasizing how the company’s solution can deliver results for their clients and on the company’s financial statements. Deployed through a synchronized marketing program, the new brand enabled the company to acquire more than $600 million in partnership commitments from Fortune 50 companies within two years.

None of this happens overnight. Building a brand requires market research and deliberate, long-term strategic thinking. Treating your corporate brand as an afterthought or a last minute attempt to pump up an IPO roadshow will surely feel like the window dressing that it is. Your corporate brand should provide investors with rich insight into the company’s culture, vision and strategy. Your brand should foster the credibility you need to set your firm apart in a crowded IPO market and make an impactful first impression, but, ultimately, you are investing for the long-term in a platform to drive momentum beyond the IPO, both internally, as a culture-building tool, and externally, to differentiate the firm in an increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace.

Recently, Mary Meeker, the Kleiner Perkins internet analyst and partner, came out with her annual Internet Trends report – a smorgasbord of information and insights presented at the AllThingsD conference. The lengthy presentation (117 slides in all), brought to fore some key findings that underscore the largely untapped mobile marketing opportunity for B2B marketers. Here are a few of the most exciting reasons you can’t ignore mobile any longer.

Always within reach. Smartphone users are never very far away from their phones, reaching to their devices 150 times a day! Almost 15 percent of that time is spent consuming content through the web, search, social media, news and alerts.

The mobile mindset. Using their smartphones for social and communication activities makes people feel connected, excited, curious, interested and productive – perfectly primed to engage with your brand, especially through compelling and useful content.

Less is more. There is a major disconnect between the percentage of advertising spending and the percentage of time spent in media. While print only accounts for six percent of Americans media diet, it attracts a whopping 23 percent of all ad spending. This trend is reversed in mobile: Americans spend 12 percent of their media diet on mobile, but the channel only attracts three percent of ad spending. For B2B marketers, this means it is an optimal time for experimenting with mobile advertising.

While the time is ripe for B2B marketers to ramp up mobile efforts, it’s worth noting that mobile should be viewed as one part of a synchronized marketing program. When marketing is synchronized and built on a solid brand foundation, all touch points feed off of each other, empowering the voice of the brand to speak to every target, through every relevant discipline. Mobile is one touch point, and an increasingly important one.

As brand strategists, we have watched the evolution of these financial brands with great interest (and even participated in a few). It turns out, Getty Images has also been paying careful attention to the ways in which financial institutions are using imagery meant to convey concepts of trust, confidence and value to reposition themselves in the market.

Since the beginning of the global financial crisis in 2008, Getty has tracked the changes in imagery used in financial services marketing. In a recent issue of their online trend magazine, Curve, Getty examined the visual trends used in the advertising campaigns, films, websites, and even social media channels of some of the biggest players in the industry (check out their highlights video below).

The issue points to some interesting trends. While none of them are surprising in and of themselves, they do underscore the challenge that financial services brands face in translating their often abstract products and services into compelling and emotionally engaging stories. What’s clear from Getty’s trending analysis is that out of the turmoil and recovery has come a deep desire for authenticity and an appetite for stories of real people doing amazing things.

For example, as small business customers have become a more important market for financial services firms, the way in which small business owners are portrayed in marketing communications has evolved – from rather bland, average, almost journalist-looking to highly stylized, sophisticated and more romantic, evocative of the ‘good life’ of the small business owner. This new imagery style is meant to convey a sense of inspiration and empowerment, an aspirational yet authentic snapshot of the small business owner that is meant to resonate with the new customer ethos and separate financial brands from the tarnished traditional images of Wall Street.

Watch Getty’s highly visual webinar to get a deep dive into these trends in financial services marketing.

In our work helping companies develop and implement CSR campaigns, we have often found that getting executive buy-in can be one of the biggest obstacles to success. Without their support – and the resources that often accompany that support – it can be that much more difficult to encourage employees to get involved in CSR initiatives.

As CECP’s event shows first hand, an engaged CEO can have an incredible impact on employee participation, making CSR a vital part of the corporate culture. For the CEO’s that presented at the conference, their level of commitment was apparent even in the way they describe their roles. Rometty counts among her central tasks “inspiring employees at all levels to get involved.” Burns sees herself as the “face of community engagement” at Xerox.

This sentiment seems to be one shared by many of the CECP attendees. A poll taken at the event identified the key actions that distinguished ‘Engaged CEOs.’ Among the top two: reinforcing the value of a company’s community engagement and inspiring employees at all levels to get involved.

Of course, any CSR professional would be thrilled to have the support of their CEO, especially at this level. But it’s worth noting that an executive’s involvement alone is not enough to ensure success. Effective communication, directed to both internal and external audiences, is critical to maximizing a program’s impact – on the company’s reputation, on employee morale and on the community organizations with which the company partners. A well thought-out branding and communications strategy, backed by the support of an engaged CEO, can align CSR activities with the corporate brand in a way that is both authentic and meaningful, and transform all volunteer, philanthropic and sustainability initiatives into culture-building activities.

Companies choose to rebrand for a variety of reasons. But along the way something unexpected almost always occurs: they learn something new about themselves, something that might have little obvious connection to their brand – but a very clear connection to their company’s success.  In fact, as our experience with the asset management firm reveals, rebranding often serves as a kind of corporate psychoanalysis, uncovering hidden and sometimes painful truths.

What can a brand (and a branding firm) do to address the hard truths uncovered during a rebranding? The answer is often quite a lot – provided brand strategy is aligned with business strategy. Companies that are successful at this alignment typically have a brand champion right in the C-suite whose influence cuts across departmental lines. Sometimes this is the chief marketing officer, but it’s often the CEO.

In rebranding a national consulting firm earlier this year, we uncovered something the firm hadn’t anticipated: it was failing to keep up with new technologies that were transforming its client base, opening the door to newer, younger competitors.  We recommended a new brand built around technology and data, but cautioned that the brand would only be successful if the firm did in fact invest in technology and data. Without aligning brand strategy with business strategy, the rebranding would be a failure.

Organizational issues often come to the fore in a rebranding. A global commercial lender asked us to develop a new brand that would increase cross-selling by uniting the company’s disparate offerings into a single, compelling value proposition. However, internal research revealed that salespeople were not incentivized to sell products outside their line of business; worse, without a financial incentive, they were reluctant even to recommend other solutions because they didn’t trust the quality of the people and solutions in other divisions, and didn’t want to jeopardize their client relationships. Our recommendations included extensive employee engagement activities around the new brand designed to build cross-business trust and understanding. But fixing the compensation issue was beyond the power of a brand.

Research almost always uncovers issues that on the surface have little to do with branding.  But dig deeper and a striking truth emerges: these “collateral” issues, if not addressed, can spell doom for a new brand. On the positive side: aligning brand and business strategy can mitigate, if not eliminate, these potential pitfalls, increasing the potential that the brand – and the company – will be success successful.

Putting the company on the couch through rebranding isn’t easy. But it’s the first step to recovery.

Of particular interest was the Marketing + Technology Summit: The Rise of CMO-CIO Alignment, a half-day conference jointly sponsored by BtoB Magazine and sibling publication Advertising Age. The event featured a handful of leading marketers who discussed the changing, more tech-driven role of the CMO and the evolving relationship between marketing and IT, a necessary partnership in an increasingly data-driven world.

Nationwide CMO, Matthew Jachius, who presented along side Nationwide CIO, Michael Keller, stressed the importance of leveraging data as an “enterprise asset,” not “silo’d departmental assets.” Incorporating an integrated, more holistic approach to data management can provide a “360 degree view of the customer.” According to Keller, “if done right, it can create a competitive advantage.”

Many of the speakers focused on how marketers can build meaningful relationships with their CIOs. Sheryl Pattek, VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research, suggested marketers start with their customers, citing a Forrester report that found 60% of the B2B buying process is completed prior to sales engagement with a particular company.

How do prospects conduct research? What channels do they use at each stage? How can technology be used to enhance and customize this experience? “First you have to understand the buyer’s journey, then you determine your must-haves,” Pattek told attendees during her presentation. She also recommended including CIOs early on in the planning process, including establishing a formal timeline for implementation and measurement.

Marrying marketing and IT within a company is a topic Pattek is particularly familiar with. She recently outlined some best practices for marketers looking to build a strong, yet flexible, relationship with their company’s CIO.

Clearly, marketing is a more complex discipline than ever. At the same time, the opportunities for gaining meaningful insight into, and enhancing, the customer experience has never been greater. As the Marketing + Technology Summit showcased, marketers that are able to build meaningful partnerships their IT departments and successfully tap into the right technologies will create inimitable advantages over their competitors.

This is the second year we have made the trip to downtown Newark to support the organization we have come to admire greatly. Playworks is a proven and scalable model aimed at increasing physical activity in low-income schools. We had the pleasure of working with this inspiring non-profit when they were looking to expand nationally and needed a brand that could support their incredible growth.

Apart from being a fantastic opportunity to take part in a CSR activity that supports an organization so near and dear to our hearts, the event helps raise valuable resources for the Greater Newark and Greater New York chapters of Playworks, which collectively provide safe, healthy and inclusive play and physical activity for over 7,300 children in Newark and New York schools.

Learn more about Playworks:

DeSantis Breindel created the attention–grabbing global integrated campaign, which launched in March 2012 and focuses on portmanteaux – a word formed by merging the sounds and meanings of two different words.

“This campaign created a whole new vocabulary for describing the unparalleled diversity of expertise and products that CIT brings to its clients,” said Dru DeSantis, co-CEO of DeSantis Breindel. “We wanted to come up with something new and unexpected for them, something that truly reflects the unique and differentiated company that they are. We’re thrilled with this recognition from FCS.”

The ad campaign appeared in a variety of media, including print, mobile, web and radio. CIT employees were also encouraged to actively participate in the campaign and become brand ambassadors through a portmanteau creation contest. In the first 90 days, the contest resulted in over 350 word entries from employees in 17 offices from 9 countries around the world.

“The portmanteau concept has differentiated CIT from traditional bank advertising in the market today,” said Dan Infanti, SVP-Marketing and Advertising at CIT. “The campaign supports our focus on growth and creatively highlights the industry expertise that our executives and sales teams bring to our small business and middle market customers.”

Sample portmanteaux, and their definitions, utilized in the CIT campaign:

• Growmentum [groh-men-tuhm] Strong momentum generated by innovative financing solutions and deep insights from CIT
• Dealpertise [deel-per-teez] Expertise from CIT in developing customized lending, leasing and advisory solutions for middle market companies
• Nonstopportunity [non-stop-er-too-ni-tee] The nonstop opportunity created by customized aircraft financing and leasing programs from CIT
• Techonomics [tek-o-nom-iks] Expertise employed by CIT to design tailored, economical leasing and financing programs for small and middle market companies for technology

The Financial Communications Society Portfolio Awards recognizes excellence in financial advertising, collateral, digital media, public relations, and return on investment. Winning entries were received from financial services providers, including investment firms, credit card companies, investment banks, accounting firms, and commercial banks. See all the winners here.

About the Financial Communications Society (FCS)
The Financial Communications Society (FCS), a not-for-profit organization, is dedicated to improving professional standards in financial communications. It provides professionals in the industry with a forum for gathering relevant information, sharing ideas and building relationships with industry colleagues. The FCS hosts the annual FCS Portfolio Awards, for creative excellence in financial services advertising, a monthly luncheon series featuring prominent industry speakers, and numerous educational events. The capstone of the annual charity-focused activities organized by the FCS is the FCS Race for Kids (www.fcsraceforkids.org) which has raised more than $1.5 million for three children’s charities since 2000.

About CIT
Founded in 1908, CIT (NYSE: CIT) is a bank holding company with more than $35 billion in financing and leasing assets. It provides financing and leasing capital and advisory services to its clients and their customers across more than 30 industries. CIT maintains leadership positions in small business and middle market lending, factoring, retail finance, aerospace, equipment and rail leasing, and vendor finance. CIT also operates CIT Bank (Member FDIC), its primary bank subsidiary, which, through its online bank BankOnCIT.com, offers a suite of savings options designed to help customers achieve a range of financial goals. www.cit.com

“The new hires come after many years of steady growth for the firm, working on complex client engagements that integrate strategy, identity, design and marketing,” said Howard Breindel, co-CEO of DeSantis Breindel.

Bob brings a breadth of expertise helping leading global companies from a wide range of industries solve their business challenges through outstanding design. In his new role, Bob will lead the firm’s creative team in integrating strategy with surprisingly fresh design to tell powerful, memorable stories.

“I was really drawn to the people here and the overall approach to branding,” said Bob. “I’ve always enjoyed working with creative strategists and strategic creatives. That’s very much the culture here.”

Prior to joining DeSantis Breindel, Bob was with Siegel+Gale, a global brand consultancy, where he was a Design Director for 8 years, including 18 months in Dubai. Bob’s clients at Siegel+Gale included Bloomberg, Hewlett Packard, Aetna, The USGA and Tyco. Prior to joining Siegel+Gale, Bob worked at Arnell Group (3 Years), Landor Associates (3 Years) and Carbone Smolan Agency (6 years).

Jonathan has deep experience helping Fortune 1000 companies turn their brands into assets for growth by defining a compelling promise to the market and then driving this promise across all areas of their organization: operations, communications and culture. As Managing Director, he will lead strategy and marketing engagements for clients.

“My focus has always been about helping companies harness their brands to drive business growth,” said Paisner. “The philosophy of DeSantis Breindel is all about helping companies align brand and marketing strategy with business strategy to achieve success.”

Prior to DeSantis Breindel, Jonathan was Brand Director at Corebrand, where he developed comprehensive brand strategy initiatives for clients such as Cisco Systems, Altegrity, QBE, Tektronix, Assurant, EPR Properties, The Arc and others. Before that, Jonathan worked at Siegel+Gale where clients included Fisher Scientific, NRT and Reader’s Digest, as well as several technology start-ups. Previously, Jonathan created and ran the brand licensing division for A&E Television Networks.

“Together, Bob and Jonathan bring extensive experience working with global companies in many different industries,” said Dru DeSantis, co-CEO of DeSantis Breindel. “The breadth and depth of their expertise will enable the firm to provide the smartest solutions to our clients’ increasingly complex needs.”