Before institutional investors turn over millions — and sometimes billions — of dollars to an asset manager, they want to know how their money is going to be invested. It’s not a question of which equities or bonds or alternatives the manager prefers. That’s easy enough to determine by looking at their current portfolios. What…
In the second post of our archetype series, we looked at how a brand team can successfully identify which archetype their brand is and why. Once they’ve aligned around the role the brand plays in its customers’ lives, that information will serve as a guide as they develop brand strategy and express it through…
The need for powerful storytelling has become a common refrain among marketers as they think about how to better connect with audiences. With ever-increasing opportunities for brands and audiences to interact digitally, marketers know they need to find ways to cut through the noise and engage with audiences at a deeper level – and film…
One logo does not always translate to one cohesive brand. One of our clients, a global management consulting firm, learned this first hand. After a series of acquisitions and internal restructuring, management was focused on creating a “one firm” mentality, hoping to create synergies across a diverse array of practice areas that would lead to…
According to the Harvard Business Review, “study after study puts the failure rate of mergers at somewhere between 70-90%.” More often than not, brand is not promoted or leveraged to provide unity, clarity and solidarity during this critical inflection point, yet brand can make all the difference between success and failure for the companies…
For decades, law firms went to market with stale messages that did little to create compelling impressions in the minds of their audiences, let alone lasting ones. To a large extent, they got away with it — relying on the strength of their bench, their personal relationships, and the knowledge that big companies had big budgets…
The traditional lines between technology and management consulting are blurring. And consulting firms of all sizes are trying to keep up, broadening the scope of their offering (often through acquisitions) to meet the increasing demand for technology solutions and services.
We first looked at this situation in 2015, when we read the TBR 2015 Professional…
B2B marketing and branding is constantly evolving, and staying up-to-date on strategy, technology, culture, regulation, and more is critical. Most of us have busy professional and personal schedules, so this can be tough — intensive conferences are great way to cram a lot of learning into a short timeframe.
Additionally, events expose us to…
While a comprehensive verbal and visual system forms the foundation of a brand, it’s only the beginning of executing an effective branding strategy. To be successful, a brand needs to be expressed consistently across all internal and external touchpoints. Consistency is critical to establish a well-defined brand and eliminate confusion in the marketplace…
Me-too brands just don’t cut it anymore in the professional services arena. This whitepaper examines best practices for creating a distinctive and compelling brand position in professional services.
A competitive review is an important part of any brand strategy initiative. It helps answer questions critical to a successful branding effort: How are competitors positioning themselves? What are the messages that consistently rise to the top? What is the white space that can be “owned” by a brand?
For dataxu, a client in the…
We bring you the latest trending and newsworthy articles in B2B branding and marketing.
This month, the CMO as creative accelerator, and some compelling reasons to keep your words short and sweet.
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Sponge, Squirrel…
SailPoint, a worldwide industry leader in identity and access management, had succeeded in winning over technical buyers with its superior products. But it struggled to connect with the C-suite and business executives who were becoming increasingly involved in security and IT purchase decisions— and who did not prioritize identity management as a critical IT…
As we noted in the first post of this series, brands are similar to people — they’re driven by unique personalities that help create their identities. To help our clients tap into their own archetypes, we’ve developed an interactive exercise that guides them through an exploration of nine Jungian archetypes. We challenge workshop participants…
Can a legendary brand be a bad thing? That was the question facing Guggenheim Partners when it set out to evaluate its long-standing brand.
A global investment and advisory firm with more than $305 billion in assets under management, Guggenheim had grown rapidly in recent years, but its legacy dates back more than a…
According to Dealogic, a record $962.6 billion worth of cross-border deals have been announced via 5,498 transactions so far this year. This represents a 38% increase in volume year-on-year ($696.1 billion in 2017 YTD), despite deal activity having dropped 18% over the same period (6,680 deals in 2017…
Transparency, engagement and conversation with customers: all are consistently championed by marketers, both business- and consumer-facing. So you might expect that crowdsourcing — seeking ideas, input or decisions from a large group of people — is an ideal way to involve customers and/or employees. But crowdsourcing can often backfire. To be sure crowdsourcing gives a…
We bring you the latest trending and newsworthy articles in B2B branding and marketing.
This month, how marketers can start integrating AI into their work, ideas for reinventing innovation, and intriguing predictions for the future of tech.
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