Successful brands always forge deep connections with their intended audiences. They usually accomplish this by learning what prospective customers need, then building a brand that addresses those needs. But as one brand initiative supporting a new product reveals, sometimes the right brand doesn’t connect by focusing on what customers need. It connects—powerfully—by…
When you find yourself in a highly competitive field, with multiple companies offering similar products and services, branding around quality, functionality, and price can be a race to the bottom. In virtually every category, “Better, cheaper, faster” is a sure-fire way to lose the attention of your audience. When everyone says the same thing…
The Great Resignation’s Enduring Impact on Employment
Absolutely everyone’s heard of it, and chances are you’ve experienced its effects as a manager, coworker or jobseeker. The Great Resignation, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, was a remarkable phenomenon that reflected people’s evolving expectations and hopes for employment. Accelerating existing job-hopping…
Thornton Tomasetti, a well-respected, global structural engineering firm, found itself at a critical turning point. After years of strategic acquisitions and organic growth, it offered a broad and integrated portfolio of services, including protective design, testing and analysis, and even artificial intelligence. However, the company’s CEO knew that its reputation in the market…
How can a newly merged organization overcome employee skepticism to create a new brand? How can fierce loyalty to a legacy brand be transferred to an entirely new brand? These were among the pressing concerns of the CEO of HALO, a branded merchandise company. With the backing of one of the country’s leading private…
Businesses evolve. You launch to meet a need in the market, you learn your niche, and then your relationships with your clients and your industry grow as you build expertise. Time passes as your business thrives and your capacities expand and develop. Suddenly you find that your brand and your perception in your market are…
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…
Crisis can pave the path for reinvention. Few industries have been more affected by the global pandemic than travel and hospitality. During this sea change moment, Wyndham Destinations seized an opportunity to reimagine its business.
In 2020, DeSantis Breindel began working closely with Wyndham Destinations as it sought to diversify its business beyond vacation timeshares…
When a company makes a major strategic pivot, such as M&A or entering a different category, leadership often ponders a new name, design language, and messaging. These are all important considerations, but too often one of the most crucial underlying aspects of a customer’s experience is overlooked—the company’s brand architecture…
It’s not always easy to figure out when a new brand direction is needed. For many companies, the brand they build in the early stages of their business can often stay in place for years – long after the organization has evolved beyond its original offering and strategy. Which means that, down the line, they…
In some market segments, competition is so fierce, and offerings so similar, that creating a new brand isn’t enough to stand out. If your field is crowded with me-too competitors, and particularly if those competitors are larger than you and have bigger marketing budgets, you don’t win by playing their game. You…
“Disruption” is more than just a business buzzword or a marketing trend. For many organizations, it has become a true strategic mindset. Companies jostling in crowded markets, as well as start-ups entering slow-moving industries, are searching for the fresh idea or novel business model that will shake up the status quo — and help…
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…
In a crowded market, it can be tough for brands to find whitespace. Identifying an ownable market positioning while maintaining brand authenticity is infinitely harder — but doing so is imperative for a brand’s ongoing success.
Our client, CDISC, was facing this challenge. CDISC began as a grassroots, nonprofit organization determined to develop and advance…
While conducting research for our branding project with ICF, a global consulting firm, we did a lot of “typical” research: in-depth interviews with senior leaders in the organization, conversations with current and prospective clients, and an online, all-employee survey. We were getting a lot of good material – insight into the company culture, perspectives…
Successful B2B brands are built from the inside out. A company’s own people are the living embodiment of the brand in a way that is rarely the case with consumer businesses. How a B2B company’s people act, speak and even think will be far more effective in communicating the brand’s promise than…
Once, “environmentally conscious” could be tossed off as a corporate buzzword. And companies could claim that the cost of sustainability was just too high. But, driven by technological advancement, the price of sustainable technologies and practices has plummeted, and the potential for savings is impressive. A 2018 report by the Global Commission on the Economy…
For a business to be successful, it’s no longer enough to just have the best offering or most talented employees. These have become table stakes thanks to players like Amazon and Airbnb that have reinvented what it means to be customer-centric. Now, customers can order almost anything with the click of a button…