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…
Each year, agencies and research firms publish the rankings of the world’s most valuable brands. More than an ego boost for the listed brands’ marketers, these valuations are important intangible assets, and they become especially pertinent during M&A activity. In fact, a study from Houlihan Lokey showed that among its sample, 70…
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…
What is brand behavior? Simply put, brand behavior is how your brand interacts and reacts with real customers in the real marketplace. While your positioning statement may say one thing about your values and strengths, truly demonstrating them is another matter.
A missed opportunity
Picture this. You’re sitting at your desk flipping through a…
Innovation. It’s been a recurring theme in almost every one of our conversations with B2B companies looking to refresh their brands. From the CMO to the CEO, B2B executives have been laser-focused on building brands that convey innovation.
When did this word become so ingrained in our lexicon? According to Google Ngram, the…
Much has been written about ‘key man’ risk — the danger for corporations that rely on one or a few individuals — and its impact on business value. Fashion firms with a celebrity designer, for example, or asset management firms with a star investment manager, are particularly vulnerable. Yet, even large, global firms can be exposed.
In…
Depending on your outlook, the financial services industry is either an incredibly scary or extremely exciting place to be right now. More than any other industry, financial services companies are facing a paradigm shift brought on by the perfect storm of digitalization, increased regulatory scrutiny and changing demographic profiles and preferences of both clients and…
Recently we helped a top-10 ETF firm launch an innovative new investment product. From the beginning, it was clear the firm’s leadership saw an ad campaign as the means to an effective launch. During our initial conversations, they wanted to jump right into creative concepts. That might have been the right approach with…
We recently sat down with Len Costa, the partner overseeing content strategy and the digital and social media practice at RooneyPartners. Len’s team designs strategies that help organizations connect with key constituencies, optimize their brand identities, and engage and activate clients, prospects, and the public.
We were interested in his take on the use…
DeSantis Breindel recently met with Forrester as part of Huddle — an intimate community of B2B marketing leaders who come together to connect, collaborate, and learn from each other and from outside experts. Forrester researchers and branding experts shared some of their latest CMO research about human-centered branding and B2B customer obsession. Here are key…
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…
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…
Every year, Fortune ranks the world’s top companies across a range of criteria. Looking at the classic Fortune 100, the more recent list of Unicorns (private startups that are valued at $1 billion or more), and other lists, we were curious to see how color was used in the brand identities of these successful…
Millennials. Generation Y. Whatever you call them, consumer brands understand the importance of the huge cohort born between 1980 and 2000. Whether they think millennials are refreshingly confident and engaged, inappropriately self-centered and entitled, or some combination of the two, marketers realize they are critical to the success of consumer businesses, responsible for $600…
At a Financial Communications Society lunch, Jaime Kalfus, then the Global Head of Brand Experience at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, presented a behind-the-scenes look at the creative strategy driving the firm’s new brand campaign. We were intrigued to see how her experience of the challenges in developing a specialty financial services…