What is Brandfluence?
At Relish we define strategic branding as the process of closing the gap between who your organization is and how it’s perceived through the eyes of your stakeholders.
Let’s take it a step further. How do you close the gap? We’ve developed a tried-and-true process of developing an organization’s brand, and we call it Brandfluence™. It’s a five-phase process that takes you from the situation analysis to the implementation of your brand plan and its ongoing evolution. While the process comprises a set of methodologies and tools, we customize the components as needed for each of our clients and their specific audiences.
Here’s a brief look at each phase.
The Situation Analysis begins with an intake session with your marketing team. We want to know what you’re doing, who your target audiences are, what’s been working for you, and more. We’ll also want to take a deep dive into your marketing materials, including your website. The phase is complete when we provide you with our progress notes.
Next comes Focused Conversations, a series of one-on-one interviews with your executive team, selected employees and stakeholders. It’s qualitative research aimed at learning what people inside and outside the organization believe about you and your competitors, what matters to them as your executives, employees and target audiences, and what they believe makes your organization special. We summarize our findings in a report.
Phase 3 is the Brandfluence™ Session. Based on what we’ve learned in the first two phases, we come to the session having prepared an analysis of your primary competitors’ brands, a positioning map so that you can see where your brand fits vis-à-vis those of your competitors, and a brand SWOT analysis.
During the Brandfluence session, we present our findings and take you through a series of exercises designed to help you determine:
1) the attributes that describe your brand
2) your dream customer; the audience most critical to your long-term success
3) your brand promise, i.e. the story you want to communicate internally and externally
Our takeaway from the Brandfluence™ session enables us to begin Phase 4, Brandfluence™ Plan development. The plan includes our strategic recommendations for your name, tagline, identity, and key messages along with internal and external campaigns and launch timelines for each. The plan is accompanied by identity guidelines for message consistency.
Finally, it’s time for the Engagement Phase, when we implement the marketing and advertising plan. Along the way, we look at how it’s going and how we’re doing. This phase also includes campaign evaluation. The below graphic summarizes our five-step process