Shafer's Innovation and Business Building Services
NORTH STAR Branding™
The challenge: Making your sales cycle shorter – for new and existing products
Our response and the result: Establishing a strong, compelling brand will guide your prospective and existing customers through the buying cycle more quickly. And, if you have a disruptive innovation, a compelling brand will help you capture and preserve more of the value it creates.
Our NORTH STAR branding™ approach provides the foundation for your brand architecture and establishes a set of guiding principles that will provide valuable direction and on-going guidance for you to manage your business more cost effectively.
Our approach:
Your Brand is so much more than a name and a logo!
The most successful business leaders and insightful entrepreneurs understand that their brands should be powerful business assets that help them generate sales and build value.
A 2012 McKinsey survey found that B2B purchasing decision makers consider the brand as a central rather than a marginal element of a supplier’s value proposition.
The survey found that decision makers say that brand is almost as important as the efforts of sales teams in encouraging them to make out a purchase order. For entrepreneurs and newly emerging companies, brand is not only central to the value proposition, it is core to helping the market learn who you are and understand your product benefits faster – critical to adoption of your products.
Our NORTH STAR branding™ approach takes this into consideration. By thoughtfully laying the foundation for your brand architecture, we help you establish a set of principles that will provide valuable direction and on-going guidance for you to manage your business more cost effectively and to help you guide your customers through the buying cycle more quickly.
NORTH STAR branding™ starts with you. We believe brands are built from the inside out. Consider McDonalds or Nordstrom’s: The power in McDonald’s brand didn’t come from the “golden arches” logo. It came from their commitment to consistency in delivering their value proposition. The commitment to consistency came from inside McDonalds first. Similarly, you might not even know Nordstrom’s logo – but it’s likely you know that their brand is built on exceptional customer service. Again a commitment from inside the company first.
We will work with you to define your brand essence and principles, quickly and efficiently. Once defined, you will find these principles will help you communicate and deliver your critical messages and value propositions to investors, employees, business partners and customers faster, more memorably and more cost-effectively, helping you build your business. We will create a brand model that will reflect the essence of your business.
With your brand model and principles in hand, we can work with you if needed to identify and select brand name(s) and architecture that will consider your business vision, objectives including expected product line growth, geographic scope and budgets. For some clients, the additional step of a market audit to thoroughly understand the competitive landscape and competitor brand positioning is critical. For other clients with more limited resources, a simple freedom to operate assessment may be all that is desired.
Once the brand name(s) and architecture are selected, creative efforts can be directed in a manner that seeks to incorporate and reflect the essence established in the brand model and principles across all your important strategic and business communication assets. Logo selection, key messages, website and social media content and other promotional materials will also benefit and leverage the foundation provided by the brand essence and model.
With this approach to branding, you will have much more than a name and a logo, you will have a “North Star” guiding you and your customers as you build your business.
“Authentic brands don't emerge from marketing cubicles or advertising agencies.
They emanate from everything the company does."
Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time