The Brand Fight
The Brand Fight is our proven, proprietary methodology for establishing a strategic brand positioning, purpose, and vision, that can act as the central organizing principle for driving collaboration, alignment, and effective business growth across your organization.
The Brand Fight Path to Victory
PREPARATION
8-10 weeks
A comprehensive understanding of the fight to come.
COLLABORATION
2-3 DAYS
Joining forces for tough conversations.
DELIVERY
ONGOING
A data-driven, future-ready knockout punch.
FROM:
Fragmented
Siloed Objectives
TO:
Streamlined
Cohesive Alignment
THE BRAND FIGHT
Preparation & Insights Gathering
A comprehensive understanding of the fight to come.
We begin by gathering all the information needed to fuel a successful Brand Fight Workshop. Working with your team to understand the current situation and growth objectives for your brand and your business through:
- Deep Dive Available Data Assessment (Consumer Profiles)
- Financial Goals Assessment
- Original Research (if needed)
- Organizational History Deep Dive
- Cultural Trends Assessment
- Category and Competitive Landscape Analysis
THE BRAND FIGHT
The Brand Fight Workshop
A comprehensive process to forge your strategic brand positioning.
Insights
Laying the foundation for a distinct, ownable, strategic brand positioning that addresses the current needs of the business by understanding the consumer, culture, company, and category insights.
Business Circumstances
Objective: Establish a comprehensive view of your organization’s capabilities, commercial goals, and market challenges in order to align stakeholders with a unifying purpose that informs every strategic decision across your organization.
Approach:
- We conduct in-depth stakeholder interviews and document reviews to understand your current business situation, from financial performance to operational challenges.
- We synthesize these findings into a clarified set of business objectives & challenges, both short and long-term, ensuring everyone shares a single version of the “big picture.”
Key Outputs:
- Marketing Capabilities Audit
- Current Business Situation Analysis
- Marketing Objective
Consumer Insight
Objective: Identify and understand your strategic growth consumer segment to uncover human insights that resonate on a deep emotional level. We align brand activities with what your audience truly cares about to lay the groundwork for powerful engagement, loyalty, and growth.
Approach:
- We analyze current segmentation data and undertake fresh research (quantitative, qualitative, or ethnographic) as needed to identify unmet consumer needs and opportunities.
- We translate consumer data into meaningful narratives, discovering the emotional drivers that have the power to spark brand love and create long-term engagement.
Key Outputs:
- Consumer Segmentation Deep Dive
- Strategic Growth Consumer Identification
- Consumer Insight
Cultural Tension
Objective: Spot emerging and enduring cultural and consumer trends relevant to your market and leverage these insights to spark disruption, innovation, and deep consumer resonance. We embed cultural tension into your brand strategy to amplify relevance and harness the momentum of culture.
Approach:
- We mine social, technological, and market trends related to your consumer and category that are impacting consumer perception.
- We categorize these trends by their potential to ignite conversation and generate momentum for your strategic brand positioning, empowering your brand to be part of the cultural dialogue.
Key Outputs:
- Cultural Observations & Trend Identification
- Trend Opportunity Exploration & Articulation
- Cultural Insight Generation
Category Framing
Objective: Elevate your brand out of the “sea of sameness” by reframing the category you compete in. We identify the unique territory your brand can claim and articulate a key shift in frame of reference that ensures your brand’s differentiation and competitive advantage in the market.
Approach:
- We review the current competitive landscape and identify white spaces that your brand can uniquely fill.
- We explore opportunities to reframe the conversation around your unique offerings, allowing you breakthrough in a competitive ecosystem.
- We develop a category narrative that firmly places your brand at the heart of the conversation, ensuring you lead, rather than follow, your industry.
Key Outputs:
- Competitive SWOT Analysis
- Category Mapping & Competitive Axis Identification
- Category Reframe
Brand Origin
Objective: Go back to the origins of your brand and bring its founding principles, iconic moments, and central beliefs to life. We weave them into a narrative that will inspire your team and unlock the opportunity to differentiate your brand, anchored in authenticity, to consumers.
Approach:
- We examine your brand’s heritage, from the moment of inception and capture the story of important milestones that shaped its evolution.
- We conduct in-depth interviews with long time stakeholders within the company to discover key moments and motivations that shaped your company’s path.
- We consolidate these moments into a compelling storyline that unlocks your origin to drive your vision, your values, and your “why.”
Key Outputs:
- Brand Origin Story
- Brand Histogram
- Brand Opportunity
THE BRAND FIGHT
The North Star
Building the vision, rooted in your origin story, that will align your brand and organization around a core idea, archetype, conviction, and purpose.
Brand DNA
Objective: Pinpoint the foundational idea that lies at the heart of your brand that acts as the creative springboard for everything you produce, shaping how you connect with consumers and fueling long-term growth.
Approach:
- We document and explore key language that has been developed throughout the workshop, identifying themes and concepts that have creative potential.
- We refine the creative articulation of the brand idea, so you are left with a springboard that can power creative platform development.
Key Outputs:
- Brand Idea
Archetype Mapping
Objective: Connect your brand’s personality with the instinctive human stories defined by Carl Jung’s archetypes to craft a resonant identity, rooted in your origin story, that fuels a distinct narrative, personality, tone, style, and attitude.
Approach:
- We explore the 12 archetypes and how they relate to consumer benefits, educating everyone on how they can be applied to help create distinctive brand identities.
- We map the competitive landscape to help understand where there is an opportunity to drive differentiation against the field.
- We leverage the origin story to identify the true archetype (including sub-archetype exploration) of your brand, based on who you are and where you came from, to ensure authenticity and brand fit.
Key Outputs:
- Competitive Archetype Map
- Brand Archetype
- Sub-Archetype Mapping
Brand Conviction
Objective:Articulate the core conflict, cause, or crusade your brand fights for or against to help clarify the mission you are on and inform your purpose.
Approach:
- We outline all of the things your brand hates, identifying patterns and groupings, and select the strongest motivator to anchor the brand fight.
- We articulate and refine what your brand fights for or against, in order to have a clarified statement of the conflict your brand seeks to resolve.
Key Outputs:
- Brand Fight
Purpose Alignment
Objective: Define the “why” behind your brand’s existence, beyond profit or product, to articulate your visionary North Star and guide everything from day-to-day decisions to long-term strategic investments across the organization.
Approach:
- We complete a series of exercises to identify the core beliefs of the brand, and how the world would be different without it.
- We distill the essence of the brand into a single word in order to create clarity around the ultimate thing the brand should evoke in consumers’ minds.
- We develop and refine the brand’s statement of purpose to articulate the “Why” behind your brand’s existence.
Key Outputs:
- Brand Belief
- One Word to Describe Brand
- Brand Purpose
THE BRAND FIGHT
Delivery
A data-driven, future-ready knockout punch
We like to call it the “C-Suite safety net.” Your new Brand Foundations will arm you with a clear and focused Strategic Brand Positioning.
Rooted in the origin and essence of your brand, it will inspire your product, service, experience, pricing, and distribution strategies. And it will ignite a unified vision and culture for your organization that will service the brand for years to come as you to activate it in communications with consumers and vision for your products.
THE BRAND FIGHT
Activation
How it all fits together in the end
The final step in achieving your growth targets is activating your newly forged Strategic Brand Positioning through your products and communications. A creative platform built on this rock solid foundation can inspire decades of effective marketing while a product innovation platform can help create meaningful differentiation in your products. Combined, these turn your Strategic Brand Positioning into action that drives meaningful business impacts.
Growth Gears Assignment +
Consumer Segmentation & Journey
Brand Foundations
Workshop
Activating the Strategic
Brand Positioning
“The brand fight process helps everyone gain clarity on the fundamental purpose and positioning of the brand. What’s even better is that the final product is a blueprint for business growth. It acts as a strategic touchpoint when considering how to tackle tough business problems.”
— Brendan Bosch, Former Head of Marketing Unilever, Whirlpool Corp, Yummly, SharkNinja
