Forging a Great Brand

Everything you need to run a brand workshop ?

Great brands are not the result of slogans, kitschy logos, edgy advertisements, or viral videos, they are the cumulative relevant experiences of the market with the firm’s people, processes, and offerings over time. This makes sense, but how do you know what experiences are needed or how these experiences are informed by the definition of the firm’s brand? This is the purpose of this handbook, to provide a step-by-step process you can use to take a firm from developing a brand strategy to identifying and defining the behaviors that deliver a relevant and authentic brand to the market.

This book is for consultants, marketers, product managers, and others interested in developing a meaningful, relevant, and successful brand; where success is measured by the firm’s sustainable growth. Brands are not about clicks and impressions, they are about a community of people working together to generate value for others and themselves through relationship. In this guide you may have your ideas about business and brands challenged in a way that I hope will expand your awareness and take you to a new level of practice.

Ultimately, this book is focused on helping you be successful at conducting a Brand Architecture Workshop. It starts with some general notes from the trenches and goes on to guide you from pre-work, through the workshop, and then, on to some key items for starting down the road to implementation. The process itself starts with an Environmental Assessment and moves through to a SWOT Analysis, opportunity selection, and then on to customer segmentation, the firm’s traits, and finally you make a gentle turn towards the finish line with the brand promise, pillars, attributes, and the brand personality defined. The ladder sections are what guide the transformation of the firm into a brand customer want and want to promote. This book is design for anyone, but it’s written primarily for marketing and business consultants wanting to make money from helping firms build great brands. For those not as familiar with marketing, you may want to purchase my second book with the same first title. The other book provides more background on branding and has additional worksheets to help you further.