Brand expression

Wider and deeper than the corporate identity systems of a pre-digital age, brand expression systems provide the strategic framework for you to communicate your vision, promise, positioning, and personality—and the shared thinking and approaches necessary to communicate across a wide range of media, constituents, and initiatives—convincingly, and consistently. Brand systems provide glue.

Every communication—print, digital, environmental, interpersonal—is an opportunity to begin and strengthen relationships—or not. Each is a chance to reinforce a message presented in a different medium—or not.

We work with a wide range of organizations—for-profit and not-for—to help them to define (or refine) a brand platform: their vision and value; appropriate strategies to connect their offerings; a competitive position they can own; agreed-upon areas of focus that make it easier for people to understand the strengths and directions of the enterprise; key messages to foster connections with different constituents; each organization's personality. Together, this thinking, developed from an understanding of your goals and challenges combined with quantitative and qualitative research, profitably informs what and how you communicate, to whom, in what media—and the look, feel, and sound of your discourse.

It's not enough to have a name and logo: focused approaches to those disciplines that come together in almost every communication—use of type, color, imagery, design, language—can, when deployed consistently across time, help you to be known by the people you want to be known by—in less time, at lower cost. And we know that branding systems need flexibility and built-in room for growth if they are to have long lives; different audiences, cultures, and initiatives require different "tilts."

But much as you don’t "own" your brand—your constituents do—we don't own your brand system; you need to. Because brand-building is a process, not an event, we build systems that can be taught and transferred; every communication you create—whether with us, other consultants, or with in-house talent—needs to achieve its tactical goals and work hard to build the meaning, image, and experience of your organization.

Brand expression systems aren't cake decorations; they're the cake.