Building and reinforcing your brand

Branding is no longer just about cars, laptops, and jeans. Organizations of all stripes feel the pressure to "get" a brand, but few understand what a brand really is, or how to build and manage one to their best advantage.

Your brand—the amalgam of what you offer and promise, how you communicate and behave, and the impressions and beliefs that those important to your success carry around in their heads—is an instrument for building connections, creating emotional resonance, sustaining relationships, and facilitating dialogues. Successful branding can distinguish you from others, attract engagement, and increase breadth and depth of participation (and buying). It can boost internal morale and support strategic changes. It can reinforce positive perceptions, correct misperceptions, and build trust. It can add value to all that you do.

Benefits of brand-building can be measured on different axes: immediate and longer term; financial and nonfinancial; tangible and intangible; departmental and organizational. For nonprofit organizations, a strong brand can help to grow diverse income streams—from sales, corporate sponsorships, foundation support, and philanthropy. Ultimately, an effective brand influences thinking and behavior—ideally in your favor.

People and other organizations form relationships with you in part because of what your brand says about them. Whether they are clients, customers, board members, or investors, they both "own" your brand and help to define it. But it's up to you to manage what forms their opinions.

Our approach

At Sametz Blackstone, we evolve brand strategy as part of your organizational strategy. More than your logo on a brochure or website, your brand is both the spirit of your organization and its material expression. Grounded in research, we help to define or refine the underpinnings of brand development—your core values, areas of focus, attributes, competitive position, and the relationships among sub-brands. We map your key constituents to what they care about and to the intersection with your promise. And we develop the strategic messages, visual language, and architecture of communications to engage people, influence perceptions, build relationships, and motivate action. And because we build systems based on principles and shared thinking—rather than around more brittle rules—our brand systems have the flexibility to "tilt" for different initiatives and audiences, and grow over time.

While we have relationships that span decades, our clients ultimately own and live their brands by having the tools and thinking to be good stewards. Early on, we engage teams across your organization—to both learn from them and ensure they're invested in the process. Farther out, we transfer thinking and provide tools and training—so that all those who communicate on your behalf—formally and informally—can be good ambassadors.

In practice…

Over the decade that the Boston Symphony Orchestra has partnered with Sametz Blackstone, we've collaborated to more clearly define and communicate the organization's four brands, helped to integrate marketing communications with development efforts, and created communications that help the BSO acknowledge constituents' "distance" from the organization—and to move them closer. And we've evolved—and shared—thinking that allows in-house staff and other consultants to make creative decisions that achieve tactical results and always work hard to build the brand.

The MIT Sloan School of Management needed to better integrate communications across offerings, define a competitive position that they could own, and raise the visibility and buzz of the school. We worked with stakeholders across the organization to design a flexible system built on shared principles (as opposed to rules) that enables MIT Sloan to pursue tactical communication goals while growing the organization's master brand—and engage students, partners, alumni, and donors in an ongoing conversation—in a voice that's uniquely MIT Sloan.

For a global leader in business consulting, we've collaborated for over a decade to craft communications programs that launch and grow a range of initiatives—in different countries in different languages—all the while building equity in the master brand and promise.

An innovator in elegant, late evening dessert dining, Finale Dessert Company opened with a single location and a vision to grow a national brand. We helped to evolve Finale's bare-bones identity into a branded communications system that supported its growth into new markets.

Brand matters

Through your offerings, communications, and behavior, you're always shaping your brand image. The important choice is whether you actively manage your brand or let it be the sum of beliefs and impressions (favorable or not) you leave behind. Working with Sametz Blackstone, you'll be taking a strategic, informed approach to brand development—and have the assurance that every communication opportunity will build on every other to build awareness, engagement, support, and loyalty.