Organizational Brand Strategy isn’t just what an organization says, what they do, or how they do it. Your brand is who your organization is – your unique identity, values, and beliefs. It’s not about the promises you make, it’s about the promises you can keep. And when you can bring those promises to life in a way that captures the essence of your organization, it can propel your business to new heights. That’s what we do.
Branding encompasses many things, but we start with your brand conviction– not with your logo, design or colors. These tactics are important, but come much later in the brand work process. These things don’t exist without your brand conviction being defined.
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Most companies get organizational brand strategy wrong. They approach it from the outside-in, asking their prospects what they want, then trying to turn their company into whatever those prospects ask for.
Spoiler alert: it almost never works.
Customers and prospects don’t actually know what they want (but that doesn’t stop them from telling you!) And if you listen to them, you risk heading down the wrong path, or worse, one that pushes your company into making a promise it can’t keep.
At Brand Federation, we start from inside your organization, because we believe that inside every organization is a driving force – an authentic conviction so compelling that it will capture the imaginations of employees and customers alike.
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Brand conviction is what your organizational brand strategy is built from. Once we’ve identified your unique conviction, we help you bring it to life in everything you do, including your internal culture and customer experience. When we know your company is making a promise that reflects the essence of your brand, and has the pieces in place to make good on it, then and only then do we create external marketing and communications.
Our team of nationally recognized and seasoned brand strategists help uncover your conviction and focus your organization’s message to make its identity authentic, unmistakable, and compelling.
When defined correctly and managed well, your Organizational Brand can be your single most valuable asset.
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Our first step is to pull together project leadership, which always includes members of the C-Suite, and critical stakeholders from your organization for a Project Kickoff meeting. The purpose is to align around goals and milestones, and to create engagement in the process, including conversation around the challenge, objectives and measurement, the process, resources and stakeholders, initial questions and strategic hypotheses, and timing.
The team at Brand Federation conducts a comprehensive review of existing materials, including but not limited to customer research, marketing assets, and other data. This review will be augmented with our own secondary research platforms and analysis.
Informed by the review, our team will design and implement primary research instruments to learn from those who know you best internally and/or get a view from the marketplace outside of your organization.
Following research, we’ll reconvene project leadership and the Brand Federation team to review our findings and discuss strategic implications.
The next session is our opportunity to share our first draft strategy with you and your team. The goal of the meeting is to share our direction and gather your feedback – if there are areas you think are particularly interesting, any spots where we’re off-base, or any recommendations that need more exploration or substantiation.
Taking in feedback during and after the synthesis session, our team will refine the brand strategy and align with you and your team for activation.
After we’ve aligned on a direction, Brand Federation will work with you and your team to develop an activation plan for the launch of the new brand story. We will review your organization’s communication channels to identify where to tell the story and the best approach to generating buy-in and excitement.
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"We appreciate all your efforts to help us get to launch.
The process of working with Brand Federation really helped guide our final execution."
Suzanne Nathan
Marketing and Communications Manager, Bechtel
"Everyone is VERY excited about what’s to come and the direction the Bank is moving. Feedback has been nothing by positive!
Everyone walked away after the meeting running on a high from the energy everyone was putting off. We couldn’t have done it without you guys and all the support you gave!!"
Sophia Agold
GVP Marketing & Product Management, Farm Bureau Bank
“Go ahead and send me my ‘Brand Federation Fan Club’ certificate - I am certainly not the first member of this crowd, but I am a proud one!
Thanks guys, for your wonderful partnership, creativity, and appreciation for our mission and audiences.”
Lauren Zaller Moore
President and CEO, Children's Hospital Foundation
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