Research

Audience Profiling— Most organizations only think about external audiences for brand communications. We build a profile on your most important internal and external brand audiences, ensuring your organization starts to think like a brand.

Customer Identification — We build an ideal customer model (primary target audience) specific to your organization. We conduct primary and secondary, present our findings to your internal team (branding taskforce) and ensure you have agreement from your entire team on who your organization is really targeting.

Competitive Brand Analysis — We collect brand collateral and marketing materials from a set of competitors or contemporaries. This information is analyzed for messaging, design and possible competitive advantage. We evaluate the use of the competitive brand collateral, including advertising, marketing, color palettes, typography, print techniques and other materials to assess a position of strength in the “competitive” brand landscape.

Naming Research — Your company or product name is your first chance to stand out among your competition. We analyze how your competitive set is using corporate and/or product names, then ensure you have a plan for creating superior value in your naming strategy.

Brand Touchpoint Analysis — We walk you through how your audience interacts and experiences your brand, ensuring every brand touchpoint is accounted for and assigned to an appropriate brand touchpoint manager.

Under Cover CEO Program — C-level executives often have a unrealistic view of their brand's most important touchpoint, their employees and internal stakeholders. We send a C-level executive under cover to become part of inner workings of the organization. For smaller organizations (where a C-level executive would be recognized), a Cartis Group strategist will take on this role. This research is presented to your organizations with recommendations on improving the brand experience.

Under Cover Shopper — We evaluate your organization's brand experience at the most crucial contact point, the buying experience. Our evaluation and analysis includes in-store and online sales experiences and returns and exchange experiences.

Visual Brand Audit — We analyze your organization's current brand collateral for consistency of design, messaging, color palettes, typography, print techniques, images and other critical brand touchpoints.

Strategy

Brand Architecture — The defined configuration upon which branding endeavors and extensions are built.

• Independent Brand — Independent brands may share ownership and resources but are built as independent and sometimes competing brands. (for instance, Brinker International owns Chili’s and Macaroni Grill)
• Parent Brand aka “Over Brand” — All brand offspring share the parent brand’s name, therefore drawing brand association and trust. (For instance, Microsoft, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Word)
• Central Brand aka “Master Brand” — All products and services are marketed under the Central Brand name (For Instance, Sears sells Sears brand hammers, dishwashers and clothing)

NOTE — Large brands with complex product and/or service offerings may operate several architectures simultaneously. (For instance, Sears sells and owns Sears Tools and Craftsman Tools)

Brand Platform — The Brand Platform is the foundation upon which a brand strategy is built. It typically consists of the following elements: Brand Positioning Statement, Brand Architecture, Brand Personality, Brand Promise and Brand Essence.

Brand Protection and Management — Building a strong brand requires having a protection and management strategy to ensure it stays strong. We ensure our clients understand how to protect and manage their brands. We also give them the tools to ensure brand management success.

Executive Brand Vision— We ensure our clients have a unified executive brand vision for their organization. This unified vision is typically the catalyst for the organization to start thinking like a brand.

Ideal Customer Model(s) — The Ideal Customer Model gives the organization a messaging focus, allowing it to craft a brand experience that leads to brand loyalty and ultimately, to long-term success.

Merger and Acquisition Brand Transition— We ensure our clients maximize and transfer all positive brand equity from merged and/or acquired brands. We also ensure that all new employees understand the merged brand positioning, leading to a more harmonious relationship.

Messaging Architecture — We build a messaging architecture specific to your organization starting with the Brand Messaging Propositions most important to your Ideal Customer Model. This architecture consists of the key messages (or brags) most important to your organization's success and the proof points that will substantiate the key messages. The entire architecture is built upon the messaging from your Brand Value Pyramid.

Naming Strategy — Your company or product name is your first chance to stand out among your competition. We analyze how your competitive set is using corporate and/or product names, then ensure you have a plan for creating superior value in your naming strategy.

Brand Culture

Brand Asset Management— We ensure you have the tools and knowledge to manage your brand. These tools include brand usage guides, identity usage guides, online manuals and other sources.

Brand Evangelism — During our brand platform exercises, we identify brand evangelists from within your organization who are responsible for leading and building the brand culture from the inside out.

Brand Touchpoint Map— We walk you through how your audience interacts and experiences your brand, ensuring every brand touchpoint is accounted for and assigned to an appropriate brand touchpoint manager.

Internal Brand Communications — We ensure all internal stakeholders understand your new brand strategy and know how to use and manage new brand collateral.

Merger and Acquisitions Brand Training — Internal stakeholders are often concerned during mergers and acquisitions. We also ensure that all new employees understand the merged brand positioning, leading to higher stakeholder retention and a more harmonious relationship.

Thinking Like a Brand — Strong brands have a unique culture, a culture their internal stakeholders understand and agree with. This brand culture doesn't happen overnight. It requires a brand strategy that is built from an executive brand vision, one that represents the entire organization. We give you the tools and knowledge to build your unique brand culture within your organization.

BrandSmart Process
Using our proprietary branding process, BrandSmart, we have helped build leading brands such as Whole Foods Market, New York Life and USAA. BrandSmart produces tangible results by guiding an internal representative group to a unified brand vision for your organization and translating that vision into meaningful brand messaging.

Before we start our brand development process, we identify a branding task force from within your organization. This group represents your organization during brand development and acts as brand ambassadors as we roll out your new Brand Platform. Our in-house strategy professionals guide the task force through several workshops to deliver strategic insights such as brand positioning, brand promise and brand personality— the building blocks for all brand messaging. The task force also participates in all brand messaging workshops to ensure understanding, message consistency and complete transfer of knowledge.

BrandSmart consists of five stages: Learn, Analyze, Imagine, Act and Evaluate.

Learn. We conduct primary qualitative and quantitative research, study secondary research and competitive brand materials, and go through several other brand immersion techniques to thoroughly understand brand perceptions about your organization.

Analyze. We analyze the collected data and produce a Brand Messaging Summary, containing a realistic look at how your brand is currently positioned in the marketplace. The “Key Impact Triggers” affecting your brand are one of the main deliverables of this stage. These triggers guide our Brand Platform strategy and form the foundation for brand performance measurement.

Imagine. We guide the branding task force through several workshops to build your Brand Platform. The Brand Platform will help guide everything the organization does (overall messaging, marketing, sales, new hires, executive reports, etc.). The Brand Platform workshops are typically completed in three, four-hour meetings.

Act. Your new brand is brought to life through all communication touchpoints. More importantly, your entire organization is introduced to the Brand Platform and trained on how to personally represent it through Brand Culturalization and brand messaging workshops, ensuring an exceptional and consistent brand experience.

Evaluate. We assign values to the Key Impact Triggers (from the Analyze stage) and other measurable variables so we can measure brand performance and develop branding best-practices specific to your organization.