We’ll get to grips with the history and origins of your brand and the foundations of how you have got to this point. We’ll delve into what makes you you, the things that really make you tick, the reasons why you are what you are. What the French romantically call “terroir”... the character you get from the place you’ve come from. In essence, we’ll uncover your brand DNA. This will involve talking with founders, key stakeholders, your team, searching archives, reviewing previous press cuttings, advertising etc.

A vital part of a proper diagnosis is loyalist research. These are the people who love your brand already. They’re your biggest advocates and crucial to understanding the things you do brilliantly. We’ll spend time asking them why they love you, what’s at the heart of that love. We’ll talk through the problems you help them solve and how they would otherwise solve them. We’ll understand their buying journey and decision making process. We’ll discover your key attributes that can be tested against the wider market.

Armed with our qualitative data from your heritage and loyalists, we will do some quantitative research to test on a representative sample of the market. We will build a survey that will allow you to filter by your target segments; help you build your sales funnel data for your targets, your competitors, and the whole market; measure your key attributes against your competitor set and show which you can own relatively. Trust me when I say this survey model packs a powerful punch!

Having identified the attributes that occupy a good space in the minds of your advocates, the survey will measure which attributes you can own versus your competitors, relatively speaking. Having also asked questions about awareness, consideration and preference of both you and your competitors, we will run correlation coefficients to highlight the associations you own and correlate with purchase intent. This will form the basis of some perceptual mapping that allows you to track your brand health year after year.

Now we know the perceptions that correlate with purchase intent, we are in a great place to make some powerful positioning statements, both for the mass market and for your target segments. This should form the basis of everything you present to your customers both proactively and operationally. It will arm your sales team for more effective conversations with prospective clients and will focus your operational delivery on the experiences that really matter to the customers that are best for your business.

Now we know what your customers really want from your brand, it puts us in a great position to pave the way to success. But what does success look like? What are we going to do? More importantly, what are we not going to do? What exactly are we trying to achieve? This is the most crucial part of the strategy and it’s vital to take time getting it right. Armed with your funnel data, we will compile a tight set of SMART objectives around the biggest leaks in your funnel and put a monetary value on achieving them.

We now move away from strategy into tactical execution. We know exactly what we’re trying to achieve and how we need to position ourselves. But does your product or service fit perfectly into that? Are your customers buying what you think you’re selling? How do you augment or tweak your offer so that it fits exactly with your positioning promise? We’ll identify discrepancies between your desired attributes and customer perceptions and make sure that the holiday matches the brochure.

Pricing is the moment of truth! It’s where all your strategy meets that final decision point with your customers. Revenue doesn’t just happen as a consequence of revenue management, it happens as a result of a value exchange with a customer. We’ll make sure that your pricing fits the customer’s expectations and use price modelling tools to find the sweet spot where customers are relaxed with your price. We’ll explore price framing tricks to create more value and remove jeopardy from the purchase.

Armed with our objectives and knowledge of our funnel leaks, we’ll identify tactical executions across the full marketing mix that work together and maximise effectiveness. We’ll identify the correct tactical levers to pull based on your strategic objectives and establish distinctive assets to deploy that reinforce your positioning. We’ll identify long-term, top of funnel, brand-building opportunities, as well as short-term, bottom of funnel, performance activities that generate maximum return on investment.

At the end of my comprehensive process, you will be presented with a Brand Plan ready to present to your senior team and/or board for approval. This will give you the road map to future growth and a template for success. The plan will culminate with a zero-base budget proposal outlining the implementation/media costs to achieve the objectives, the resulting incremental revenue and expected Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI).