Most will agree that there are four ways to strategize for growth: increase the share you hold in the markets you are strong in; develop new products for those markets; extend your reach by finding new markets for your current brands; and develop new products that cater to new markets.

However, knowing the ways to grow and growing are two different things. Navigating a responsible course between stretch and over-reach requires more than strategic intent, it requires commitment and now, flexibility.

Growth Through Flexibility

Business performance today is less defined by absolute size and more by the speed and agility of it to react and act which only comes from clarity of purpose, strategic insight and decisive actions.

The reason flexibility is becoming a stronger priority is because the ability to respond is more important than the ability to just keep growing.

Especially as more and more factors come into play. Today’s brands increasingly need to balance momentum with dexterity. The threats are no longer confined to shifts in competitor behavior. Increasingly they are unforeseen changes in expectation, concern, emphasis or morality.

The Brand Growth Strategy Workshop

In the Brand Growth Strategy Workshop, experts from The Blake Project employ first hand experience from helping numerous brands in all stages of development grow as well as multiple proprietary frameworks and models to decipher ideal growth trajectories.

Realizing growth potential starts by understanding how your brand has grown in the past and what challenges it faces for future growth. Having ambitious goals for the future is good, but proving them to be attainable is critical. To achieve the clarity and confidence necessary, we use insights driven hypothesis and correlations between enterprise goals to arrive at strategically viable decisions.

The Brand Growth Strategy Workshop helps leadership and brand teams create a wider horizon, refine goals and prioritize sources of value. To that end we include a series of highly facilitated, consensus-building team exercises that focus on:

• Defining growth and its alignment with your brand’s vision, mission, purpose.
• Identifying and analyzing the brand’s current target audience, economic viability, competitive landscape and industry dynamics.
• Identifying distinctive capability advantages.
• Assessing the brand’s historic growth patterns. What you do best vs. What you don’t.
• Analyzing current trends and disruptions impacting the supply chain and how they can be exploited by the brand.
• Defining the brand’s flexible future state with corporate goals and building scenarios.
• Analyzing organizational design and its feasibility to achieve the future state.

With multiple, real-world growth strategy examples as guides, our approach is driven by an honest analysis of your brand and business that questions assumptions and takes participants on searching journeys to arrive at new and optimistic decisions about your competitive future.

The Brand Growth Strategy Workshop is one full day with the senior leadership or brand team and is delivered ONLINE and around the world at the location of your choosing. The Blake Project requires 7-10 days to plan and build the workshop.

The deliverable is a comprehensive decision document that incorporates the following essential elements: Brand Growth Plan, Prioritized Goals and Key Performance Indicators for measurement.

The outcomes of The Blake Project’s Brand Growth Strategy Workshop prove vital for startup, emerging, regional, national and global B2C and B2B brands in:

• Providing a flexible and sustainable direction for growth
• Guiding products and services life-cycle
• Prioritizing resources and obtaining higher returns
• Providing efficient economics within the portfolio
• Navigating from where your brand is now to where it must go
• Defining future performance goals and how they are integrated
• Responding to competitive threats and market disruption
• Guiding internal and external investment decisions (M&A, JV’s, Alliances)
• Identifying deeply profitable strategies for growth.
• Gaining clarity and confidence in the strategic direction of your brand’s growth

The Right Answers Require The Right Questions

What level of growth are you going to commit to that enables your brand to grow at a realistic pace, retains the customers you have, introduces new advocates to your brand community and continues to safeguard and enhance your brand’s immediate and long term reputation?

Our work together in The Brand Growth Strategy Workshop will lead us to these answers and a bigger future for your brand.

Please email me, Derrick Daye for more. I can also be reached directly at 813-842-2260 in Los Angeles, California.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

Powerful brand cultures are built from the interaction of a range of elements:

• A strong sense of purpose, emanating from your mission, vision and values, that helps you build brand equity by enabling your brand to stand for an idea that people want to celebrate every day
• Clear storylines that give the brand a unified sense of direction, but that can also be segmented by audience
• Experiences that bring people together and enable them to share being part of the community

Today brands cannot expect to simply market products and services. And a culture cannot simply expect to service that market and the brand’s customers. A brand, its culture and its customers now not only need to concur on a distinctive belief system, but also to interact and build trust and loyalty as a community on that basis.

Through this lens The Blake Project’s Brand Culture Workshop offers opportunities to arrive at actionable decisions on building the powerful brand culture you desire. We will help you identify and implement the internal changes needed to establish a new understanding of your brand that you can use to propel effective change from the inside-out.

By the end of one full day together we will make actionable decisions in four key areas:

1. How we will make the strategic shift from what your brand is today to what it will become internally and what the implications of that are for how you work
2. How we will use your brand values to make that change and encourage people in order to underpin the brand’s competitive advantage
3. Building and activating the internal story, one where the narrative comes alive for your people in ways they can truly own
4. How we will encourage and reward your people to live the brand promise and strengthen bonds with your customers via experiences (celebration, acknowledgement, recognition)

This workshop is highly interactive and will include group exercises designed to bring leadership teams to consensus on these four areas, as well as brand education on building high performing brand cultures and best practices for inside-out branding today.

Deliverables

The output of the workshop is:

• A comprehensive summary of specific recommendations to help you build a powerful sense of your brand from the inside out

Participants:  Ideally, 6-12 brand team participants. We recommend that your human resource team attend this day along with the leadership team, general managers and sales and marketing executives.

Timeframe: One-day workshop. Preparation will take The Blake Project 2 weeks.

Outcomes: The outcomes of The Blake Project’s Brand Culture Workshop prove vital for startup, emerging, regional, national and global B2C, B2B and Not-For-Profit brands in gaining clarity and confidence in the strategic direction of brand culture building efforts.

Driving Change Throughout The Culture

By involving everyone at every level of the organization, inspiring them about what the future can hold, teaching them what they can do and then energizing them to pursue goals, we bring about change across cultures that is real, lasting and relevant. Change works when people see why it’s happening and how it works for them. Our programs do that, and because they always involve senior leaders, the changes we make in a culture move in sync with shifts in the business, so that strategy and culture are working together and not at odds with one another.

Please email me, Derrick Daye for more about how this strategic workshop can help you release the full potential of your brand. (NOW DELIVERED ONLINE)

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

This multi-disciplinary, interactive workshop for one client brand brings creators, editors and potentially communications agencies together in a one-day ONLINE intensive, facilitated by members of The Blake Project, to create the template for how all the content elements will forge a new and powerful understanding of the brand and its relevance for consumers.

The Content Strategy Workshop gets results because it tasks those involved in creating, managing, distributing and measuring content with strategizing how to change the relationship that customers have with the brand through content in order for the company to better meet its business objectives.

Working together, subject matter experts join forces to link the business needs, buying journey, customer needs and content in ways that build brand equity and deliver real value for customers and prospects. Over two high-impact days, the team maps:

• Persona-based content needs analysis for the full customer base, including common points of interest and areas of divergence, assessed across all stages of the customer journey
• The key objectives for content against the brand DNA and strategy
• Strengths and weaknesses of the current content development and distribution approach
• Current engagement points and their effectiveness, including linking content to sales nurturing program to accelerate engagement and purchase
• How and where content should add value within the customer experience journey
• The editorial architecture for the brand, including influencer strategy and community building
• Specific content mapping
• Documenting your integrated marketing strategy
• Measurement frameworks

Deliverables: 

• Shared buy-in and agreement across all participants on the future content direction of the brand and how they will come to life in broad storylines over the medium term.
• A clear plan for bringing content to life in an integrated way that builds the brand’s value proposition in the marketplace.
• Content that continues to fascinate and engage key audiences.

Ideal For:  Brands looking to broaden their content presence in order to better inform and involve consumers.

Participants:  Ideally, 6-12 brand team participants and up to six representatives from outside agencies.

Timeframe: One-day workshop. Preparation will take 1-3 weeks, depending on how much pre-work you wish participants to do.

Outcomes: A clear view of how all of your content will work together going forward to build a deeper and more valued understanding of the brand in order to increase sales and ROI.

Context: This Content Strategy Workshop builds on the learnings from our Vision, Mission and Values, Brand Positioning, Brand Storytelling and Customer Experience workshops.

If you are looking to get the greatest value out of your time together, we recommend bundling this Content Strategy workshop with our Brand Voice workshop so that everyone involved in developing content understands how to stay on-brand with everything they write.

Please email me, Derrick Daye for more about how this strategic workshop can help you release the full potential of your brand.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

In the Disruptive Brand Strategy Workshop experts from The Blake Project help brands in critical moments of change define and analyze disruptive issues, identify and map opportunities and build the strategic infrastructure necessary to help create the future they seek.

In this full strategic day customized for one client brand, we begin by sharing the new context in which brands must compete and the requirements for brand relevance in an age of disruption.

A series of highly facilitated, consensus-building team exercises follow where we will focus on:

• Identifying, analyzing and selecting the brand’s target audiences, competitive frame of reference and key customer benefits (functional, emotional, experiential and self-expressive).
• Assessing the brand’s internal and external strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
• Developing and or refining the brand’s unique value proposition. Ensuring that your brand is differentiated in its marketplace, has chosen the most powerful benefits to own and that it has developed the proof points and “reasons to believe” for those benefits.
• Defining the brand’s future state and its path to relevance.

This workshop is highly interactive and designed to question assumptions, taking participants on searching journeys to arrive at new and optimistic decisions about their competitive future.

The Blake Project will provide specific behavioral data and trend forecast data on your brand to help inform the process.

The Disruptive Brand Strategy Workshop is delivered ONLINE and around the world at the location of your choosing and is designed for 8-15 key stakeholders.

The deliverable is a decision document that incorporates the following essential elements: target customer, SWOT analysis, unique value proposition and future state.

The outcomes of The Blake Project’s Disruptive Brand Strategy Workshop prove vital for startup, emerging, regional, national and global B2C and B2B brands in:

• Extending or creating relevance
• Navigating from where your brand is now to where it must go
• Understanding the new normal
• Gaining clarity and confidence in the strategic direction of your brand
• Responding to competitive threats and market disruption
• Shaping perceptions that the value of your products or services are high and unique
• Gaining stakeholder consensus on what the brand stands for today and its future state
• Anchoring the brand culture with one ‘ownable’ point of difference
• Defining and articulating competitive value
• Guiding internal and external communications in staying on brand

The Disruptive Brand Strategy Workshop is co-led by Geoff Colon and Derrick Daye

Please email me for more about how this strategic workshop can help your brand see, understand and navigate the disruptive forces ahead.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

The power of The Customer Experience Workshop resides in the collaborative process. Working, imagining and creating together, customers interact with their company ‘peers’ to create the template for an enhanced experience that will build equity and value for both the brand and its customers.

Facilitated by the seasoned brand experts of The Blake Project, the workshop’s day begins with an opening “Discovery” session and then moves into “Co-Creation” experience design. The day concludes with a “Consensus” session where top ideas are prioritized and expanded on.

The Customer Experience Workshop is the logical next step after brand positioning, brand storytelling, brand voice and customer touchpoint design.

DISCOVERY: Guided imagery storytelling will help customers articulate what the current category experience looks like for them. Staying brand neutral, touch-points are confirmed and insight is built around the pain points and frustrations as well as the unmet customer needs, expectations and desires that are the core drivers of satisfaction. The sponsoring brand is then introduced and creative visualization techniques help customers articulate the sponsoring brand’s experience and compare it to the overall category experience.

CO-CREATION:  Utilizing agreed upon touchpoints and the sponsoring brand’s essence, promise and personality as a guideline for development, participants collaborate to co-create new, energized and valuable customer experiences.

CONSENSUS:  The day will end with a strategic session prioritizing and expanding on the ideas that offer the highest levels of user satisfaction and brand differentiation.

Ideal For:  Those marketers within the company responsible for brand management and brand experience, design and implementation.

Participants:  Ideally, 6-12 brand team participants and 10-16 customers attend The Customer Experience Workshop.

Deliverables: 

• Shared buy-in and agreement on the brand experience ideas and concepts that will form the basis for a market-differentiating brand experience for the sponsoring brand.
• An energized sense of purpose and direction that will add speed, precision and power to the implementation of the brand experience.
• A comprehensive overview of findings.
• The ability to ‘Wow’ your customers, not just satisfy them.

Timeframe: One full workshop day. Preparation and customer recruitment will take 2-3 weeks for The Blake Project.

Outcomes: Clarity and confidence in the strategic direction of your brand experience.

Learn about The Brand Positioning Strategy Co-Creation Workshop.

The Blake Project is a leading brand consultancy with a history of helping brands overcome high-stakes marketing challenges, create new value and build an advantage in the minds of those most important to your brands future. Customer Co-creation is a core competency.

Please email me, Derrick Daye for more about how The Customer Experience Workshop can benefit your brand.