Brand Crafting: How does a design strategy company fare better than a marketing/brand consultant

My blog posts seem to emanate from some questions, to which I did not have an immediate answers. I found it better to think for a while and pen them down. This one is another chip in the same block. Yesterday, a leading newspaper approached us on elaborating the work we did for Secure Meters - Brand Transition Research and Re-branding. Onio has been working with Secure Meters for quite some time now, not on product design but rather on brand strategy.

Secure Meters is one of the leading home grown energy metering companies which has acquired companies across the world and is developing cutting-edge technologies on the energy metering front. Each of the acquired companies, though working in the same domain, had a different brand name and geographical reach. This posed a big challenge for brand-architecture and messaging over time.

Secure chose to work with Onio on brand integration thus showing remarkable corporate maturity and the ability to work with new methodologies in this area. With assistance from Onio, the group finally prepared a brand transition plan towards a single corporate brand across the globe. Onio used corporate ethnography as a tool and interviewed close to 40 stakeholders (including board members, senior management, workers, distributors & suppliers) across three countries in five locations worldwide.

So the first question this correspondent from the newspaper asked me was, “Why did Secure come to you and not go through the conventional model of involving a market research company / marketing consultant / ad agency in this work?

Onio had conducted brand strategy and research assignments earlier but not on this scale. I would try and articulate what I think Onio brought to the table for this work -

1. Focus on Empathic User Research: Gone are the days when a brand strategist would spin a word-web and spice it up with glossy graphics to create a brand definition. Today's brands whether corporate or consumer product brands; are deeply entrenched in the user space i.e. how does the user/stakeholder interact with the brand? And mind you, this stakeholder of today is tremendously aware and rational. So the ability of empathising with people across the hierarchy and the value-chain, to extract the concerns and projections, comes naturally to a design company. Use of ethnography and visual tools to enhance the interaction with the respondents and observational research are some anthropological practices which design companies like Onio have adopted early on.

2. NEED at the centre of brand innovation: Design companies are trained to think with the NEED first. Contextual inquiry into the NEED can be quite an entangling task. A simple word like 'need' has multiple dimensions in the mind of such a researcher. Matching the corporate needs to employee needs, market needs to social needs, aspirations to capabilities and verbal to understated… there is a long journey where the researcher needs to remain connected to the ground realities. This multi-dimensional facet in the need universe is a skill taught in design schools.

3. Textual to Visual World: Complex modelling of the brand universe of an emerging organisation can be a daunting task. Gives and takes between different companies, product brands, technologies, geographical reaches, operating divisions and possible directions of evolutions can become a maze of words that may only confuse the managing team. A clear visual illustration helps the team in a big way to see the emerging patterns.

4. Meta-crafting Abilities: This one particularly is my passion and forte. Brand Research and Strategy is a game of 'fact-finding' and 'meta-crafting'. Design companies are used to the detailed information collection and extraction of meta-facts out of it. Though meta-crafting for product innovation assignments could be very different from a brand design assignment, the skill set is similar.

5. Ability to be a gentle sounding board: This one is something not so straight forward. It is more of human quality than a corporate skill. Onio discovered it long back that mid-sized, owner-driven enterprises look for a consultant who can be a good sounding board rather than a 'holier-than-thou' domain expert. Many of these enterprises have been built on individual insights, business acumen and years of sustained hard work. Hence articulation of even the pain areas needs to be done with care, because it may nudge some of the stakeholders the wrong way. It is a tact combined with clarity of insight and articulation.

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