Creating a brand

Creating a brand on product benefits and best business practices alone is a sure-fire way to waste time and money. You can’t build preference and steal market share through value propositions. 

Every one of your competitors claims these. Other branding companies speak in clichés.

Stealing Share is a brand agency that approaches creating a brand differently. Contact us here and we’ll tell you why.

The relationship with your prospect begins with your brand.

The emotional promise is the permission to be more important and preferred. And finds flight in all your equities: Your logo, mark, color palette, font choices, tone, and theme line.

A pretty logo won’t build preference and steal market share. A listing of best business practices is not persuasive.

Competitors claim all of them. So do all branding companies. But they don’t have the expertise to steal market share when creating a brand.

Brand agencies give you what they think you want. But not what you need.

Our promise to you is blunt. The only reason to rebrand is to grow your market share.

Everything else is a waste of your money.

We are the only global brand agency with that singular focus.

5 Rules When Creating a Brand

1) Are they experienced?

Category experience is crap. Branding agencies, unlike advertising agencies, are hard to evaluate. So, ask the hard questions. How successful are they at creating a brand? Consider whether they are problem solvers?

2) Does the branding company ask YOU tough questions?

Understanding the problem is how you find solutions.

Evaluate their questions.

What do they want to know about creating a brand? It’s an indication of how they think.

How they think is an indicator of their strategies. Some branding companies just don’t get it. They confuse corporate identity with branding.

3) Does the branding company’s work convey brand strategy?

Ask them to explain the brand strategy.  Clearly and simply.

Is the strategy focused on the company or the prospect? Look for the meaning. Can’t see the persuasive brand personality in the work? Scratch them off your list.

4) Ask how they arrived at the strategy?

Great brand agencies can tell you how they got to the solution when creating a brand. Did they develop a model for choosing? Did they conduct projectable research?

Was the research qualitative or quantitative?

Great brand research explores possible strategies.

It is the end-product of great strategic thinking and builds certainty for the strategy.

If they don’t conduct research, scratch them off your list of branding companies.

5) Are the design elements on strategy?

Are the design elements on strategy?

Few brand agencies can strategically defend their work when creating a brand.

Have they created a valuable and memorable brand proposition? A proposition in the emotional fabric of those it influences?

Is the theme aspirational? Aspirational in and out of the company culture? Does it demand the company focus on a single powerful principle?

If not? Scratch them off your list of brand agencies.

How can branding companies help steal market share?

Brand agencies start with the status quo. And tell you what they think you want to hear.

We don’t. We challenge you.

Stealing Share builds a new position and meaning when creating a brand.

Customer preferences are based on deep-seated emotional beliefs. Not just rational judgments like price, quality, and effectiveness. So, your message needs to be bigger. (Read here about when to rebrand)

The more prospects identify with your brand’s position and meaning, the more powerful your appeal and the more urgently they seek you out. They will prefer you and pay a premium to buy what you sell.

Brand meaning

Reflected in your symbols and equities is meaning. And your theme line must say something powerful. Not something about you and your company. But about the prospects you need to influence.

They must change their minds and their behaviors when creating a brand. We know how to make that happen. Most brand agencies don’t.

Our brand agency focuses energy on discovering and exploiting those emotional beliefs.

We are the only brand agency like it. 

We developed and honed a proven and replicable process.

Our brand modeling uncovers purchase motivators in creating a brand.

Concrete ways to make these persuasive motivators visible and real to the prospects.

Our branding process adapts effectively across cultures. It works as well in developed, undeveloped, mature, and immature markets. Our work has taken us all over the globe.

We promise to identify the most important changes. Changes you need to adopt and own.

In addition to our behavioral modeling, our branding process starts with research. A combination of qualitative and quantitative research. We insist on competitive analysis, a critical strategic evaluation of your positioning, and an evaluation of your entire market.

We uncover the key motivators that drive preference. And we translate that persuasive power into everything you do and everything you stand for.

What you get from us.

You get much more than just a pretty logo when creating a brand. More than a message that promotes a product benefit. We demand more. So should you.

You need a single-minded position. It creates focus.

We activate this brand position in every touch-point, including design and sales training. Market-changing strategies and challenging decisions matter.

We are aggressive. And we are challenging to work with. Not everyone is comfortable with our culture.

Do you need to move the marketing needle? If we are too aggressive, here is a list of more passive brand agencies. It is a BIG list.

 

Different is better

Stealing Share strategists, researchers, consultants, and designers deliver actionable marketing strategies. We create clear messaging and elegant creative executions. We get to the root of human behavior. And we cause change.

We dive into the fears and motivators. Things that make audiences covet and switch brands. These clear and powerful switching triggers are fuel for creating a brand.

We have experience, but that shouldn’t matter

We have experience in many categories, including fast food, medical devices, insurance, destination and tourism, banking, finance, and insurance. Hospitals, transportation, consumer products, and appliances. But do not choose based on our category experience.

Choose us because of our expertise in changing behaviors when creating a brand. We know finding the perfect brand agency is never easy.

One thing is for sure, Stealing Share needs to be on your list. Because we will have a different opinion. Other brand agencies just claim experience and creativity.

Give us an hour of your time and we will prove that we change everything.