A structured strategic process that enhances your brand’s creative approach
Within the world of luxury, brand strategy plays a critical role in setting clear direction before creative work begins. Clients typically ask us to undertake a strategy phase at the start of a project, ensuring that subsequent branding, design and communication decisions are both focused and differentiated. The objective is to define a distinctive point of view that can clearly separate a brand from its competitors and provide a stable foundation for long-term growth. We start the process by gaining a deep understanding of the consumer audiences, and carefully review the competition in its market category. The process then turns to the creation of a range of possible brand concepts, one of which will be progressed to become the anchor around which the remaining strategic building blocks are based, and ultimately the direction upon which all of the brand’s visual assets are created. This applies equally whether we are shaping an established luxury house or defining the strategy for a new boutique brand entering the market.
To achieve business success, your brand will need to be different in some way to its competition. This might be created by its aesthetic, but it can just as easily be about its approach to pricing or to distribution, or by creating a new kind of relationship with its consumers. In considering all angles, SUM’s work on your competitive review will assess the competition across all aspects of the marketing mix. We’ll aim to learn from best practices and to avoid the worst. It’s a process that is best addressed with a degree of humility because you’ll tend to find plenty of impressive thinking that already exists in your category.By the end of the competitive review the nature of the challenge that lies ahead tends to be considerably clearer than at the start.
There is a tendency among both new and existing brands to describe their audience in very basic terms, for example ‘Millennial women with an interest in sustainability’. As a consequence, brands can miss out on sales that would otherwise have been achieved with a more thorough and insightful audience definition. At SUM we aim to work with you to identify audience segments that offer most potential, and develop insights about their behaviour and attitudes that will unlock new opportunities for the brand. We will include analysis of published research sources to inform our thinking, and where necessary commission new research through specialist research houses.
In the luxury and fashion categories there tends to be a high degree of overlap between competitive brands. With literally hundreds of swimwear brands, thousands of jewellery brands, and tens of thousands of fashion labels, the need to create a differentiated positioning for your brand has never been more important. We will work with you to define a potential basis for genuine competitive difference because this is likely to lie at the heart of your brand’s success.
Having prepared the initial brand strategy and associated creative assets, the modus operandum switches to one where we need to share our message with our chosen consumer audiences, wherever they may be in the world. With a finite budget your brand will need to refine the targeting in terms of geographies, audience typologies, and communication platforms. For example, do we use only digital channels? Do we involve a degree of above-the-line traditional media? And how do we translate the main brand strategy into a more diversified digital strategy to engage audiences on selected media platforms? While our planning at this stage, particularly as regards digital, becomes a whole lot more scientific and performance-oriented, we never lose sight of the need for creative thinking and storytelling. Indeed, this is so often the touchpoint at which the entirety of our strategic thinking on the brand meets the consumer for the very first time.
Creating a contemporary pet nutrition brand defined by strategy, precision, and a quiet sense of design intelligence.
Brand transformation - From excellent security products to a British luxury brand.
Distilling a celebrity brand into a confident, editorial identity with crisp messaging and restraint.