BRAND STRATEGY

Cause transfer of your sustainability from your company to your customers. Let's Talk Measurable Results

Comprehensive strategic and tactical plan to give your company or subsidiary its own brand AND AS A result, your customers will advertise and sell for you and will protect you if you stumble or get attacked.

The PURPOSE

The great achievement of a brand is that it transfers sustainability of a company to its customers. Customers advertise and sell for a brand and protect it if it stumbles or gets attacked. The metrics impact of this culture-to-culture evangelism impact of this is tremendous for your company, including rapid growth, margin protection, protection against competition, rapid acceptance of new products and policies, and reduction in marketing expense with simultaneous turbocharging of marketing effectiveness.

But your company can’t claim or demand to be a brand. “Branded” is not a verb; it is a tribute. It has to be given to you to you by two groups that absolutely cannot be fooled: 1) Your employee culture, 2) your customer culture. You are a brand when these two cultures say you are.

Your brand promise is your company saying to the world, “You will know us by our intention.” Your employee culture has to represent that intention to others with its own good name. Your customer culture has to ignore its well-earned cynicism about lofty campaign promises by companies, and other seductive or logical buying options. To become a brand and gain that critical transfer of sustainability, both of these cultures have to answer a question for themselves that cannot possibly be answered in order to give you the one thing they least want to give you.

The question your cultures have to answer is, “How can we trust you when you tell us you care?” There isn’t any way for your employee or customer cultures to confirm that your brand promise is legitimate and sustainable. They can’t trust it on face value, and self-protective cultures don’t like to trust anyway as this makes them vulnerable. They have to give your company the deepest level of trust possible: they have to give you faith. Faith is, “I believe but I don’t know” and places your culture in a maximally vulnerable position. To provide unfounded trust is a culture’s rarest gift.

A brand is about strategy, which has to be visionary and sophisticated. It is mostly about discipline, which has to be uncompromising and unending. The purpose of SLAP’s brand strategy solution is to provide you with both, and to secure that rarest of cultural commitment.

The Process

  • The benefits of achieving brand status are extraordinary. However, asking for faith from your employee and customer cultures and then defaulting on could cause damage to your business. Therefore, the SLAP process is a comprehensive combination of solution components that assure that your brand strategy is both positive and safe for you.

It includes, but is not limited to:

 

  • The development of your unique brand strategy, including: psychographic profile of your customer culture that reveals what customers would most want to buy from you if they could buy anything; identification of the biggest problem to solve in order to gain and protect brand status; the making of both the business and emotional cases for your brand promise; your customer evangelism strategy; where you must meet your customer to be within brand atmosphere; various confirmation processes to assure accuracy of the strategy before it is implemented.
  • The development of your brandable customer experience. This is our Heaven session (see HEAVEN solution) augmented by SLAP’s own analysis of your customer experience and recommendations for bringing it to brandable – spectacular, signature, sustainable and matching the DNA of what you sell with how you sell it. 
  • The development of your unique communication personality, so that when your company talks, customers immediately recognize that it is you and are preconditioned to listen, trust, remember and refer.
  • The development of both discretionary effort drivers for your manager and employee culture so that it evangelizes your brand promise and standards to your customer culture. The development of internal discipline in every business unit so that the company is fully in compliance with brand principles and intention.
  • Full implementation steps, including how to secure the initial leap of faith in your brand promise and policies from potentially hesitant cultures, as well as continuing proactive actions that will ensure progress and protection.

HAVE QUESTIONS?

“I have been on the inside of a company that became a brand and I can tell you that SLAP has the most accurate process I’ve ever seen for causing that to happen in your company.”

Allen Olivo

Senior Vice President of Marketing, Apple

I wish we'd had SLAP at GE during our branding efforts.

Beth Comstock

Vice Chair, General Electric

“The full SLAP approach to creating what they call a ‘brandable customer experience’ does exactly that. Their process is the best I’ve seen in all my years in business.”

Richard Cohen

Chief Executive Officer, North America, Ermenegildo Zegna

THE BIG PROBLEM

How do we achieve brand status?

THE SOLUTION

SLAP's Brand Strategy

MAKE THE CALL

Let’s talk about measurable results that can only come from the maximum commitment of your manager, employee, and customer cultures.

SLAP

450 Geary St.
Suite 100
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 362-1240

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