In today’s digital world our motto “Your brand is your business; your business is your brand” has never been more true. Since the birth of the internet, our team of brand strategy consultants has brought together brand and digital expertise to define digital brand strategies, articulate brand purpose, define value propositions, build strong employee brands (EVPs) and plan digital transformation programmes. Their focus is to ensure brand and digital strategies always align with business strategy to support the achievement of business goals.
Our consultants' strategic expertise can be applied to planning start-up brands, rebranding and repositioning tired brands, brand naming, digital transformation and designing award winning brand identities and user experieces across all customer touchpoints.
Our brand and digital strategy consultants have international experience across a wide range of industries, but with particular expertise in banking, financial services, sustainable energy, travel and hospitality and luxury. We are currently actively engaged in several sustainable branding and energy transition programmes for clients in the energy, mobility and recycling sectors.
Sustainable brand purpose
Why does a brand deserve to exist? It's a simple enough question, but a complex response is not the answer.
We live in a social world where 2-way communication (engagement) is key. Brands can no longer just broadcast what they do and expect consumers to believe their promises, especially if they act as if profit is their only purpose. Profit is not a purpose, it's a result. Today, brands must take full responsibility for their actions and demonstrate that their business models are sustainable, in that they do not deplete natural resources, are on the journey to net-zero, and are socially responsible. Brands that are not sustainable, or worse, pretend they are by "greenwashing", don't deserve to exist and, before too long, won't have a future.
The need for a compelling purpose that unites leadership, colleagues, partners and customers has never been greater. It must explain 'why' the brand deserves to exist in today's world in simple, easily understood language.
Our brand strategy consultants help our clients define brand purpose, vision and mission, with aligned value propositions that will resonate with customers and differentiate from competitors. We take today's narrative and values and ask simple questions. Then we deconstruct the answers before rebuilding the story in a step-by-step process to define the brand's true purpose, based on precise inputs that are both accurate and really ring true with employees and customers alike. This provides the answers to three critical question: Why? How? What?
Similarly, when creating new brand names we deploy a methodical naming process that is aligned with the brand strategy, reinforces the brand purpose, using filters for domain name availability and trade mark searches, conducted by expert trade mark attorneys.
Once the brand's strategy and purpose have been clearly defined and validated - with the brand being able to deliver on its promise - the brand strategy can be brought to life by designing seamless brand experiences.
Rebranding
We have helped many famous companies rebrand to show the world they are changing. Sometimes this is incremental change, but often it's because their market is changing and they need to reposition themselves with a new value proposition. Energy is a good current example. Businesses that have powered our homes, busineses and vehicles for decades are at the forefront of energy transition and need to show the world they are committed to the journey to net zero, whilst continuing to power today. To navigate such a passage requires understanding tomorrow's market as well as today's, and identifying the value drivers that will resonate with customers through the transition. But rebranding isn't just about customers or contemporary design, it's about taking your people with you, because if the new proposition doesn't ring true with them, it will fail.
Employer branding
A new brand is pretty worthless unless employees stand behind its values and promise, which is why we encourage our clients to use rebranding as a way to engage employees from an early stage, as colleagues in the process. This reduces the risk of the new brand not resonating internally and, instead, ensures that all employees understand what the repositioned brand now stands for, where it's heading, and what they need to do to contribute to the brand's success.
We call our employee branding process 'Inside-out branding', because we use the topic of branding as a way of discussing all sorts of things that matter to employees under the umbrella of 'brand', which we have found to be an unthreatening way to get valuable employee feedback. We can then identify priorities and 'spurs to action' to help the brand influence corporate culture. Quite often this is a bottom-up process or a slice through the organisation, using questionnaires and workshops as a start.
For us, the employer brand is as important as the customer brand, as it will influence the talent you recruit and retain and even influence their desire to achieve personal goals. It has a big impact on reputation and increasingly research shows that employer branding is a major influencer in strategic talent acquisition glassdoor recently reported that '69% of all surveyed said it was very important or extremely important that their employer had a brand they are proud to support'.
Digital transformation
We all know what has happened to retailers who underinvested in e-commerce. The pandemic accelerated the shift to digital, home delivery has become ubiquitous and department stores have gone bust.
Change is ripping through many industries, driven by innovative technologies and disruptive business models. supply chains are being re-thought and intermediaries are in danger of being disintermediated. Agility is an essential ingredient in every digital transformation and investment in continuous digital improvement should be on every board's agenda.
Our strategy consultants can define digital strategies to leverage many brand opportunities by reaching new markets, lowering the cost of customer acquisition, improving customer engagement, digitising or transforming processes, increasing conversion and lowering cost/income ratios.
Data has been the hidden gold of the digital industrial revolution and marketing automation has realised startling improvements in marketing effectiveness, but with this comes the need to protect customers' privacy and security. Here, too, we can help, by designing compliant processes and systems to harness the value of data whilst complying with GDPR regulations.
Brand and digital strategy come together in many of our programmes, where we rebrand existing businesses or launch a challenger brand into a competitive market. At Nucleus brand + digital is just the way we think.
Take a look at some of our strategy case studies to find out how our digital brand strategy expertise has helped many brands around the world.
Brand strategy services
Digital strategy
- Opportunities assessments
- Digital transformation
- Usability research
- User experience (UX)
- Information architecture (IA)
- Ecommerce
- Booking engines
- Conversion optimisation
- Emarketing
- Analytics
- Data privacy and GDPR
- Security