The Brand-Led Business Building® Effect

We’re a brand(ing) agency.

But what that description means to you depends a lot on your definition of brand. To some, it just means logos. Or research. To many, it doesn’t suggest digital capabilities or involvement in product development, operations, or experience design.

For us, branding goes beyond slick logos, flashy sites, and clever campaigns. It’s a deep process of building value, based on values. It starts with the core reason a company exists, then permeates everything you do about it. Every small detail of a company’s approach sends a message that over time can have a massive effect on the whole. It's the branding equivalent of the butterfly effect.

In the past, companies counted buildings and machines as their owned assets, but today’s most valuable assets are often the intangibles that earn loyal customers and employees. Brand-Led Business Building helps you create an experience factory and a cultural catalyst that has a profound effect on everything you do. It’s a methodology that helps companies focus, cutting through the chaos of the marketplace. It’s highly secretive, and there are concentric circles involved.

Brand-Led Business Building helps us engineer companies (including our own) by aligning Vision, Operations, Expression, and Traction to create the kind of business that people truly buy into and deeply value.

• Vision unites companies around shared purpose and values. We’ve often said we help companies “be their best selves.” Companies must make money to survive, but they increasingly need a higher purpose to thrive.
• Operations focuses your processes and systems on brand intention and purpose, rallying your team around delivering a distinct customer experience that lives up to your promise every time.
• Expression captures and conveys the story, special moves, little details, and big images that help your company stand out as a brand that people are proud to work for and buy from.
• Traction is measured through the impact you have on the people who work for you, the customers who buy from you, and the world you inhabit. That impact can be revenue, perception, loyalty, price/margin, or brand equity.

Companies that use all the tools at their disposal to line all these things up create brand integrity. Yes, integrity means honesty, and you should do that right away. But it also means being whole and free of weakest links; that may take a little time. You should start soon.

You build an incredibly valuable asset if you work tirelessly toward making that asset valuable in every little thing you do. It takes time, and it’s an investment. But what you build, you own. It’s why we like to say, “Make a brand, and you’ve got it made.”