YOUR BRAND IS NOT YOUR LOGO
It's far bigger and more powerful than a logo, a set of fonts and some colours...
I define "brand" as the “meaning people attach to you and your offering”. You do not own your brand. Your audience does.
“Branding” is the “management of meaning”. It is the strategic analysis, planning and delivery of experiences designed to give the right meaning to the right people.
I help businesses manage meaning using storytelling and design thinking.
PROPER branding
Four key business areas of branding
Culture
Why you exist & how you behave
This includes leadership, staff, HR, recruitment, routines, rewards and environment. It encompasses what behaviours you encourage, how your team collectively behaves and how they interact with each other and the outside world. It encapsulates who you exist to serve and how engaged everybody is with serving them. Use the principles of brand to define and articulate your purpose and values - and then design your employee experience and internal comms to ensure they are engaging with it.
Product & services
What you do for people
Businesses exist to serve customers but many are not developing unique products or services which truly help customers with their goals or needs. What a brand actually does, what and how it provides it, ultimately brings meaning to a customer. Branding cannot simply be a coat of paint at the end. We need to get serious about innovation and customer-centric product development. We need to make better things. Branding should influence business innovation and how products or services are designed and created to make people feel.
Customer Experience
How you make people feel
Having a clear, mapped out customer experience that is constantly being improved is essential to the modern business. Having a system which can enhance the brand in an audience's mind at every step is a powerful tool. Use brand principles to keep on top of ever-changing customer behaviours and desires. Make your customer stronger and increase their loyalty.
Marketing Communication
How you speak & dress
How a business articulates itself and how it dresses is crucial to ensuring communications are rooted in its story and the longer term meaning a brand wants customers to connect to it. Creative and strategic design should embody the character, tone of voice and style needed to build recognisable and distinctive meaning for an audience. Comms should communicate purpose - why and not simply what.
I offer consultation to leaders of businesses of all shapes and sizes. My services span these four key areas of branding helping leaders to manage meaning. Let’s talk about how an outside consultant can have a positive impact on all of the above and get you building a powerful customer centric brand.
free e-book:
think brand
Three essential tools to align your people around brand thinking.
“Matt helped breathe real life and energy into projects I have delivered at both Boots and Specsavers, helping me and my team to really consider and articulate the brand/tone of voice we wanted to create.”
Steven Evans
Design Manager | Specsavers
“A key strength is Matt’s ability to bring together the often disparate and conflicting requirements of an organisation or team into a coherent and powerful message.”
Karim Khan
Principal Business Advisor
“A fantastic brand session. One of the best business experiences I’ve had.”
Lee Healey
Managing Director | Income Max
Rebrand in six weeks not six months
Attack your branding project using agile strategy and get to a solution fast. Led by a brand consultant, leaders swarm on the challenge using branding frameworks, design sprints and huddles to solve problems and make decisions collaboratively - sometimes with designers in the room who then act on decisions with speed.
Certified Brand Specialist
I am a Level C Graduate having been trained and certified personally by world-renowned branding expert Marty Neumeier.
Watch a keynote
This is me speaking at the East Midlands Business Marketing Club in May 2019. The theme for the evening was "Is B2B Marketing Boring". My answer - yes, if brand thinking is not being deployed. How do you deploy it? That's the subject of this talk.