Next G ‘Think Tanking’

Your Brand or Business Planning Day can include evaluation and exploration of the following topics. These should be based upon your project need and/or the maturity of your business and brand:

• Discovering core values and creating the envisioned future (vision, mission, ambition)
• Examining brand scope including core competencies, goals, objectives, strategies and alignments
• Performing consumer trend analysis that involves mapping market dynamics to explore factors affecting your brand category and back-casting – a technique to examine the steps required to obtain your brand’s envisioned future
• Determining your competitive set: who constitutes your competition for the key consumer and industry drivers of time, money and user benefit. Note that your competitive opportunity or threat may not be in the same product category or area.
• Constructing your brand pyramid or brand identity passport: structuring how your consumers and/or employees experience your brand, and thus identifying your brand essence or true meaning
• Creating the brand idea, including symbolism, positioning, archetypes, visual identification devices and language to construct a believable brand personality
• Designing brand frameworks and architecture to understand how your business could offer more brand contacts and revenue
• Exploring continuous and disruptive innovation for established businesses seeking to inject new interest, custom and exposure by investigating incremental, break-through and even transformational ideas in new product and service development
• Determining effective communications strategies to best reach and message prospective consumers, employees and others – from traditional to new social media and other emergent channels – this also examines persuasive brand content and presentation.