BRAND STRATEGY STEP BY STEP
HOW BRAND STRATEGY HELPS
A good brand strategy simplifies and improves everything you do as a business.
It focuses your team.
It shows you the most effective path to rapid growth.
It makes connecting with true fans easier.
It can propel your business into category leadership.
It will lay the course for products and services people love and want to talk about.
It will open doors to new customers and new markets.
It can get you unstuck with the clarity to finally see the wood for the trees.
It can be the make or break difference your business needs for success.
1 DISCOVERY & INSIGHT
Where’s your blindside? Research identifies the shifts and opportunities in culture and consumer behaviour that have potential for impact on your business. Effective research will unearth inconsistencies and confusion about your brand and point the way forward. Requirements for research vary based on the complexity of the market, brand and challenge but is a necessary part of building a breakthrough brand.
2 COMPANY VISION & CLARITY OF PURPOSE
Why does the world actually need your brand to exist? Does the world really need another brand of yogurt, bicycles, t-shirts, or cooking tools? What role does your brand play in people’s everyday lives? Why does success even matter? These are the hardest questions but will unlock everything you do. We get there collaboratively through workshops and in-depth time spent together. Company teams come out of this energized, focused and empowered to make the right decisions.
3 CULTURAL & VALUE INNOVATION
Transform your vision and ambition into a pragmatic plan of action and the tools needed to fulfill it. How will your brand be a cultural leader? How will you provide innovative value that can’t be easily replicated by competitors? Working collaboratively with in-house design, product and marketing teams, your company will feel a powerful sense of ownership of the brand’s transformation. We deliver detailed creative marketing plans across all channels, design briefs, product roadmaps and other needs to build your brand. Where no in-house team exists, we fill the gaps as required with the right, carefully selected external partners.
4 IMPLEMENT & LEARN
No strategy exists in a vacuum. It needs to be road tested. Any strategy consultant who hands off the implementation of their strategy should not be trusted. How do you know it will work? If the strategy doesn’t work it might need to be adapted and refined. My job is to build your brand, not to write you a strategy.
Select Clients
“Collyn helped us synthesize our existing culture and increasingly ambitious vision into a clear and actionable set of brand guidelines and strategy. We now reference these guidelines in everything we do. Working with Collyn has helped us to both consolidate our community, and to undertake aggressive brand-building projects, confident in the knowledge that our foundations are anchored to a set of principles that we’ve proactively designed. Collyn is a game-changer.”
“My only wish is that we would have found Collyn on day one. She’s a brilliant strategic mind who’s helped us grasp just how powerful our vision could be and then articulated the strategic vision in a way that has given every member of our team the tools they need to push us forward. Her impact has touched the business at every level, from hiring to product.”
“Collyn’s ability to combine deep customer insight with a strategic mind steered our early efforts as we started to address marketing to women. Some five years later, her work’s still very much in evidence and I can think of no better endorsement. ”
“The reception to our rebrand has been great - a real uptick in interest, sales, presence, everything is moving in the right direction. I’m just so grateful to Collyn for the work she did. I feel so much more confident in our brand knowing that I know who we are, why we are and who we are for. I feel really honoured to have worked with Collyn, her insights and vision are super sharp. I still don’t always “get it” but that makes it all the more magical!”
“She delivered actionable insights and plans in hand and we could immediately apply her work at all levels of the organization. Collyn did more than help us re-imagine and better define our brand, she helped us become a better team of people and a better company. We have found even more energy, excitement and creativity since having worked with her. You will be hard pressed to find a smarter, more capable and more reliable brand strategist.”
About
Collyn Ahart
15+ years experience working with some of the world's most influential brands and creative agencies (Rosas Barcelona, Wieden + Kennedy London, Poke, Fray Network, Lewis Moberly) to turn the dial, as well as founding the outdoor clothing company Bowndling, in 2013. Collyn lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area with clients in the U.K., Europe, Africa, and the U.S.A.
Collyn is an independent strategy director, speaker, occasional writer, and founder.