Brand management tactics
A brand grows through
dozens of decisions
And you need to know whether they are taking it in the direction you chose. What this work produces is specific, usable answers that help you correct the brand's course.
A strategy and an audience profile do not answer every question a marketing team runs into
Are our actions in the market taking us towards the goal we set in the strategy?
How well are we hitting our strategic goals, could getting there be made simpler, and what is in the way?
Are there trends in the market, the category or society at large that we should account for and use?
Analytics leads to better-weighed,
better-grounded brand decisions
Research raises the odds of a good decision by showing how the brand is best expressed at the key points where it meets its audience.
Points of contact
Communication and creative
Product and offer packaging
Price and value proposition
Choice of channels and promotional formats
Brand development in the context of the market and category
Choosing and developing brand activities
What we rely on in brand management work
A brand value can fail if the form it takes does not match the audience
We once had an uncomfortable case where the brand value — masculinity — was chosen correctly: the brand's audience did want masculinity. But the way it was expressed — what exactly was meant by masculinity, how it showed up and how it read — did not match what the target audience understood by it. Masculinity — right. Which masculinity — wrong. The brand's communication missed the audience. So did the budget.
Trends in the market, the category and society can open up room for a brand to grow
Covering trends through desk research is not especially hard. It simply takes time — which is why it is worth delegating — and a certain knack. We use desk research regularly in brand management work and know its strengths and its limits well.
Never letting desk research become unsupported assertion is our core principle
Desk research is a distinct class of methods, and an underrated one. We enjoy running desk research aimed at branding problems, and we hold to strict rules:
Clearly defined time frames: as a rule, the last two years.
Full coverage: every key trend documented within the chosen time frame will reach you. We treat this as a matter of professional honour.
Transparent sourcing: every link to every publication we used comes to you as a source book.
Limited use of genAI in the final material: human intelligence does the primary work on our projects. No conclusion or recommendation is generated with genAI.
Bringing in additional methods: desk research gets better with expert interviews, other qualitative methods, and the collection and structuring of user-generated content.
We deliberately turn down work where we cannot guarantee the necessary quality. On branding problems we act with confidence and expertise. On problems that belong to strategic marketing we are not the specialists, and if that is what you need, we will do our best to recommend other teams who will serve you better than we would.
Fluency in your category is a condition of the quality of our conclusions, and it has to be built on every project
Do not assume we will be experts in every market. The question to ask is which market markers can and should be gathered, so that the analysis in your project rests not only on the data we collect and the context you share, but is also connected to what is happening in the category while we work with you.
Even when the team has already run projects in a category, a year can change the picture noticeably. So we immerse ourselves in the category again: the competitive set, advertising campaigns and brand presence in the media, new offers, trade marketing activity, how audiences react online, and any shifts that could affect how the market develops.
As a result, the recommendations rest not only on the data collected and your company's internal context, but on the real state of the market at the moment the decision is taken.
Survey methods deliver more when set against brand strategy and market context
There is no shortage of quantitative methods — brand health tracking, product tests, concept tests, creative tests, and techniques for choosing a product or a set of product attributes — and one can always be matched to your task.
But the value of analysis lies not in applying a method as such, but in what that method does for your marketing problem. And one condition for that value, as we see it, is embedding the research project in a wider context — the context of the market and of your brand's strategy.
Choosing methods is always a question of what is sufficient for the task
Inventiveness in how data is gathered and analysed comes from years of work across different markets, different problems and different constraints. We are practised at proposing the best combination rather than the customary one.
The advantages and the limits of the approaches we propose are always set out transparently at the start.
If we cannot deliver the method best suited to your situation to a high enough standard, we will point you to the teams on the market who can solve your problem better than we would.
The final result is the product of discussion inside our team and of co-creation with yours
At the start of the project we gather whatever internal context you are willing to share; once the main work is done, we go through the findings and the decisions ahead with you. Our analysis is your instrument, and we want it to be comfortable in your hands.
The result becomes an instrument the marketing team uses to make a specific decision.