Spur growth through superlative brand innovation by leveraging the right mix of technical, cultural and human enablers

Unleash true brand centricity for a sustainable organic brand growth by establishing a clear brand identity that resonates with your target audience.

Branding Consultancy

Top global brands have demonstrated that a brand drives superlative financial impact and increased value to stakeholders and its workforce. A poorly crafted brand strategy depletes precious funds from the allocated marketing budgets, considering these criticalities, brand-building mustn’t be left to chance or pivoted only towards creative marketing. Brand performance dynamically shifts over time in response to changes in business climates, preferences of customers, and channel performance. Fluctuations in performance can be influenced by a variety of levers, from unpredictable trends to failure to monopolize market gaps and opportunities. Because of this dynamic—and often fickle—flux of brand performance, brands require a constant inflow of deep insights and an agile brand strategy to thrive in difficult times and outperform during good times.

Leaders of industry-leading brands constantly track the performance of the brand and its competitors, evaluate brand strategy and its milestones, identify new channels for the potential for growth, and continue to scrutinize market conditions and the optimal market position for the brand. All of these factors must be maintained while continuing to align brand image and actions with core values and customer base. Incorporating an analytical mindset and strategy to brand management ensures that brands are optimally positioned and developed to drive growth and sustainable success. Cognitute’s proprietary outcome-driven brand strategy consulting 4.0 framework is structured to scan hundreds of market dynamic signals and their influence on the brand, spotlight core measures to be deployed to suit the market condition today, and predict tomorrow's winning game.

Brand strategy additionally incorporates the skill sets needed to either revitalize an existing, underperforming brand or branch out into the development of an entirely new brand to respond to trends or market gaps. Creation of a new brand or reinvigorating an existing brand is a complex process where responses of other brands must be carefully measured and analyzed, and appropriate architecture must be established to reach the full potential of a brand portfolio. Brand differentiation can be supported in highly individualized ways to optimally drive growth of the brand and portfolio. For a peerless brand strategy to be crafted, brand owners must establish a robust framework that canopies and answers these core brand elements:
- Does the brand have a clear purpose of why it needs to exist?
- Key insights influencing and driving consumer purchasing behavior.
- How individual brand levers (Product range. Price points, Purchasing parity, etc.) are influencing brand positioning?
- What is the current consumer centricity maturity index?
- Is customer obsession an elevated focus across the organization and the voice of the customer is accounted for every business decision?
- Are decisions backed by well-oiled consumer insights and analytics?
- What is the growth potential across newly identified channels?
- What’s the brand advocacy index?

An unparalleled brand marketing strategy requires the right balance of art, math, a people-propelled model, and holistic consistency. Great brand and marketing strategies are created by an empowered, diverse group of well-integrated teams. Cognitute’s branding consultancy combines sophisticated market research, and in-depth consumer insights–coupling these with economic-based decisions that rigorously quantify every tradeoff in terms of value to the business and portfolio. Our brand consultants strive to ensure the brand transformation is reflected in everything the customer experiences, right from emotions, to purchasing decisions, to the affirmation of the brand promise.

Brand Strategy Consulting Services

Brand Centric Transformation

With shareholding periods continuing to decrease, customers' rapidly changing choices, and a continued focus on high-frequency trade, businesses face more pressure to effectively manage portfolios and increase market relevancy than ever before. Optimizing a brand is an effective lens that industry leaders utilize in response to short-term pressure. In an increasingly interconnected global marketplace, consumer expectations have shifted to prioritize brand experiences that are highly individualized, time-efficient, and purposeful. In a recent annual pulse survey, more than three-quarters of businesses that outperform competitors in revenue growth reported prioritizing that all brand activities were purpose-led. While many businesses have a clearly defined purpose, only a few have succeeded in consistently integrating this core purpose across all levels of the business. Businesses that prioritize customers' voices when making essential business decisions are additionally shown to outperform, showing a clear connection between integrated customer-centric internal and external processes, and revenue growth.

Organizations with leading brand strategies have shifted the role of Insight & Analytic teams to leverage customer-centric business growth. Traditionally, Insight & Analytics served a role centering primarily on support, but customer-centric brands prioritize high involvement of Insight & Analytics in decision-making through integrating these teams into strategy, execution, and leadership. Cognitute’s brand strategy services help organizations bring sense to every element of the brand, identify which brand elements matter most to customers, and design the ideal brand experience. Our brand strategy consultancy framework is rooted in our proprietary consulting 4.0 framework–one that is meant to drive guaranteed tangible outcomes. Our brand consultants help clients understand how the brand is being perceived and bring a new sense of purpose to every brand and consumer touchpoint–by building internal frameworks and blocks that foster a test-and-learn approach and one that is anchored on deep analytics.

Brand Positioning Consulting

The simple act of defining and outlining brand positioning leads to increased reach, drives revenue growth, and leverages marketing activities. Brand positioning functions as a highly impactful aspect of marketing strategy and delivers a large amount of influence on customer opinion and brand-customer relationships, as well as setting apart the brand from competitors. Regardless of industry, each business has a desired emotional effect to exact upon consumers and potential customers, and brand positioning is the essential deciding factor for this effect. Effective brand strategy is defined through an in-depth understanding of the needs and wants of customers, as well as an analysis of the competitive advantage and differentiation points of the brand which have the potential to impact this target audience.

Brand positioning allows businesses to communicate with potential customers, creating the narrative of differentiation points to influence brand perception, and strengthening the relationship between the brand and the existing customer base. Customer perception incorporates a complex range of information, including brand reviews, recommendations, previous experience with the brand, and marketing actions such as advertisements. By incorporating social media consulting into the brand positioning strategy, Cognitute assists clients to make the brand appeal to the right audience, amplifying or revitalizing the brand space occupied in the minds of customers, and design the ideal articulation model to create clarity around the audience that the brand serves.

Digital Branding Strategy

New digital channels have led the way to drastic changes to consumer behavior and emotional influence on the brand, impacting even the most sophisticated marketing teams around the globe. In the past, the rates of failure or success of brands have been gradual, with popular brands barely shifting in ranks from decade to decade–In a highly digitalized age of modern business, this no longer holds true. This is further aggravated by customers' demand for unmatched personalization and experiences. Brands that are able to continue sustainable success in the digital age are those that are willing—and able—to dynamically adapt to these new conditions. These adaptive industry leaders show consistent use of digital branding qualities that allow consumer behavior to be harnessed and utilized to the advantage of the business.

Strategies such as rewarding consumers for engaging with brand content or products, prioritizing brand accessibility through price, channels, and design, and focusing on communication through topical content creation, and user-generated content are prevalent in outperforming brands—but absent in underperformers. Using these strategies allows brands to transform, ensuring an increase in relevance in the long-term and effective engagement on digital platforms. It is also imperative to balance traditional brand levers with digital efforts to improve the effectiveness of digital channels, marketing function excellence, and ROI. Almost every organization devotes significant resources to defining its brand identity, but only a handful ask a crucial question–how to protect it? Cognitute’s brand strategy services ensure brand durability and elasticity by coupling the right legacy techniques, modern technological interventions, and human capabilities.

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Long Arch indicating Growth and Innovation of an organization

Consumer Insights and Segmentation

In any thriving industry, there are dramatic fluctuations in the potential for profit, behavior, and needs of consumers. To accurately collate these potentials and preferences of both the consumer and the marketplace, businesses must focus on an in-depth understanding of customers– Understanding inferred by leveraging easily accessible data flowing through the organization and ones collected from customers. The evolution of first-party data further enables personalized and more compelling marketing and engagement campaigns. Cognitute’s digital marketing consulting arm works alongside our brand consultants to help clients develop use cases derived from insights that can be aligned to the strengths, weaknesses, and overarching strategy of the brand. Resource allocation and selection of key opportunities based on customer insights and individually designed segmentation strategies allow revenue potential to be maximized across all business segments.

To continue a culture of customer centricity and to promote customer loyalty, innovation should continue to be driven by customer insights at regular intervals, providing the organization with the power to anticipate trends and navigate fluctuations in the marketplace. Prioritizing customer experience is a powerful, revenue-driving tool, but requires a continued, detailed understanding of both the likes and dislikes of customer segments. Augmenting a range of customer interactions unique to each customer segment and developing a robust customer experience strategy allows leadership to identify opportunities, prioritize the right R&D programs, and strengthen go-to-market innovations. Augmenting a range of customer interactions unique to each customer segment also allows leadership to identify opportunities, prioritize the right R&D programs and strengthen go-to-market innovations. Our brand consultants through Cognitute’s deep tech capability center (DTCC) specializing in artificial intelligence consulting and machine learning amongst others strategically develop machine-driven customer segmentations to discover hidden groups with similar characteristics, gain granular insights, and a 3-dimensional holistic view into the customer lifecycle.

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Audience Persona Development

Having an audience persona of “everyone” is perilous to the brand, including the danger of not appealing to anyone. Organizations need a newfound focus on the importance of defining buyer personas due to the ever-evolving demands of customers towards experience, personalization, and the right products. Brand leaders require the most pragmatic way of segmenting the market, as traditional demographic segmentation does not provide a rich view of today’s complex target audience. Organizations require a pragmatic model that not just appraises competitive strengths and weaknesses, but one that answers crucial questions—Which is the potentially profitable segment of the market? What product lines will draw parallels to the demands of the market? And more. Audience persona also promotes an increase in brand loyalty, as well as improved communication and intimacy with the existing customer base. Cognitute’s brand marketing consultancy is designed to help clients extract and answer these very same questions meant to instill evergreen customer actions at all touchpoints, loyalty, and advocacy.

Effective branding and marketing strategy requires an in-depth understanding of the goals, behavior, needs, and pain points of the target audience. While it is an impossible feat for a business to connect individually with each customer on a personal level, it is possible—and highly advantageous—to achieve a deep understanding of larger subsets of the customer base through a robust audience persona blueprint. In the current digital era, industry-leading customer-centered marketing teams are creating a highly detailed profile of their ideal audience or existing audience using deep technologies such as machine intelligence and traditional frameworks to precipitate persona accuracy in its finest form–This allows brands to “put a face to a name” and decipher the inner emotional decision layer of customers. For this high-definition rendering of customer personas, a highly agile team must leverage advanced analytics and cross-functional capabilities to conduct customer research, address customer pain points, and brainstorm innovative solutions.

Brand Voice & Messaging

Brand voice is often overlooked in favor of the visual appearance of a brand. But with the influence of social media and online disruptions on sales and marketing continuing to grow, a focus on brand voice is essential to create a point of differentiation in the digital marketplace. While the digital age has created pressure for a strong brand voice, it also creates new barriers that may prevent businesses from sustaining a consistent, advantageous brand voice. Customer-brand interactions are continuing to evolve and fragment through the vast range of possible digital interactions, such as browsing services online or viewing an advertisement on social media, a push notification requesting actions–for which brand voice must be expertly adapted for these situations. Many organizations are stuck within siloed business functions, which reduce the agility and adaptivity needed to coordinate and deliver brand messaging.

Creation of an omnichannel experience for customers boosts working relationships across all levels of the organization, as well as building customer value and fostering a deeper understanding of the customer base. Achieving a balance of classic marketing techniques with modernized brand messaging results in clear, non-contradicting communication, as well as deeply impactful brand story-telling. By incorporating branding consultancy into the creation of an omnichannel experience, customers can ensure a consistent and impactful brand messaging across all channels, while also building customer value and fostering deeper customer relationships. Advanced techniques such as data-activated marketing strategies allow intelligent communication based on customer actions and needs, serving to boost ROI while improving customer experience and perceived customer support.

Customer Sentiments Analysis And Strategy

Throughout interactions with a brand, customers will invariably have an emotional response to brand engagement, products, or services. With an undeniable correlation between customer experience and brand reputation—as well as between positive customer sentient and profit growth—leveraging and understanding customer sentiment is an incredibly valuable tool in business. Customer sentiment analysis allows marketers to identify and analyze the emotional responses and triggers of customers at different points throughout the customer journey. Negative customer feedback is an outcome that brands wish to avoid—but even highly successful organizations inevitably experience a small proportion of negative customer experiences. It is, therefore, vital to foster capabilities to learn from bad customer experiences through customer sentiment analysis, providing valuable insight into the cause behind negative customer emotions. These insights can then be used to remove customer barriers and friction points in the future, decreasing the likelihood of negative customer experiences.

Customer sentiment analysis results in improvement of customer satisfaction indices, growth of lifetime value of customers, and drives customer loyalty in the long-term. Additionally, customer sentiment strategy supports data-based anticipation of trends, insight into market opportunities, and evaluation of weaknesses in product launches. This creates momentum for continual improvement of existing products, and guidance for expansion into new niches. Cognitute's clients benefit from the cohesive efforts of our consultant's capabilities from interlinked diasporas of customer experience, marketing excellence, and advanced analytics to drive positive experiences and scan customer sentiments in real time. Cognitute's data and analytics capabilities play a crucial role in supporting our customer sentiment strategy, enabling our clients to anticipate trends, identify market opportunities, and continually improve their products to meet customer needs and preferences.