At Blacksheep, we help companies understand their marketplace and their position within it. Research, insight and experience are the value we contribute. A clear path to meeting your brand aspirations is what we deliver.
Blacksheep provides consulting and research expertise in the areas of:
- Brand positioning
- Brand strategy
- Customer experience management
- Marketing management
- Strategic planning
- Marketing research
- Corporate stewardship
- Customer relationship management
- Spokesperson training
Brand Positioning
The principles for branding are at play in every business. People can summarize any brand they are familiar with in a simple statement and can use qualifiers to explain their perceptions. The importance of branding lies in ensuring that these associations are unique, meaningful, positive and ultimately drive customer purchasing decisions.
What does your organization stand for? Or more importantly, what should it stand for? These critical questions can only be answered with solid insight into your marketplace. Blacksheep will consult with your management team to flesh out your brand issues and brand aspirations.
How are you viewed right now? Creating a powerful brand position requires a clear understanding of your current position in the minds of customers, employees, and targeted public groups. Our Blacksheep team applies our extensive research capabilities to reveal attitudes and drivers of these key audiences and explores their connection with your organization.
How do you connect these perceptions with your goals? Bringing all these views together and developing a powerful brand position is a shared process employing insight and expertise from Blacksheep and your organization. The result is a powerful brand essence that supports your strategic goals and influences your internal and external audiences.
Brand Strategy
Every company has a brand and the principles of branding – differentiation, credibility, relevance, and authenticity – affect every business. Whether you consciously manage your brand or not, you are subject to its principles. Successful brand building requires a proactive approach and is not simply an exercise in marketing. A well articulated brand drives not only the marketing function, but also focuses other activities and resources.
How do you drive your brand position forward? If you consider that your brand consists of all the perceptions your company has, the task can appear daunting – at first. Blacksheep is not an ad agency and we view the marketing component of brand strategy as the last step, rather than the first. You can’t promote who you are until you can deliver on it. Once your brand position is determined, we will work with you to develop a plan to align your people, systems and processes around delivering the brand promise to your customers. A comprehensive marketing plan is the next step.
Each member of the Blacksheep team has extensive expertise in brand building. We provide a structured research process to examine the readiness of your brand position with customers, employees, competitors and public audiences. Research with these stakeholders provides a deeper understanding of your business’s current connection with these groups and the impact you plan to have. Combining this input with an understanding of your organization’s objectives and capabilities, Blacksheep delivers successful well-designed brand strategies.
Customer Experience Management
A powerful brand strategy only provides value when it is deployed throughout your organization. Deployment is not the advertising function. Putting your brand into practice requires the heavy lifting to ensure your brand promise is consistent with the interactions you have with your customers. It involves aspects as diverse as product/service development, administration, customer service, merchandising, information technology, marketing, corporate stewardship, sales activities, and others.
Where is the best place to start? Conducting an audit of processes, interaction and communication touching the customer is the most effective way to identify issues and determine priorities. Internal research with affected stakeholders can provide valuable insight with those on the customer front line. Customer research adds another layer of learning to help direct implementation efforts.
How do you take action? Once a strategy is in place to deal with issues identified in the research, an internal launch with employees to communicate the brand position and the implementation plan and drive the necessary changes. As the improvements become visible to your customers, reinforce your brand position with effective marketing communications.
Blacksheep provides not only the needed research capabilities, but our comprehensive experience in all facets of business means a thorough review and strategic direction for your organization.
Marketing Management
Controlling and leveraging your brand position requires ongoing measurement and management. Brands can easily become stale and complacent. As your marketplace evolves and competitors adapt, your strategy must develop and mature. What was once innovative has now become table stakes and is not the advantage it once was.
What’s working? Where do you go next? Discerning the path forward requires a combination of strategic thinking and solid research. Do your corporate structure, array of sub-brands, and responsibility for branding support or hinder effective deployment of your overall brand strategy?
Regular ongoing measurement is vital to establish consistent measures for tracking the success of your brand strategy and flag inconsistencies related to your organization’s objectives.. Database analysis can be used to measure customer-related goals such as retention, wallet share, gross margin, acquisition. Internal brand monitoring measures employee uptake and internalization of the brand. Customer research tracks awareness and affinity toward your brand position. With this input, your strategy can be refocused to address issues and identify next steps.
One of the strengths Blacksheep can bring to bear on your organization is a fresh perspective on the issues you face. Our broad experience with many industry segments enables us to apply best (and less than best) practice lessons to your individual situation. Conducting strategic brand reviews and validating brand position through research is our specialty.
Strategic Planning
The importance of a corporate vision is well acknowledged by most organizations. Direction creates focus. Objectives enable measurement. Finding the right words for your vision and mission is accomplished only after you can articulate your organization’s current position and where you want to be. The next step is to develop an achievable strategy for aligning your organization with the mission and communicating with your internal and external stakeholders.
Developing effective strategy is a team process. Whether you are creating a new set of vision, mission and objectives or simply revisiting your existing strategy, developing ownership is best done by harnessing key stakeholders in your organization. This same group then becomes the team that carries forward the priorities and actions arising from the strategy.
Blacksheep brings considerable experience to your planning initiative. We have helped many organizations develop effective strategy and communicate the results. Consistently, we have found that third-party facilitation promotes broader participation and more effective outcomes. We employ proven pre-session and workshop processes that provide more complete and valuable results.
Marketing Research
The most successful brands are developed based on a solid understanding of consumer motivations and perceptions and managed based on ongoing monitoring of brand strength and positioning. Blacksheep uses research strategically to ensure that all phases of brand development and management are soundly rooted in market understanding.
Research plans are integrated into brand planning, and incorporate four strategic research objectives:
• Foundation – lays the foundation for brand development. Helps discover, understand, uncover, and describe market perceptions, motivations, characteristics, segments, and patterns.
• Validation – validate proposed brand strategy. Helps confirm, verify, fine-tune, reduce risk, and clarify customer and market reaction to elements of the proposed brand positioning, market segments, opportunities and barriers.
• Benchmark – set initial measures to allow for ongoing monitoring of brand position, brand strength, and brand associations among various stakeholder groups (customer segments, overall market, employees, shareholders, etc).
• Monitor – develop a research plan to measure strength and relevance of the brand, through monitoring the brand’s position, strength, and associations among key customer segments and stakeholder groups.
We use qualitative, quantitative and database research techniques depending on the strategic requirements of each project. Research can be directed at any number of stakeholder groups including customers, prospects, community, employees, etc. Our services include strategy, design and execution, and result in strategic analysis, recommendations and integration of results into brand development and management.
Corporate Stewardship
Intensive media scrutiny and increased public expectations for responsible corporate behaviour are driving demand for relevant, ethical and community focused business practices. As a result, more organizations now treat their corporate social responsibilities as seriously as any other business function. In our experience, effective corporate stewardship must move well beyond being a policy review or a donations program and become a core strategy aligned with brand objectives.
Having a strategy for corporate stewardship and involving your employees in that responsibility is not only the right thing to do, it also contributes to competitive advantage in areas like employee recruitment and customer purchase decisions.
Blacksheep facilitates the development of a formal corporate stewardship strategy for employee, environmental and community responsibility in a way that is authentic, credible and fits within an organization's character or brand image.
Reputation Management
Reputation management is central to building your brand and developing a strong public image. Reputation management involves communicating who you are, what you do and how you benefit your customers and community, while being prepared for unexpected events. In reputation management, demonstrating sincere concern to employees, community and customers is key to supporting your brand position.
From measuring the effectiveness of existing public relations efforts to working with clients to prioritize needs and build effective communications plans right through to implementation and evaluation, Blacksheep employs a wide range of strategies and tactics to build and strengthen your reputation.
Drawing on our wealth of experience in media relations and issues management, the Blacksheep team can help you identify opportunities to get your name and story out to your key publics, whether they be clients, employees, partners, suppliers, media, board members, government officials, industry associations, stakeholders or the public at large.
We have the keen ability to see public relations challenges from the perspectives of these key audiences. We can help you anticipate, prepare for and manage the issues by developing strategies to meet those challenges head on, while at the same time, strengthening your relationships and managing your reputation.
