great brands

We firmly believe that the basis for any strong brand needs to be a quality offering. A successful brand is honest with itself and its customers. Take Jamaica's Ugli fruit as an example. We're told it's quite the seller at supermarkets accross the UK. Just goes to show what a healthy sense of reality paired with a sense of humour can do for a commodity product.

Happily, there are huge numbers of very good products and services being marketed the world over. So many in fact that some of us are having a hard time telling the difference between one washing detergent and the next. Or one credit card and the next. Even one multi-billion Dollar pension fund provider and the next.

Finding what makes one company or product different from all the others is our job. We think it is a lot to do with what that company believes in and how it goes about its work as a result of those beliefs.

PLACE BRANDING

The best Whisky comes from Scotland. The only cigars worth smoking are Cubans. Paris is the city of love. Why is it that some countries, regions and cities have a special reputations? Why do we pay a premium to spend a a couple of nights in one place over another?

The answers are, of course, rather complex and many scholarly articles have been written to give them. Briefly, we think some places have been better than others in identifying how to best exploit the natural advantages they have. They've begun to tell stories, create a buzz and have, often over a very long time, pursued a specific place-focussed brand strategy.

Place brands are infinitely more complex than their corporate counterparts. Partly because there are so many more stakeholders to statisfy and partly because there is usually a lot of politics involved.

We've worked on some programmes in this field. We've helped identify Brand Beliefs for countries, regions and cities, worked on expressing them clearly and communicating them to broad audiences.