Brand & Design Consulting

text 1 The growing competitive pressure of global markets coupled with the ongoing fragmentation of media and markets has boosted the significance of corporate brands: The complexity of today’s companies, the diversity of their business segments and the breadth of their product and service portfolio call for a strategic and substantive definition of what the company as a whole stands for and what it is capable of: the corporate brand.

Today, conventional image management through advertising and public relations can only be used as a short-term, tactical tool – against a backdrop of rising costs and waning efficiency. This poses a key communications challenge to top management: In times of growing corporate complexity and nonstop change, how can a consistent corporate brand be built up and conveyed so as to help tie relevant stakeholders to the company efficiently?

In virtually every market, today’s customers have choice. Objective decision-making criteria are increasingly giving way to emotional factors and “preconceptions”. High potentials are being courted across all sectors of industry. In all companies, the battle for the brightest minds has broken out. At the same time, companies must offer much to identify with if good employees are to be retained and motivated. Since the New Economy bubble burst, analysts and investors are increasingly critical. Given that – also in Germany – the stock exchange has evolved into the No. 1 source of financing, a company must inspire and communicate trust in its strengths and future viability. The political press and opinion-leading public are showing more and more interest in economic and social corporate conduct. A company’s reputation is the make or break factor when it comes to overall appeal and acceptance, which makes it a major decision-making catalyst for other stakeholders.

With its consulting discipline Brand & Design Consulting, Deekeling Arndt Advisors provides an innovative approach to effectively mastering the communications challenges posed by strategic brand-building processes. We see the strategic management of the corporate brand as making an ever more important contribution to safeguarding a company’s success. Our consulting approach is geared to distilling the brand-building process from the company’s relevant, unique services, strengths and capabilities, giving it a strategic framework and shaping it far removed from ethical value discussions – in other words, specifically tailored within a real-life business context.

Accordingly, the Brand & Design Consulting service portfolio takes in “strategic brand consulting” as well as the implementation-oriented consulting fields of “brand management” and “brand style”.

Strategic brand consulting

• Brand identity
  • Conducting identity and image analyses
  • Preparing expert opinions on brand strength and brand values
  • Defining brand essentials
  • Developing the brand story as content platform
• Brand positioning
  • Conducting market and competitor analyses
  • Identifying target group trends and developments
  • Holding positioning workshops as top management discussion forums
• Brand architecture
  • Preparing portfolio opinions on existing brands and their interrelations
  • Developing strategic options for brand architecture
  • Visualising the best possible brand architecture
• Name finding
  • Name creation
  • Linguistic check
  • Legal verification and registration

Brand management

• Brand communications
  • Execution and monitoring of communications planning (master plan)
  • Concept for and implementation of welcome-the-brand and living-the-brand campaigns
  • Concept for and conveyance of communications programmes for specific areas of the company, notably marketing and sales
  • Development of cardinal recommendations for long-term media planning
  • Implementation of brand publishing programmes (including newsletters, magazines, brochures)
  • Brand-specific concepts for event format
• Brand steering
  • Conducting organisational analyses
  • Preparing expert opinions on structural and steering requirements for effective branding
  • Developing and communicating brand management guidelines

Brand style

• Brand design
  • Conducting a symbol analysis (semiotic analysis)
  • Defining core brand symbols (symbol set)
  • Developing and optimising brand name and brand logo 
  • Developing communicative key elements (key visuals, key acoustics, key taglines)
  • Developing and implementing corporate design