What was the problem?

After months of great research and hard thinking, a company had a new brand essence to be proud of. It was clear, pure, succinct. It was a core brand phrase with eight key words arranged around it; a classic bulls-eye model.

But the company realised that the brand’s future now relied on everyone consistently interpreting a dozen decontextualised words. Could the implementation live up to the quality of the origination? Was the thinking now so compressed it would be hard to use?

What did we do?

We produced a kind of semantic safety net.

We mapped out the cultural life of these words and what they had to mean in the context of this brand. And we highlighted some cultural bear traps - some potential meanings that were wrong for the brand and had to be actively avoided.

Some words were easy and obvious, but others less so. For example, we had never noticed before that the word ‘optimistic’ brings some quite nasty baggage with it.

• In the dictionary it’s a lovely, positive, happy word.
• But when it’s loose out there in the real world, in use, it often speaks of a negative past (‘despite x, she remains optimistic…’); a lack of judgement (‘wildly optimistic’, ‘overly optimistic’); and even, in inverted commas, a manipulation of the truth (‘the Prime Minister was "optimistic" about…’).
• This is quite useful to know if ‘optimistic’ is one of your key brand words…

What did they get out of it?

Our work on the brand model directly informed the client’s communication strategy and a range of brand-related activities. It helped maximise the effectiveness of the ongoing investment in the brand.