Brands face an increasingly cluttered, commoditized environment…

Where potential customers have better access to information than ever before. So it’s more expensive to break through, more important to be meaningfully different, and harder than ever to fake it. In short, the most important place to start is with the truth. How is your product or service different and better than the alternatives? If it’s not there already, could it get there? The most effective marketing starts with something really new, good, and true to say. This requires insight, creativity, and intellectual rigor.

It also requires a realistic assessment of the competitive landscape. Because you may be operating in a world where business constraints prevent product-based differentiation. If so, what is the emotional role your brand can play? How can it resolve your customer’s inner conflicts or reflect their deepest aspirations? This requires more insight, creativity, rigor, and honesty.

In the best case, you do both: make a rational argument for your brand’s true advantage and do so in the context of an emotionally compelling story.

This is the heart of Brand Strategy: Who should you be targeting? What are they looking for? What are their barriers to purchase? What do you actually have to offer? What do you believe in? In short, who should your brand talk to, what should it say, and with what sort of voice should it speak?

Chapman Brand will guide you through a collaborative process to sort through these questions and generate the best possible answers. We’ll listen first and respect your experience, but challenge your assumptions. We’ll introduce new ideas; some naive, some hopefully brilliant. And we’ll find ways to clarify and simplify both the problems and the solutions.