OUR CAPABILITIES: Branding & Positioning

Building a Brand
A brand captures the essence of an organization — the fundamental idea, the promise to customers. In a complex, dynamic world, when you develop a brand you create a tool people use to place themselves in relation to the ideas, organizations and activities with which they choose to become involved.

We approach brand development and positioning as being primarily about the perceivers, and only secondarily about the organization, product or proposition. A successful brand is created and sustained in the same way a symphony orchestra performs, with engaged musicians collaborating to achieve a coordinated sound. The orchestra’s effectiveness is measured not by the components of the music or by the virtuosity of individual performances, but by the ability of the orchestra to attract, hold and, ultimately, delight an audience.

Developing the Brand Perspective
Neuger Communications Group uses an interactive process to identify and develop a brand perspective. The process is highly collaborative and is designed to capture the characteristics and assumptions that define an organization, as well attributes or habits that hinder a strong brand identity.

We believe that everything an organization does is an opportunity to express the brand. The challenge is to choose the areas of an organization’s communications and operations with the greatest potential impact on establishing and projecting a brand identity. Through the brand perspective process, we explore three key elements that clarify the brand promise: competitive perspective, functional perspective and stakeholder perspective.

There are no shortcuts to capturing the stakeholder view of the organization, particularly the emotional core represented by the organization’s values, beliefs, history and mythology. Through structured interviews, focus groups and surveys, we build a consensus understanding on which to build a brand.

Identifying the external stakeholders’ knowledge and needs is an equally, if not more, complex process. We focus on understanding the competitive, functional and aspirational perspectives through image, awareness and other forms of market research that bring to the surface the key characteristics valued in our clients’ core markets, the operational standards they must meet; and the aspirations of their prospective customers.

The Brand Promise
The result of the brand perspectives process is a concise understanding of the language and images that represent the essential characteristics of an organization's brand. We distill these characteristics into a brand promise that captures the heart and soul of the organization. The collaborative process ensures the strength of many voices, while honing in on the core message that both reflects and drives our clients’ best and highest ambitions.