A brand consultant plays a critically important role in a company’s growth. So what kind of service does a brand consultant provide, and how do they contribute to that growth?
Who Is a Brand Consultant?
Brand consultants are people with the ability — and the cognitive flexibility — to analyze data, establish cause-and-effect relationships, and develop strategy using certain technical methodologies. There is no formal education program for becoming a brand consultant today; the great majority accompany brands on the strength of the experience they have gained in professional life. That is why the most basic condition for being a good brand consultant is to hold certain competencies — and, beyond that, to have kept developing them over time. When you look at the competency profiles of successful brand consultants, you see people who have managed to fuse several abilities in a single crucible: people who can understand human and social psychology and observe social and cultural interaction.
A few of the ways a brand consultant contributes:
- They bring a work history across many different sectors. As an outside eye — or through what they have learned in other sectors — they find fresh ways out of the chronic, sometimes gangrenous problems of the company or its industry.
- A brand consultant treats every situation the company faces, good or bad, as a project with a defined timeline. So the problems employees see as unsolvable, and the successes they assume will simply continue forever, are handled in a project-focused way. A brand consultant knows they must arrive at a conclusion — a finding — at the end of any situation. They leave no problem unresolved and no good development unplanned. Thanks to this results-focused approach, the company can act far more nimbly on situations that might otherwise remain unresolved or unplanned for years.
- Companies hold their marketing departments responsible for running current activities and set annual performance targets in those areas. As a result, marketing focuses on the results to be achieved within a year — or even a quarter — and on the activities that will deliver them. A brand consultant, by contrast, has little involvement in day-to-day operational work (communication crises aside). So rather than isolated actions, the whole picture is always kept in view — which helps avoid the mistaken or wasteful spending that can occur in areas such as product development, portfolio strategy, brand naming, identity and packaging design, and advertising and communication.
Creating a New Brand:
The process of creating a new brand must be run according to the fundamentals of modern branding and the conditions of the market. We now see fierce competition in almost every category, and today companies can overcome it only through the intangible power of brands. So in new-brand initiatives, you should work with a brand consultant who steers every part of the process. Doing so saves companies a considerable amount: thanks to the qualities listed above, the company spends its budget and resources within a clear plan of priorities. Instead of isolated actions, the whole picture is always considered — which avoids mistaken or wasteful spending in areas like product development, portfolio strategy, brand naming, identity and packaging design, and advertising and communication.
Most often, creating a new brand arises as entering a new category, or — for product expansion within the same category — creating a sub-brand or a premium brand.
Consumer Research:
This is an area that has also spread into brand consulting over the last four or five years. Consumer research should no longer be left to the survey questions of traditional research firms or to leading focus-group studies. For more superficial, generic findings, traditional research firms and their solutions can of course still be used. But today, to solve a decision-making problem at the point of purchase, far deeper methodologies and multidisciplinary approaches are needed. Just think about the number of advertising messages you are exposed to every day. Given that customer attention is steadily shrinking, an insight likely lying in the subconscious is like a brand striking gold.
With this research we reach a very deep customer and market analysis, and the target audience’s cultural and psychological purchasing criteria come to the surface. For this work we use what we consider the current frontier of science: ethnographic research and cognitive-therapy (hypnotherapy) tools.
Developing Brand Strategy:
It is brand strategy that steers all of a brand’s communication activity (value proposition, reason for being, positioning, and so on). If there is no brand strategy, it must be defined from scratch; and a past brand strategy that no longer answers market dynamics must be updated together with a brand consultant and their team. Developing a brand strategy and using its outputs consistently in communication is the key to being etched into the consumer’s mind. Brands that hold no place in the consumer’s mind cannot be said to have brand equity.
For a brand simply to identify its customer’s problem and find a solution is no longer nearly enough. At what we consider today’s frontier of science, when developing brand strategy we start from the emotion sets defined by the science of psychology. For any purchase in any category, we first identify the customer’s pain point through the right emotion sets, then determine in which direction the brand should transform that emotion set. It is now plainly clear that brand-strategy documents which say nothing about emotional transformation have no real-world equivalent. Through this work, a document with the standing of the brand’s constitution emerges — independent of individual opinions (the Board, the company owner, marketing managers, the brand consultant, and so on).
Brand Equity Audit:
Sometimes a brand consultant does not carry out active development at all. Commissioning a brand and marketing audit while things are going well is work whose fruit companies reap over the long term. For brands, when things are going well — periods of profitable growth — the goal is to extend the duration of that period, and an audit is one method used to maximize the potential gains. In this work, the brand consultant and their team focus on the company’s marketing activities, studying the bond built with the consumer and the long-term health of revenue channels. They report objectively to the Board, the company owner, or marketing department managers, with findings on what is healthily improving and what needs to develop. When things are going well at a company, victory-drunkenness among management and employees is not a rare thing.
