This book grows brands

Last week my publisher called to say What’s Your Point? was their biggest selling book on Amazon in February with sales up 25% on last year.

Published in 2019, it’s great to see the book sales continuing to go up, and to celebrate this, I’m offering complimentary copies to the first five of my network that drop me an email here. (If you don’t know, the book contains a proprietary process called the Brand Arrow® that can deliver a brand strategy in a single day.)

It came at a good time as I have been working with some of my clients on quantifying the benefits of brand strategy.

It stands to reason that if the whole company is aligned behind a shared understanding of the brand and where it’s headed it will have a much greater chance of success than a company that doesn’t have that alignment. A brand strategy can deliver this, and whilst you may be nodding at the logic of this, you may also be asking, well, not to be rude here Bruce, but can you prove it?

In a word, yes.

And whilst it is generally accepted that brand is valuable – just look at Apple’s $250b[1] valuation for example - what about the brands that do not straddle the world, brands that service a region, or are run by a small team, brands that provide b2b services or are even run out of a home office.

It’s these sorts of companies that make up my client base because it’s these sorts of companies that need a brand strategy most - a framework to make good strategic choices about how their resources are put to best use.

So, here are three recent examples of how the Brand Arrow has delivered quantifiable benefits.

Acin, a multi award winning software firm pioneered a new approach to operational risk, applying a blend digitization technology and data science to change the way the banking sector deals with operational risk, from a manual and qualitative approach to quantitative and automated. The brand strategy helped Acin present their pretty complex solutions into a series of benefit-led messages that has had a significant impact on their performance - in the words of Paul Ford, their CEO, “Since working with the brand strategy, our revenues have tripled”.

Camelot, an insurtech network, brings together skilled and experienced insurance IT experts with insurance companies needing rapid solutions to thorny tech problems. The brand strategy guided the implementation of their new website, messaging, and marketing collateral which has since contributed to a 46% increase in new members and a 60% rise in revenues.

Build PR had been working across several sectors, but wanted to explore focussing solely on the construction sector. The Brand Arrow workshop identified a ‘sweet spot’ of clients that, with a market share below the top three, were too small for the big specialist agencies but too big for the small generalist agencies. This led to a brand proposition around delivering big agency specialist expertise but at the price of the smaller generalist agencies. Since the re-launch (along with a commitment serve only the construction sector, a new brand name, and new marketing collateral) the agency has seen its conversion of web visitors to paying clients increase by 300%.

In my next blog I’m going to look at the ‘softer’ less numerate results of brand strategy but I wanted to finish with the words of a client I worked with recently. A Data Scientist from Blue Yonder, we followed the Brand Arrow process to make a fiendishly complex but extremely useful new product understandable first to the management team who would need to approve it and second to the global sales team who would have to sell it.

“This book is a masterpiece and I have recommended it to so many technical people. Yes, technical people! Don't think this is a book for branding or marketing people only. Everybody has something to communicate and this book provides a clear process to get to a good message, no matter if it's your brand, your service, or your product.”

So, if you want to nab a free copy of this masterpiece, now is your chance!

[i] Available at:https://www.forbes.com/the-worlds-most-valuable-brands/#530e67c9119c (Accessed: 08 March 2022)