Ways we can help
– Brand Strategy and Transformation Consulting
We’re diverse with cross-functional skills that facilitate joined-up thinking to deliver the end to end solutions that increase business capability. We know brand and business strength are dependent on how well interdependent aspects of the business are tuned and integrated.
This makes us a creative consulting agency with a tangible difference. Brand strategy consulting with a view to business transformation is important because your business depends on the power of your brand. This cannot be sustained without effective and innovative business processes. It can’t be separated from the processes and operations that help to deliver the values your business is built on, in order to fulfil your brand promise.
– Change Management and Business Transformation Consulting
Our specialised transformation techniques focus on raising your business’ procedural prowess and digital capabilities. Business transformation changes your business operations, technology, processes and people. Change management is a methodology that ensures it is all done under control. The management of people is critical to making the change stick.
We can help you to improve your operations, processes and technology. Help with employees includes training your people to align with your brand values once they are isolated. With business transformation consulting from Iconify, you can dispense with ‘solving in silos’. This is a key factor for suboptimal business change projects. You also get an edge with a team of technico-creatives with change management expertise too,
– Software and IT Solutions Consulting
To move your business forward, business and/or IT change is almost certainly required. From software solutions integration with process change and improvements, we can help you get the technology right and your people ready. Whether you’re adopting enterprise architecture or migrating to the cloud, we help clients use new systems optimally.
– Brand Strategy Consulting and Development
It’s an adventure to carve out your place in the marketplace. It’s our mission as a creative consulting agency to join the dots between your brand strategy and the need for capability, to ensure you maintain it. Our long-range approach to building a sustainable brand ensures your brand is considered and protected throughout any operational, strategic or technological initiatives. We recognise that your business’s successes are dependent on your brand equity . Therefore, from brand creation to reputation management, we adopt a strategic brand risk architecture, tailored to your business needs. Effective branding will create a unique identity and image and will reflect a position, perception and message that resonates.
– Digital Transformation and Innovation
Innovation and digital transformation go beyond keeping up with technology changes. It imparts the ability to keep adapting and transforming, It’s central to achieving strategic objectives.
Digital capabilities will give your business the ability to capture, transform, analyse and interpret data which can then inform your offerings and processes. We help you take this journey to identify and prioritise opportunities. We start with brand strategy consulting in order to audit current capabilities and understand existing gaps. The creative consulting agency small businesses need post the pandemic must understand the vast opportunities digital offers for impressive customer experiences. This is because Customer Experience (CX) is increasingly the linchpin of sustainable brands.
– Responsive Website Development for SMEs
Your digital journey may start with web development but it shouldn’t end there. Website development is part of a digital journey that enables not just the customer experience but with the right integrations, the employee experience and your business’s interactions with a range of stakeholders. Our website development process focuses on responsive and high-performance websites that help you win. We believe that small to medium-sized businesses deserve the advantages that come from digital adoption as much as larger companies. If you have yet to take your business online or revamp your digital presence, we are here to help with website development, central to the customer experiences you offer your online customers.
CONSULTING AND CREATIVE
Build, Restore or Transform
Being brand-aligned in business transformation consulting is a philosophy we believe changes the transformation and competitive strategy game. As a spectrum of holistic services, brand strategy consulting and transformation implementation present real opportunities for uplifting capability and increasing visibility for your business.
Brand-aligned customer experience, business and technology change are all linked. They are integral ways to keep your target segment and your promise to them at the forefront of everything your business does. It’s important to create and sustain a narrative through the entire business that carries through all facets of your company.
A Brand, Change and Digital Agency
A Technical and Creative Hybrid
There is a two-way gap in the industry currently. Many consultancies focus too much on technical and strategic elements on one hand, with no input from creatives. On the other, many creative agencies eschew technical and change expertise. Further, many have been found to have actually realised a creativity deficit! A recent report into the creative industry models discovered that many ‘agencies are responding to disruption through cost-cutting rather than business transformation. In fact, the report found that ‘creativity is being managed out’ at the very same time as the largest traditional management consultancies have been buying agencies to be able to offer creative capabilities. Whereas, at Iconify, we embrace creativity and innovation in business transformation consulting as fundamental to brand sustainability. This is why are structured as a consultancy/agency hybrid, combining our creative, business and technical faculties. We take a holistic approach and never confine ourselves to just the symptoms of the problem, and so we do not miss the root causes of problems.
Uniquely, our mindset as a creative consulting agency is a manifestation of our conviction that effective solutions are multidisciplinary ones.
Iconify is bridging the capability gap between traditional business services consulting and creative brand development and marketing. With brand strategy consulting services we help to identify the capability a business needs to build. We offer a marketing strategy to execution process that is purpose-led and which focuses on the identification of brand purpose and articulating business transformation objectives, and delivery aligned with that purpose.
Service Guides and More Info
New Brand Creation
Creating a leading brand starts with defining what the business is, what it stands for and its purpose as well as your branding goals. These are the foundational elements to defining your branding visual identity and creating an emotional attachment with your target segments that goes beyond the functional fit of whatever your offerings are for them. We help you define and distil all that is unique about your brand to drive decision making in favour of your product or service offering. We pull together professionals across the creative consulting spectrum to provide full coverage for providing exciting propositions with holistic brand strategy consulting.
Brand Development Strategy and Implementation for your Small to Midmarket Company
Your brand could and should be your company’s strongest and most recognisable asset, both at functional fit and psychographic attachment basis. It pays to focus on this and ensure that all that your business does enhances, protects and defends your brand and Iconify’s mission as a creative consulting agency is to recognise and ensure it’s a business imperative for all competitively focused businesses to build, strengthen and establish resonant and powerful brands. Let’s discuss how.
A quick note on Brand vs Branding
Brand differs from branding, in that while branding represents your visual identity and recognisable visible cues, marks and straplines, your brand represents an idea and story founded in the needs of your target segment and the messages in your story that position your brand as the offering that meets those needs the best. Note, your business or service need not be the best in its class by features or function. Your target segment just needs to perceive it as the best fit for their stated and unstated needs and benefits versus rivals in your market.
Brand Strategy Definition – the end of uncertainty
Brand Strategy Definition – the Creating and having a brand strategy with Iconify, consists of defining and articulating your brand purpose, principles, positioning, proposition and promise in an integrated and powerful way that enables the development and crafting of compelling communications that can be used to interact with your customers throughout the customer lifecycle. We are geared up to provide holistic creative consulting services that ensure that we can assist with any potential requirements or blockers to building a strong brand.
The Process: This a multi-step approach that uncovers the brand pyramid, purpose and the who, what, where of your business in a competitive landscape.
Brand Strategy Underliers: We run discovery and deep-dive workshops to understand your business and its goals, your people and stakeholders, as a precursor or in parallel to the research we will be doing on your industry, competitors and opportunities.
- Brand Strategy Enablers: People and Team structures, workflows and information flow that would affect your promise or proposition delivery.
- Brand Strategy Components and Maintenance Framework: We consider how your current state business model and where gaps, issues, risks and opportunities lie to make improvements in people, practices, policies and organisation-wide tools that would impact on the strength of the brand strategy implementation.
- Branding Collateral: The foundational part of creating a brand, as outlined above drives everything. Once that is complete, we help you prepare the collateral to underpin the image decided on through the previous phase and consider how that is translated into your visual identity using branding rules.
- Logos: Using creative and methods, we brainstorm with your decision-makers and marketers on the ideation for your company logo and other marks for different channels usage.
- Design: With the brand truths documented, we work with our graphic designers to build out the brand look and feel of your business or products and services. This will be a prerequisite for creating your website, social media and other communications.
- Rules: We provide in-depth planning and consultancy of the rules of naming, logos, and brand design and positioning including colour and shape cues most appropriate to your brand, and your tribe.
Brand Strategy Implementation
Brand Communications is a critical part of any implementation.
- Brand Communications: Digital Communications and Marketing are absolutely key to the brand communications process as are developing strong brand aligning messaging appropriate to all digital marketing.
Step by Step Guide to Brand Strategy Implementation
Through the brand strategy consulting process, we have a strategy and plan. What now? We execute, within a tight and tracked project management structure. The steps will differ depending on the business type, challenge and stage in the lifecycle, but will broadly follow the following process.
1.Create or revisit the brand architecture
Building a brand pyramid helps to discover purpose and values for the brand and ascribe a personality, voice and emotional aspirations to your brand.
2.Define and refine differentiation and proposition
. Understanding business objectives and then taking the steps necessary to differentiate your offering and find a position to lead in and fleshing out the business plans and operating models to achieve this.
3.Research
Core research on your area, competitors, industry and consumer profiles to map key offering features to positioning objectives and underserved needs and isolate viable segments to target as closely and tightly as possible to enable customer capture and growth.
4.Discovery and Current State Analysis where applicable
We begin the process of aligning your brand strategy to your business strategy by deep diving into your organisation and its workings.
5.Workshop the relevant candidate target segments
Using primary and secondary methods, we investigate further the motivations, fears and desires, pain points and possible gains and other psychographic elements within audiences and finding overlaps that can be exploited.
6. Determining and your tribe and the various target segments
There comes a time when all the research is in, the interviews are complete and the picture is clear as to whether your brand has a tribe and the different demographic profiles that make them.
7. Determine Market Position – for the offering and for the brand
Linked to differentiation and the by now tightly defined customer profiles, based on what we know about the market, how you are different and who your tribes are, work can begin to delineate a credible, ownable position, one that your brand can lead in.
8. Brand Communications
The pivotal dimension to brand strategy implementation is brand communications. Messaging
We start with a story –the story that everything your brand will ever do or say or imply will hark back to, anchored to your purpose, values. Digital and content marketing
Website Design and Development leveraging the power of great Brand Communications
Your website anchors your image and your message and once developed your brand identity too. It’s a crucial source of information and should form part of your brand extension strategy.
9. Internal brand engagement
Precious People. It’s one of our catchphrases here at Iconify, and a real thing for us. We like to think that people are top of mind for our efforts. But there are precious people on both sides. Sure, your customers generate revenue and help build visibility but so do your staff. It is every bit as important to engage your staff as your front line clients, train, equip and empower them to help propel your brand’s message, visibility and reputation.
10. Brand Risk Management
All of the above is to say that as we build your brand and implement your strategy, but mostly beyond, significant Brand Risks exist and we run some exercises as part of implementation to ensure that there is a framework for outlining the risks your brand faces through its delivery process.
11. Brand Collateral Creation
With brand positioning in mind, with its references to target audiences, it is almost always a strategy implementation imperative to make changes to verbal and visual branding.
- Logos
- Design
- Rules
12. Project Management and Delivery
Project Management is the discipline and process that ensures that a book of work is started for the implementation when the initial works are discussed, to ensure that it is planned, resourced, approved by the relevant stakeholders and monitored to ensure a concerted and quality delivery.
Business and IT Change Delivery and Project Management
Businesses are beginning to realise that transformation is necessary and indispensable, not just nice to have. Complexity, volatility and speed of changing customer tastes and expectations mean that formulating a transformation solution, ideally across the spectrum of your business is not a choice so much as an urgent service to your business and its stakeholders. All business goals boil down to winning, thriving, driving in business. Transformation gives your business the capability to confidently perform and keep doing so.
Reach out to us for business transformation consulting when some part of your business needs to undergo fundamental change. You may already know that it’s a long term plan to build a sustainable and responsive business, able not just grapple with the scale and daunting pace of change, but can contend and increase business and brand power not just now, but at an ever-increasing rate in the future.
We recognise that successful approaches to transformation depend upon and are led by your business’ values and ideals. Consequently, we do not advocate or seek to implement myopic strategies, bringing instead long term lenses to potential solutions. This is a key reason that our creative consulting services can take you further.
Software Development Services and IT Consulting
More and more businesses are looking for the right software consulting firm to help them with their strategic IT objectives and develop software solutions integrated with their existing technology and legacy systems.
Is that you? Are you realising that you need a software consulting firm that is more than just techies, but who knows the secret of high-quality software? Iconify Transformation Technology Consulting and Practice specialise in enterprise architecture and Software and App Design and Development, providing IT and Software Consulting. With a dedicated development team, we are a software company supporting the full software development lifecycle, from requirements and architecture design to development and testing services, and we can help to enhance or replace existing technology and tools.
Digital Strategy and Innovation Consulting
Most creative agencies design for the present but our creative consulting agency will build your business up as the brand you hope to be. Digital considerations are critical because digital platforms and social media offer clients logical and virtual proximity to customers, so marketing and organisational thought should increasingly be directed to channels and technology that enable access to all possible interaction points with customers. We help clients counter the challenge of making this seamless, constant, progressive, positive and relevant. We ensure that all efforts must map back positively to showing and sharing clients’ purpose and meeting the needs of the customer. To grow, your business needs to stay relevant. To stay relevant you must be dynamic, requiring a connection to purpose, reliability and responsiveness to customers and stakeholders.
Iconify Innovation Advisory is delivered as part of our Transformation and Technology practices and we help businesses evaluate aspects like, what value can be captured within your agreed strategy and what’s the smartest, fastest, most effective and in short, innovative way to can do it. We help leaders determine risk appetite and understand your innovation profile and consider which new ideas when implemented will deliver the highest impact, made possible by the cross-functional teams that deliver our creative consulting services.
Create Boss Branding and transform your visual identity
Most creative agencies are known for work that starts and ends with branding and creative. As a creative consulting agency, we bring strategy and transformation to the forefront of brand mindset and the sustainability of your business. Defining your brand might start here but it’s only the beginning for businesses with long term goals.
Brand Strategy Collateral
The aim of our creative consulting services is to help you span the entire process of brand building, communications and the operating model to live the brand.
The foundational part of creating a brand, as outlined in Brand Strategy, above is important and ideally, a prerequisite preparing your brand communications materials and once that is complete, we help you prepare the collateral to underpin the image decided on through the previous phase, and consider how that is translated into your visual identity using branding rules. Brand collateral is the development of the brand assets that comprise your visual and verbal branding designs, marks and music, and as part of this stage, we can help with naming or renaming, logos, straplines, colourways and signature tunes.
Logos
Using creative and methods, we brainstorm with your decision makers and marketers on the ideation for your company logo and other marks for different channels usage.
Design
With the brand truths documented, we work with our graphic designers to build out the brand look and feel of your business or products and services. This will be a prerequisite for creating your website, social media and other communications.
Rules
We provide in-depth planning and consultancy of the rules of naming, logos, and brand design and positioning including colour and shape cues most appropriate to your brand, and your tribe.
Verbal Branding
We can help with naming and taglines through brainstorming with your stakeholders, on the basis of the outputs of the brand pyramid and brand strategy principles.