I know, I was there at this critical time in Nike’s growth. During those days Nike had very idiosyncratic, gruff, but brilliant leaders, who even though  were grounded professionally on law (Rob Strasser) or accounting (Phil Knight) they used their native instincts and intuition over half the time. There was no paralysis through over analysis, there was always a bias for action. The mantra was to try lots of things, lots of new design concepts and marketing approaches, note what worked and get better over time.

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If you really want to understand Rob Strasser and a half dozen other extraordinary and quirky leaders and geniuses of that time you’d have to read the book written by Rob Strasser’s wife, Julie, Swoosh: Unauthorized Story of Nike and the Men Who Played There. There have been many books written about Nike, this captures these wild go go years. The company was living off the land and its own street smarts. There were no firm rules. It was making up its own rules as it went along, based upon trial and error, stimulus and response, trying shit out, throwing product up against the retail wall and seeing what stuck versus what fell down. The early product and sales teams inside Nike were (in accordance with a Phil Knight principle) always moving forward, learning, making lots of mistakes, but never making the same mistake twice.

This ethos and management style is reflected perfectly in the simple one page memo below. It resulted in streaks of brilliance, like the signing of Michael Jordan. But, this style of management also had issues.

The coordination, communication and alignment of vast organizational resources (R&D, Advanced Materials, Product Design, Production, Sales, Distribution, Marketing: which consisted of product line management, athlete promotions, event promotions, retail promotions, product advertising, (and non-existent at this time); brand advertising, consumer research, product line marketing planning … all of the above can collectively be referred to as the Matrix Organization. Most of the division heads of all these areas were poorly communicating and coordinating with each other. They pursued sub-unit goals, not common external goals.

So when Rob Strasser left Nike, he left a big leadership void, but he also opened the door for new people, new thinking and new ways of working. Perhaps this is the hardest thing to see when you are living and working in a well defined culture with known motives and methods of work.

While I was there observing how things got done under Strasser as VP of Marketing, I was also observing what Strasser and his team weren’t doing. And when Strasser left, I saw a window of opportunity open up. So, I called for a meeting with Mark Parker (at that time head of Nike footwear Design, now Chairman of Nike) and Tom Clarke then just leaving as head of Nikes Sports Research Lab, on his way to take over Strasser’s job as VP Marketing. Seven years later Tom became CEO of Nike and held that position for another seven years.

At the time, I was a financial systems analyst working for Nike’s controller, and just completing a two year project to redesign Nike’s core financial systems, upgrade our chart of accounts, and consolidate 52 sets of accounting books into one integrated management reporting system.

I had interviewed every department manager on their budget and operational reporting needs, and I was surprised to find that Nike didn’t have a true marketing department, had never written a marketing plan, and didn’t have feedback systems to help gauge the effectiveness of product line management, advertising, or sports promotions. That is, in terms of learning what was working and what wasn’t in the marketing mix, we were flying blind.

The goal of the meeting with Parker and Clarke was to convince them that the company would benefit enormously by adding marketing planning, systems, and research to improve how business was being done. I had been warned that someone had recently tried to impose a more formal marketing planning system on the company, but after nine months he’d been ejected from the company like a virus, so it was with some trepidation that I approached Parker and Clarke to present my ideas on what had already proven to be a very unpopular topic.

I presented them with two maps, one tracing the process flow for bringing a new product to market and the major hand-off points between departments, the “status quo,” and on the other a process flow that included a simple marketing planning framework that could be owned by the product line managers, the goal of which was to increase strategic insight into how to make more effective business and brand development decisions.

The meeting went well; a week later I was offered a new job (without a title) working under Tom Clarke to quietly bring the new map to life, so in the spring of 1986 I transitioned from Financial Systems to become Nike’s first Director of Marketing Planning.

My tools were my education, my knowledge of Nike core systems, and an Apple Macintosh (the first in the company).

I had a clear mandate, but no grand announcements were made about my formal role, because any announcement about new systems, planning and research tools would have guaranteed cultural resistance and a quick failure. When people asked me what I did during my first year, I’d say, “I’m the product intelligence officer,” which was sufficiently ambiguous and mysterious enough to keep the naysayers away.

A Brand Culture Is Born

It helped me enormously that I wasn’t just an analytical geek who knew how Nike core systems, data flows, and decision points worked. I was also a runner, and every day at lunchtime a large contingent of management could be found in the locker room suiting up for their daily runs. I got to know all the senior managers as runners and people, and I befriended the running product line manager, Claire Hamill, and offered to help her develop the template for a marketing plan. We developed the first marketing plan for the footwear running product line. The fifteen-page document looked something like this:

Market Situation Analysis:

• US Running Category, Size and Growth Rate
• US Running Category, Market Shares (Leading Brands)
• Nike Sales and Market Share, Current Year & Projected Two Years Out
• Target Running Consumer Profiles & Segmentation (by product / pricing levels)
• Nike Running Product Line, by Season Projected Two Years Out
• Competitive Analysis (Brands, Key Products – How Nike was ahead, equal or behind)
• Channels of Distribution Analysis (Strengths & Weaknesses)
• Advertising & Communications Analysis
• Sports Promotions & Events Analysis
• Issues Analysis: SWOT Analysis (Internal Org Strengths & Weaknesses vs. External Threats & Opportunities.

Marketing Goals:

• Financial Goals: Current Year Plus Next Two Years (sales, units, margins)
• Brand Positioning Goals: What people believe now versus what we want people to believe about Nike’s running presence 2 – 5 years in the future.

Marketing Strategies:

• Product Line Plan (18 months to 2 years out)
• Products Linked to Consumer Segments, Product line story presented in Sales Toolkit
• Advertising Plan (Identification of statement products, athletes, stories and campaign concepts) … this info became the basis for new ad briefs.
• Promotions Plan (Athletes, Events, Camps, Clinics, etc.)
• Public Relations Plan (to augment advertising reach)

Consumer Research Plan

To eliminate key marketing blind spots.

Organization Plan

To develop new talent, skills, technical capabilities to succeed.

It was monumentally difficult to gather all this information, but since product line managers were expected to request a budget to help move sales in their category forward once each year, developing a holistic vision of how all the marketing mix elements could be aligned and focused to achieve the greatest synergy was essential. It was evident that there needed to be one person responsible for a category to pull together the organizational insight and learning.

In the process of writing the first plan, a manager had to interview the heads of other business functions to understand what they could and would support, and critical to our success in the intuitive Nike culture, in the process of conducting those interviews, consensus was being built before the plan was written.

After Claire and I had written the first plan, some of the intangible benefits of marketing planning started to become apparent, including the power of focusing elements across the entire matrix organization to achieve campaign impacts.

That first marketing plan was placed in a ring binder so that pages could be taken out and updated as new information arrived, while the second-year effort to write the plan took a fraction of the time. It did not create paralysis by analysis, but instead created a useful narrative that enabled shorthand communications between business functions to focus company resources on creating greater brand synergies and impact.

Next I called on Ron Hill, the basketball product line manager and showed him what we had done for running, and asked him if he wanted to try something similar for basketball. Ron could have refused, and that would have been the end of it, but he immediately grasped that he was competing for scarce organizational resources to grow his basketball category. He realized that if the running product line manager had a better story, a justified story explaining why she was asking for millions of dollars in marketing support money that she hadn’t asked for in the prior year, and that it was justified by the size of the market, Nike’s market share and growth rate, and all the other assets and resources that Claire had shown she was focusing on through the plan to achieve seasonal campaigns to grow sales, Ron immediately came to the conclusion he needed a marketing plan for basketball too.

In this way, all the other product line managers learned about the marketing plan template, and soon my phone was ringing. By the second year, all product line managers in the apparel division were writing similar plans, and by the third year I was traveling overseas to show country managers how to think about marketing planning too.

Marketing Becomes The Hero

Several interesting things happened after marketing plans had been written for all of the 12 footwear product lines. First, management noticed something different in the sales meetings. By virtue of the fact that they had gone through the effort to analyze, plan, imagine, strategize, organize, and lead the thinking behind the marketing development effort, they were much more informed, inspired and fluid during sales meetings.

Their arguments for Nike superiority became more clear, profound, and considered. They developed perspective on where the brand was going that had never existed before, and the materials they presented to the sales agents became more effective. The storytelling about marketing direction strategically built upon Nike’s brand strengths, it remedied competitive product weaknesses, blunted competitive brand threats, and provided far more detail in profiling new opportunities and explaining how those efforts would be supported in the calendar year ahead.

Prior to the advent of this new planning process, Nike was already a great organization. It had streaks of marketing genius, as the Air Jordan phenomenon clearly showed. But as Nike was rising in stature, the public couldn’t see the depth and breadth of all of its product lines. Product category management lacked synergy, coordination, and focus. Functional heads across the matrix organization pursued their own sub-unit goals, unconcerned about external team impacts.

Ultimately the new planning approach succeeded because it created a framework for analyzing the business more rigorously to justify increased investments in developing the business and brand further. It allowed the matrix organization to learn how to mesh to support campaign launch events, and the results of these changes were profound. In the ten years after the installation of annual marketing planning Nike grew more than 860% in annual sales, and the process of annual marketing planning was key to organizational learning from successes and failures.

It’s fair to say that today, as Nike surpasses $35 billion in annual sales, marketing and marketing planning are no longer dirty words, but a welcome way of life that has helped the company to achieve market dominance.

These and other insights into brand management is covered in greater detail in my book, Soulful Branding – Unlock the Hidden Energy In Your Company and Brand. For more about Nike, here’s what I learned working on the Just Do It campaign.

The Blake Project can help you make the shift. Please email us for more about our purpose, mission, vision and values and brand culture workshops.

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Here are 14 considerations and questions that will help in building a successful strategy for your brand.

1. Be Realistic

No brand or product is at the center of how consumers live their lives, yet this assumption is often made in consumer research projects where a narrow set of options are presented for exploration and validation. Realistic context for understanding the consumer’s involvement and interest in the category is a prerequisite for effective brand planning.

2. Be Analytical

Analyze your marketing program’s strengths and weaknesses annually to assess how well these programs are working for consumers. What has worked? What has failed? What needs to change?

3. Expose Assumptions

Very often there are unspoken assumptions, hidden but operative, about the way things “should” be done. It’s essential to expose these hidden assumptions so they can be scrutinized and tested. Are we making the mistake of being more concerned with driving transactions than with the quality of contact with the consumer?

4. Discover Opportunities

As we look outward at the marketplace, where are the emerging opportunities? Where are the threats coming from? Have realistic scenarios been generated that reflect the forces that are changing our business model and marketing effectiveness? Surfacing the issues that are emerging is sometimes called “Issues Analysis,” and there should be an element in every marketing plan for candid design reviews of issues and creative alternatives should be suggested to address them.

5. Be Mindful

Where is the emotional high ground in this category? Are we anywhere near it? Do we really understand the consumption moment when “it’s as good as it gets”? Are we speaking to that moment? What situations, settings, moods, and feelings really define the moments of truth around consumption? Sometimes transaction speed, efficiency, and convenience are the biggest leverage points. (Amazon has clearly figured this out). In addition to these core values, are there other layers of value waiting to be integrated? Are there long-tail product opportunities?

6. Be Curious

How can we more favorably alter our value proposition? How can we enhance the brand persona/image? How can we generate buzz? What new breakthrough ideas are there that would transform the experience or benefits offered in this  category? Across categories? What positioning approaches from the past have broken through? Does any of the past work contain deep insights that can be reinterpreted in a new light today? You have to be curious to discover ideas that will lead to a bigger future.

7. Be Observant

Are any competitors more favorably positioned with groups that matter to our brand’s growth and success? Who are we actually appealing the most to? (age, sex, education, income, relationship status, behaviors, psychographics) How are these consumer groups interpreting our brand? Do channel partners present our brand in its best light? Is our storytelling in touch with the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times? How do our views differ from the views of the people we’re trying to reach?

8. Be Human

All brand impressions work toward building an image. Is the approach we’re taking projecting a human face, or is our communications approach focused on more mundane, material or product positioning? Are we seen as a good citizen? As a company that cares? As a company that uses its super-human powers for good? Does our brand have a conscience? Are there warm and human attributes and connection points in our brand story? Is our company involved in the community, concerned about the environment, involved in the human drama? Making a more human brand involves strengthening human relationships. Is your mix of messaging selling functional benefits, emotional benefits, values or personality? Which of these positioning choices have the greatest consumer impact? Which creative approaches leave people with the most positive feelings about your brand?

9. Be Imaginative

Crafting a brand vision requires going beyond the logical and into the imaginative. Creative teams tasked with envisioning the future need the freedom to take imaginative leaps, and the essence of this aspect of creativity is in seeing new connections between things where no apparent relationship existed before.

10. Be Expansive

To expand the brand concept, expand the ways of looking and thinking about new brand opportunities. In early stages, idea generation workshops can be productive. Some simple guidelines help to get the most out of ideation workshops: Get offsite, have fun, think like a kid, relax old rules, keep the group small, invite a range of creative thinkers, use creative exercises and pre-planned stimulus to generate lots of ideas, and allow no killing of ideas during ideation. Screen the ideas later on to find the ones with most potential, build on these ideas, and then put them through a rigorous new business development filter.

Explore how to add more meaning to your brand. What stories, images, and myths would add great chapters to your brand history? What new products and services connect with the brand essence? Explore ways to layer on qualities that will add to your product’s perceived value, and imagine how to better connect with important consumer subcultures or activities.

11. Look For Integration Possibilities

Can communications be improved by tying together positioning themes across the divisions or the product mix? What creative ways are there to extend branding activity working with co-brands or partners?

12. Be Patient

Moving the brand image in a mature category can seem glacially slow, but a continuous stream of breakthrough advertising can accelerate the shift in feelings by creating cultural buzz. Affinity and image measures can move in a shorter timeframe.

13. Monitor For Impact

If the original insight that connects the brand with consumers is unique, favorable, and strong, and that insight is driving your communications, then improvements in brand strength can be expected. Brand Equity Measurement with sensitivity in design of the brand image descriptors is the best way to track brand repositioning efforts over time.

14. Enriching Conversations

When I worked at Nike, the Brand Guardians, the core team of Nike directors with brand level responsibilities, would go annually to an offsite for a couple days to reflect on our successes and failures, and to learn from both, and we’d have lively strategy discussions about what could be done to move the brand forward.

I originally wrote down these principles after reflecting on the many different perspectives this group was taking on these brand strategy review off site meetings. These brand planning principles operated in the background for Nike, and influenced how we strove to attain the radiant qualities of the brand by helping us to have lively debates and enriching strategy conversations.

You may find shifting perspectives like this is helpful as you engage in the annual process of tearing down how your brand and business model has performed during the past year. Key questions for you may be …

“How can you and your team produce your best work?” and “What group dynamics are essential to cultivate to get to the really good stuff that raises the potential of your brand, which your team feels are worthy and attainable goals?”

These core ideas and others can be found in my latest book The Brand Bridge – How to Build a Profound Connection Between Your Company, Your Brand, and Your Customers.

At The Blake Project we are helping clients from around the world, in all stages of development, redefine and articulate what makes them competitive at critical moments of change. Please email us for more.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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You’ve formed an impression, sometimes a strong one, sometimes weak, about all of the above. That perception is based on whatever mix of inputs have been pushed to you, whether intended or not – previous interactions, something you read, heard or observed, and yes, formal marketing communications such as advertising.

We all develop our perceptions of brands based on this full range of direct and indirect stimuli, yet many businesses – even large, global, sophisticated ones, often seem satisfied to address only a narrow portion of these stimuli, and then typically using only the traditional marketing tools of advertising, promotion, and packaging. It’s not surprising to hear boardroom conversation and cocktail chatter about the latest retail promotion or a favorite TV spot, but it’s far less common to hear how a consumer’s interaction with a salesperson has been engineered to ensure that it reinforces the intended meaning of the brand.

Brand Optimization

Despite the ubiquity of branding and the overwhelming number of companies and executives who engage in brand marketing, not many companies have fully utilized their brand effectively as an asset.

But for a select few companies, brand optimization has become a foundational element of their overall business strategy, creating key competitive leverage points at every turn, and directly enhancing revenue, profits, goodwill, and market capitalization.

They know that the true value of their brands is not just about clever ads or billboards, although advertising is certainly an important component. It’s not just about packaging, the website, or social media, although these are certainly important too. Instead …

A great brand is a set of consistent, positive associations and values that have been created through the sum total of customer interactions with a company, its products and services, and all the messages through all media that the company and its people put out into the environment.

Delivery of this consistent set of values and messages creates consumer expectations, and strong brand perceptions create an unspoken brand promise, an expectation of future value.

Thus, customer experience is at the core of every brand. Research shows time and again that people reward companies whose products and services meet or exceed their expectations, and they punish those that fall short. Rewards come in the form of brand preference and customer loyalty that translates into revenue; punishment comes in declining sales and eroded reputation.

Customer Interactions And Desired Experiences

Yet many companies don’t seem to recognize how fundamental it is for all customer interactions to be seamlessly and effortlessly aligned toward a mutually desired set of experiences.

Those that understand the true meaning of their brands will use their brands to influence and drive their entire organization toward highly satisfying and mutually rewarding interactions. This is how Southwest Airlines became one of the most respected carriers, and how Coca-Cola has delivered a consistently refreshing experience for millions of consumers throughout the world for more than 100 years.

Behind every great brand is a history of effort and commitment, and it’s not easy to deliver a consistent brand experience. It takes strong leadership and a clear vision, combined with employees who share the vision and work every day to make it a reality for every customer. It also takes constant monitoring to make sure that things stay on track.

As your goal is to create compelling and actionable brand strategies that can be effectively delivered, you’ll need to develop a planning process that enables your company to identify and adopt behaviors that will lead to enhanced customer experiences and revenue growth.

Most companies begin by asking four simple brand development questions:

1. What is the state of our brand today?

2. What is the desired state for the brand tomorrow?

3. What must be done to activate the brand throughout the company?

4. What ongoing measures are needed to ensure that the brand promise is being experienced consistently?

Who’s responsible for asking these questions?

It’s the Brand Guardians, of course.

Honest and robust answers to these questions are essential points for learning and inspiration along the journey to building the strong and enduring bridge to your customers and a bigger future for your brand.

These core ideas and others can be found in my latest book The Brand Bridge – How to Build a Profound Connection Between Your Company, Your Brand, and Your Customers.

At The Blake Project we are helping clients from around the world, in all stages of development, redefine and articulate what makes them competitive at critical moments of change. Please email us for more.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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Similarly, the genius of Starbucks’ business model innovation was figuring out how to create a cup of coffee that people would pay ten times more for, and delivering it in a welcoming atmosphere where people are contented to hang out or work for hours, but doing this at a really low cost to Starbucks.

The genius of Apple’s business model is also the experience, the experience of using their devices, and the care and attention that’s given to product design and user interface design.

In fact, every company provides or enables or delivers an experience of some sort, and the essence of business model innovation is designing those experiences thoughtfully, and improving on what already exists.

This is pretty easy to see in a retail store environment, but it’s just as true online.

Google’s simple search page also offers a distinctive experience, and in fact its vast white space has been meticulously designed to convey a very particular message: this page tells you that “it’s all about you, and whatever you type in the search field.”

This has obviously been wildly successful, as Google reports that it did more than 3 trillion web searches in 2017, which works out to roughly 95,000 per second. Clearly people like using their (sort of free) service.

But what makes it possible for any business model to operate? The third element of the business model is whatever goes on inside of the organization that enables it to create, provide, and  deliver those experiences.

The fourth and absolutely essential element of your business model is that it defines how you differentiate (or fail to differentiate) your company.

To summarize, then, the four things that a business model does simultaneously are these:

1. It’s how you make money.
2. It’s how you deliver experiences to your customer.
3. It’s how you use products, services, technology, supply chain, and operations to compete.
4. It’s how you differentiate your company.

Every company has a business model, because it’s just a description of “what is.” The opportunity in business model innovation is in thinking about “what should be.”

The Formula For Business Model Innovation

The failure of a business almost always reflects at root the failure to innovate, failure to recognize change, and the inability to respond to change adequately or appropriately.

And today as we see that yet another massive wave of new technology is about to crash across the global marketplace, what with artificial intelligence, blockchains, machine learning, self-driving cars, robots, quantum computing, etc., all arriving immanently, we must therefore anticipate that every existing business model of every existing business is thoroughly and utterly subject to disruption. This is a stark warning about the need to innovate.

Wouldn’t it be so incredibly helpful if there were a formula to explain all this, to simplify it and make it useful in practice? And indeed there is, a simple, three element framework:

1. Outside: The company provides experiences to customers through the delivery of products and services. The current quality of those experiences is today’s reality; making them transformatively better is the vision.

2. Inside: The factors inside the organization make this delivery possible. These can be many and varied, including the product or service itself, the supply chain, the operations, and technology. These are the means.

3. The Bridge: And then the way that a company communicates this value proposition to customers through marketing and branding, which are the messages and means through which the company communicates. This is the story.

This formula for business model innovation immediately gives us essential questions to ask about our own business model, and how to improve it:

• What’s the best possible experience that our customer can have? (vision)
• How can we organize ourselves to deliver that? (means)
• What’s the best brand identity to represent it? (story)

We also observe that the most successful business model innovators tend to focus obsessively on one particular aspect of their business means, and develop it innovatively and far beyond what’s been done before. That is, they push it to the edge, the absolute limit of possibility, and in so doing create an entirely new capability that they then leverage to define or enable an exceptionally better value proposition for their customers.

Let’s look again at some of the companies we’ve already been discussing to see how this applies: where did they push it?

Amazon: The company’s determination to leverage its core technology into every aspect of the customer relationship.
Apple: Obsession with the user interface design created an ease of use that is the basis for nearly everything else that Apple has accomplished.
Google: Obsession with creating user traffic on its platforms has driven two decades of growth.
Southwest Airlines: Obsession with reducing operating costs enabled an entirely new business model and created three decades of exceptional growth and success.
Walmart: Obsession with supply chain optimization is the foundation of its global retailing empire.

The word “obsession” shows up in each one for good reason, and in fact in each of these examples it’s a dual obsession. On the inside, it’s the obsession to optimize some aspect of operations; on the outside it’s the obsession to optimize the customer’s experience.

How Business Model Innovators Think

Getting there may not be easy, though. Southwest Airlines had to endure a near-death experience during its startup stage before a core element of its eventually-successful business model became clear; it took Google years to figure out how to make money; Amazon and Uber are still losing money, and Apple was moribund as late as 1997, and it was only in about 2005 that its many decades of persistence began to pay off.

How does this work in practice? Business model innovators often begin with these questions simultaneously at the forefront of their thoughts:

The first is simply, What would make the customer’s experience better? Answering this question well requires a detailed understanding of the tacit dimensions of the user experience.
The second is, How can we achieve that? This is the means.
The third question then focuses the compelling story, the critical importance of branding.

These core ideas and others can be found in my latest book The Brand Bridge – How to Build a Profound Connection Between Your Company, Your Brand, and Your Customers.

At The Blake Project we are helping clients from around the world, in all stages of development, redefine and articulate what makes them competitive at critical moments of change. Please email us for more.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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Thus, it cheapens a brand by putting out the message of inventory overstock or sales desperation, thereby reducing the product to the status of a mere commodity wherein price is the meaningful differentiator. This may be motivating to some consumers, but it’s a terrible strategy for meaningful brand differentiation.

Conversely, pull marketing is the strategy that creates a halo around your brand by enhancing your brand’s identity value. This works particularly well in high-interest, high involvement categories such as in the culture industries, all forms of personal technology, entertainment, clothing, beauty, fashion, auto, food, sports and fitness, beverage, dining, hospitality/tourism, health and wellness, and education.

The Desire For Magic Moments

People engaged in these high-interest categories want to experience magic moments as they make their way through life. The brand bridge challenge is to find ways to express and deliver on the emotions and identity facets that this audience wants to feel. But most of these emotional needs are latent and tacit, unspoken and largely unknown, until and unless they are thoughtfully researched and artfully uncovered.

When you do discover them, you can show people how to live life more fully, which leaves people with a very different feeling than advertising intended to manipulate behavior by making them feel fearful or insecure. While playing upon insecurities has become a common strategy in advertising for a long time, which of these approaches do you see as a better long-term brand building strategy, appealing to insecurities, or invoking magic moments? Which approach is better at getting people’s short-term attention?

These core ideas and others can be found in my latest book The Brand Bridge – How to Build a Profound Connection Between Your Company, Your Brand, and Your Customers.

At The Blake Project we are helping clients from around the world, in all stages of development, redefine and articulate what makes them competitive at critical moments of change through online strategy workshops. Please email us for more about our brand storytelling and brand positioning workshops.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers