Brand Development

Here is a resulting example of our branding process: A boutique travel holiday experience for women travelling to Europe? Why, Lili de Luxe of course! So successful, that the brand can now be adapted to a number of business models. So successful that partners and employees LOVE the brand. Wow! That’s powerful.

We often see businesses that are ashamed of their brands. They may have spent thousands on brand development or design. They may still be using some picture the owner once drew. They may have scoured for a new fresh web address, but all the .com names were gone. The result of bad branding is alienation. The intended audience (presumably the client) does not share an emotional bond with the colours, the messages, or the products. Heck, we even come across lawyers that provide brand consulting based solely on outdated trademark processes. Yikes! Dear Livestrong, we know how to refresh your brand after the Lance Drug scandal. Just call us and we will make your brand pedal up the mountain once more!

We provide brand development services and consulting. This is a process that includes design, logo, colour guidelines for print and digital, key messages, and emotional context. We specialize in place branding. We also think a brand development process is an opportunity not to be missed with regard to communicating with staff and customers. We can provide ancillary services tied to a brand refresh that will engage your community. Why not have an internal survey of three concepts for example?

Creative

Just a quick question for you: What will register more in the minds of people driving by a bus bench advertisement? Contact information with a picture? Feels very real estate agent, don’t you think? What about understanding the bench for what it is: A target of graffiti day in and day out. Turning heads will get you noticed, triple the results from your media buy, and get people talking next time they visit. Now that’s creative that understands the medium. Good creative lets you have fun. Tired of your moustache? Need a little cosmetic makeover to keep people talking? What about a pirate makeover or anything else that feels like graffiti. All fun aside, if your creative is managed to have maximum impact, you are optimizing your money.

We provide consistently good creative that is in line with the brand message and “internet of things” possibilities. We can also very quickly tell you if the creative you have is good or how it can be fixed. We have all the pieces to generate excellent creative which extends out of the advertising realm and into experience engagements and place branding impact. Strategy, data, results, and people that are easy to work with.

Information Graphics

Old but true; a picture is worth a thousand words. We are huge fans of mashing together concepts and data into clear and concise graphics that speak louder than words. What? We want you to pay us to draw pretty pictures? Yes. But only if we have the potential to bring people together. Do you need to articulate your new strategic direction within your organization? Do you need your targets to easily understand why they should buy or invest? Do you need people to know what they should do in front of the button? Information graphics may be an important part of your success.

Remember the two pillars of successful project management? Common language and team work. We work with you to develop information graphics that act as a map to achieve both. Remember, if there is a business fire, everyone go to the rally point, here on this graphic. We provide custom information graphics (that look great next to your brand!).

Kinetic Typography Videos and Presentations

This example highlights our ability to deliver kinetic typography videos. That’s a fancy word for a video presentation that look great, keeps everyone interested, but does not require expensive stock photos or actors. But don’t worry, we can make it expensive!

We provide production and management to deliver videos and presentations that support your projects. From start to finish, we are only interested in providing top quality results. We can start with strategy. We provide script writing and story boarding services. We source and manage all third party media assets and talent. Finally we can provide any file type required for today’s networks. Maybe you need a steady stream of effective video content for your foray into marketing automation platforms? Perhaps you need a killer presentation to make investors and shareholders swoon? We have the experience and broad background to tailor videos and presentations with the right tone for your audience.

Customer Experience Design

The project displayed above revolved around creating an ipad kiosk where clients swiped through a friendly presentation loaded with key messages. After 2 minutes, each guest received an entry form to win a prize. Contact information was collected. A prize was drawn every month for 6 months. For under $2K, the results impacted hundreds of customers that were encouraged to tell their friends and become clients.

We design experience programs that make people curious, engage creativity, and generate unforgettable experiences. We provide experience design for your place and your brand. We can help with a wide range of services from initial experience program concepts to managing large experience program budgets. We are not event managers. We hire and manage event managers as part of the overall project if necessary. We also love spreadsheets and data. As part of our engagements, we show you ROI every time.

Our primary differentiator is that we work with clients to identify strategic goals. We are actively responsible to quantify the effect of experiences for our clients so they have the data to support decision making. Finally, ask yourself how many other agencies understand experience design, place branding, and have an architect on staff? We work with managers, committees, working groups, entrepreneurs, and the C-Level suite to achieve results.

Marketing Project Management & Websites

This is an example of creating a portfolio website which you are now viewing on our website portfolio on the internet. We launched a website for DiStefano Architecture that would signal their presence in Canada’s Okanagan Valley. The challenge was to create a web presence that would accommodate a number of design and business factors. For example, a balance was created between the minimalism of preferred architectural design and a people friendly store front. The site was also developed to be easy to maintain, SEO and CPC friendly, with the ability to grow in the future. This project involved multiple planning stages from a strategic brief and creative brief to design and development to SEO and CPC management. The results speak for themselves. Go ahead. Use any keyword in your Google search bar to find an architect in the Okanagan or Kelowna or Penticton or Vernon. distefanoarchitecture.com is now a site that cannot be ignored and new clients and job hunters contact DiStefano Architecture on a regular basis.

We provide marketing project management services. There are a number of ways we can work with you to deliver results, from providing a consultant to managing a fixed budget project. We specialize in generating place branding experiences that will impact a global audience.

Outsourced Marketing Management

We love spreadsheets. That’s a bold statement if you are not a management accountant. What else do we love? Data! Marketing management is essentially managing budgets to maximize lead flow into the organization where the sales process and procurement take over. In some cases, the goal is growth. In other cases, it is budget effectiveness. We provide our knowledge and experience to manage your marketing budget and suppliers just like you would.

Our core services are focused on actively modernizing your marketing and generating customer experiences that allow you to “win” your marketplace. Modernizing really means professionally managing your marketing with a management and budgetary cycle. With each cycle, we review activate and deactivate programs to achieve best value. We also investigate new technology and data sources as they relate to micro and macro trends and add them to your plan. Finally, we work with our clients to craft exceptional experience projects. By using a toolbox of processes, data, new technologies, new channels, and understanding trends as they cross the chasm into general adoption, we build experiences that will drive loyalty and referrals.

Place Branding Consulting

This is an example from the BeBunker project funded by the Experience Agency. We use place branding to unlock value concepts with our audience during the sales process. We also walk the talk. We are not just place branding consultants; we are business leaders investing in new place branding business models.

Place branding is concerned with impacting the concepts and emotions of a target audience as it relates to a place. A place is typically a country, a province, a city, or a temporary (seasonal) festival. While some have argued that it is impossible to change the perceptual concepts about a place, we beg to differ. By engaging a strategy and actualizing a budget, media can be created and tuned to a specific country and language specific target populations. Across both physical and digital mediums, profiles can be raised and narratives engrained.

The Experience Agency travels the world to help companies and governments create and engage place branding strategies. More than just tourism. More than just a new city logo. It’s leveraging and repackaging the place assets to open the reputation for travel, business, and growth. It is using digital networks both as quick time research and as quick time message dissemination.

For example, Chinese mainlander tourism is increasing by over 100% a year. How are you creating a place branding experience to capture this multi million dollar opportunity?

Product Development, Design & Sales

Smile Gallery Pro is a great example of setting up a micro business around a market segment profile that can generate cash for years. It is a Web application that allows health care professionals to create stunning “before and after” photo galleries to show their patients. Once the opportunity was identified, an application was developed by a small team using an agile approach to manage the project. Then, a focus group was established and a “go-to-market” plan was generated. The results speak for themselves. Cash flow positive within months. ROI achieved shortly after. Cash cow after that. Often, our customers are sitting on this very type of opportunity, but do not have the time or the innovative team to follow through on successful management. Finally, never forget the power of integrating your software and processes into the daily lives of your users and clients. That dependence is golden.

We provide consulting services that span strategy to sales to product development. We are generalists with experience in a number of industries. We provide a fresh perspective, fresh ideas, and people who are fun to work with. There are so many latent industries ready for new services configured in new packages. Let us bring our creativity and global business perspective to your next success. Whoops! That last bit was “sales talk”. Sorry about that.

Plans & Programs, Process Diagrams, Feasibility Studies and Market Analyses

Here is an example of a market landscape analysis for a portion of the health care market in Canada. Understanding which external actors will influence which part of the market chain is critical to preparing a go-to-market strategy. A market landscape analysis provides perspective on vertical or horizontal moves to gain leverage in the chain. This, of course, is now happening on a global scale in an international context.

A market landscape analysis is just one type of deliverable that can help. We can also provide action (business) plans and process diagrams. As with information graphics, the goal must be to create clarity and rally stakeholders to a common understanding. Our deliverables can be aimed at top level strategy all the way to small processes. We are passionate about providing tools that become easy to update instruments that have fast impact (not long documents no one will actually read).

We provide discreet consulting for senior managers and fast moving entrepreneurs. We have helped companies around the world step away from the elephant of their business to make sure they benefit from a fresh perspective. Sometimes, consulting with someone outside of the box, is just what is necessary to unlock the right questions.