As an agency leader, you take deep pride in the creative solutions you deliver for your clients. But you know that the ultimate success of any rebranding engagement depends as much on your client’s ability to fully implement your brand strategy and design as it does on the quality of your work. How many times have you buttoned up a brand, only to have your work put on the back shelf because your client didn’t adequately plan for the full cost of rebranding – or have the intended impact and value of the brand diluted because the client couldn’t fully implement it across all assets as envisioned with consistency?
This common scenario underscores the importance of rebrand agencies and implementation planning, from scenario planning to nuts-and-bolts execution. Yet those activities fall beyond the scope of your agency’s engagements. In fact, you may not even be aware of rebrand implementation as a distinct discipline. That’s for good reason. Chances are, rebrand implementation doesn’t align with what really sparks your interests – or your agency’s DNA
The right-brained agency meets the left-brained BrandActive
You excel at: intuition, creativity, and skilled artistic expression. Rebrand implementation, on the other hand, represents left-brain thinking: analytics, complex data, and detailed planning across thousands of inter-dependent line items. These two modes of thinking are totally distinct, yet wholly complementary. And so is any partnership between BrandActive and creative agencies like yours.
So, as a skilled agency, brand strategy and “attitude shifting” creative are your strong suits. BrandActive’s consultants, on the other hand, are distinctly left-brained thinkers who approach brand and marketing operations and rebrand implementation through the lens of logistics, budgeting, plan execution, and operational efficiency.
The success of any large brand or marketing program requires a balance of both these skill sets and activities. You need the creative work to be impactful and strategically on point. And you also need the right branded asset inventory, cost optimization, structure, processes, technology, and organization to effectively implement it. The two disciplines go hand-in-hand.
Many agencies (and even clients) assume BrandActive’s offering overlaps with that of agencies. But as two specialists in very precise disciplines our worlds run parallel rather than intersect.
During a rebrand, your agency takes the lead in terms of the brand strategy, event planning, communications planning, and stakeholder engagement. Those crucial activities are fully in your court. We take the lead on financial analysis, scenario planning, and the management of the logistics and tracking the conversion of our joint client’s organization to their new brand across all touchpoints, make sure the transition happens on budget and on time, and improve operational efficiency to drive down costs and improve outcomes for years to come.
In other words, you come up with the big-picture strategic plan and brand expression, and we make sure it’s properly executed. By working closely together, we strengthen our respective outcomes — and our clients’ results.
The benefits of partnering with BrandActive
When your agency partners with BrandActive, you stand to yield many benefits, including competitive differentiation, reliable project budgets, additional project work that addresses unidentified client needs, and brand work that always sees the light of day.
Competitive differentiation for your agency
By partnering with BrandActive, you put yourself a step ahead of the competition. Because together, we present the complete answer: brand strategy and expression and rebrand planning, cost optimization, and implementation. In doing so, you can put together agency proposals that come “pre-wrapped” in a data-backed business case that is more logistically savvy than anything most agencies can produce on their own.
Not only can you propose the right solution for your client’s budget, but you can offer opportunities to rationalize and gain operational efficiencies in the process, thus effectively extending the client’s budget.
Help clients realistically plan for the full cost of a rebrand
Funding is a major point of failure when it comes to rebranding projects – and much in the same vein, so is not capitalizing on the many opportunities for improvement and efficiency that exist within these rare programs. Too often, organizations aren’t able to realistically plan on the front end for the cost of achieving the outcomes they want in a defined timeframe. When that happens, they are far more likely to run out of funding midway through a project.
BrandActive works with clients to ensure they understand the bare minimum investment required to achieve their goals. At the same time, rather than “scaring” clients away from projects, we help them identify sources of funding, quantify fiscal and OPEX/CAPEX splits, as well as potential operational savings opportunities in order to build a viable financial roadmap for their rebranding projects.
Identify multiple options to implement a rebrand
On a related note, we empower our shared clients to see that when it comes to planning and budgeting for a rebrand, they have multiple options.
Rather than simply presenting a single budget — we give our clients meaningful options. We present a set of tiered rebranding scenarios that represent possible alternatives. And, we offer a full understanding of the tradeoffs that go along with each one.
That kind of strategic, fiscal approach drives alignment and buy-in — and puts the client’s marketing team in the position of being a strategic business leader as opposed to another cost center. Doing so allows us to elevate the profile of the program while capturing a right-sized budget, along with aligned expectations for what the results will be.
Help bridge the gap between marketers and the C-Suite
It should come as no surprise that some C-Suite executives respond more readily to left-brained approaches. These individuals make decisions based on numbers above all. When it comes to a rebrand, they are more interested in the potential ROI than the “softer,” qualitative benefits. BrandActive can provide the financial and quantitative considerations of a proposed initiative, both in terms of costs and net gains.
Want to learn more about BrandActive’s integrated approach to partnering with creative agencies? We’d love to hear from you.
