Catalyst Branding

Need to Work On Your Brand? Coaching May Be The Best Way to Go.

September 13, 2016

Enhancing Brand Consulting Effectiveness

Since founding Catalyst five years ago, we’ve been working to hone the effectiveness of traditional brand consulting engagements.   Our clients told us that the big firms take too long and cost too much.  They’re seeking a faster and more cost effective alternative.

We were able to fulfill their requests by delivering a new model that actually increased outcome quality through a streamlined process that was both faster and less expensive.  By giving clients complete access to the best minds in the firm – those capable of working both smarter and faster – we’ve been able to create business enhancing solutions in less than half the time, for a third of the fees the big firms are charging.

Coaching as an Alternative

Along the way, a select number of clients have started to ask for a new type of engagement.  These clients have a strong staff with significant internal capabilities. They’re confronting a new reality where brand alone, while necessary, is no longer sufficient to build attention and engagement needed to spur demand. And they’re being asked increasingly to serve a C-Suite role that integrates marketing and culture to grow revenue and deliver a compelling customer experience.

These clients don’t need an outside firm to come in, do their work and deliver an externally produced branding solution.  Instead, they seek external expertise to coach, guide and teach their internal staff to create their own integrated branding, marketing and customer experience solutions.

The Benefits of Coaching

This approach has many benefits.  Most of all, because the internal team created the solution, they tend to be more committed to doing all it takes to make it successful.  The process of taking ownership breeds the collaboration required to create truly integrated solutions across marketing and customer experience.  Furthermore, the solutions tend to be more organic in that they are actively managed and easily honed  to respond to internal & external catalysts.

Finding the Right Coach

The challenge lies in finding the right coaching partner.  As with all other forms of coaching,  a branding coach that follows a rote process for each and every challenge is the wrong way to go.  Instead, it is important to find a coach who has the expertise to work within models and frameworks that are right for the individual firm.  Most clients already have institutionalized frameworks.  If that isn’t the case, most talented teams have experience with particular frameworks that will ease the developmental process.  If neither is the case, the coach needs to be able to tailor the right framework  to the firm’s needs given the nature of how decisions are made.

The Coach’s Role

First, the coach must guide the team through the process of defining the real business challenge and/or opportunity to be addressed in order to spur demand, ignite growth or neutralize competition.

Second, the coach helps the team to understand market psychology, identify inflection points, map strengths and weaknesses and determine territories for viable long-term positioning based upon relevance and differentiation.

Third, the coach guides the team to chart the customer experience by mapping the path to purchase and the journey to loyalty.  Each touchpoint needs to be identified and evaluated.  From this, the team determines the fit and strengths of the current brand identity system and frames a plan to retain, refine or transform the brand to fulfill the opportunity.

Fourth, the coach helps the leader shape the resourcing plan – coordinating internal resources and identifying best in class external resources to manage the process of creative exploration, refinement and finalization.  The coach also plays a very important role with the C-Suite, reinforcing the leader’s recommendations and providing the context key decision makers need to evaluate proposed solutions.

Fifth, the coach guides the various teams through the process of creating execution plans for marketing and customer experience to optimize the paths to purchase and loyalty.  In the process, the coach identifies key training requirements and works with the leader to develop internal team skills.

Finally, the coach works with the leader to institutionalize a program for success measurement, on-going evaluation, strategy refinement and new opportunity identification.  This ensures a constant state of readiness and enables an organic go to market solution.

The Brand Coach – My Favorite Way to Engage

For me, this is a welcome new development.  My most enjoyable and successful programs resulted from, or evolved into, this type of coaching relationship.  The clients I’ve worked with would testify that this approach yields team buy-in and executional effectiveness more successfully than traditional models.  It’s an approach best suited for the dynamic demands faced by today’s marketing organizations.

Reach out if you’d like to know more – david.martin@catalystbranding.com

Posted under: Branding Strategy, Changes in branding, Marketing Strategy