What’s the biG idea?
When Tim Berners-Lee unveiled the World Wide Web some thirty years ago, he unknowingly lit the fuse wire that would lead to the explosion of the marketing industry and the disintegration and splintering of its resources.
Clients, specifically Marketing Directors, are now faced with a proliferation of services that have been created or at least facilitated by the digital revolution – all of them vying for their share of budget.
Most, if not all these services, have a valuable role to play in the right context. But it must be mind-numbingly difficult for any client to evaluate the relative merits of such disparate approaches when they don’t share a common language, methodology or technology platform.
When Mike, Whitey and I first decided to get together and form biG, we were acutely aware of the need to establish a clear position for our skills in this new and fragmented world. While we are die-hard believers in the power of creativity, we could see that the primacy of this discipline was being challenged by the power of connectivity. Clients were and are being seduced by cheap, immediate and trackable access to their target market via a range of new, digital media. Efficacy is now routinely judged by how many people a promotional idea or campaign reaches and not by the power of its persuasive content.
This scenario is unlikely to change as few, if any, of these services share a common process and their desire to communicate is compromised by their need to compete with one another.
Think of the new media world as a galaxy of planets and stars. Now take away the force of gravity. Chaos. That’s the world we’re living in.
So, we went in search of what Einstein called a ‘Unified Theory’. We wanted to create an operating model that would appeal to clients and bring all these resources together in meaningful relationships and allow them to orbit around the gravitational pull of an agreed, central strategy.
We found our solution in one of the earliest manifestations of neuroscience – the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument.
This scientifically validated, psychometric profiling tool has been languishing in HR departments for years and its true value as an ‘organising principle’ is only now being properly explored and utilised.
The Herrmann Whole-Brain® model is the Swiss Army knife of its category. Unlike Myers Briggs, LSI or any other profiling tool, it has the ability to perform a wide range of tasks by focusing on one fundamental aspect of human behaviour:
How we like to think.
Working with the Herrmann organisation, we’ve developed a process we call Whole Brain® Branding.
It’s a process that unifies resources by letting us communicate consistently to four key thinking ‘styles’. It allows us to share a common language with those who believe in analysis and data, with those who feel secure in systems and processes, with those who value creativity above all else, and with those who love to bond over shared feelings.
Perhaps most significantly, it creates a meaningful connection between those inside and outside an organisation in that it aligns your people with your customers around shared values and beliefs. We call this ‘Brand Symmetry’, the notion that your staff are ‘buying into’ the brand your customers are actually buying.
Since working with Herrmann, we’ve now created an online version of their profiling tool that lets you profile your brand and see how it needs to change if it’s going to make better connections with its target market. The beauty of the tool is that it allows you to profile your staff, your customers, even your competitors’ customers so that you can adjust your strategy to find the right ‘Brand Trajectory’.
By restoring a single-minded, or ‘Whole-Brained’ focus to communication across a plethora of media platforms, we can then focus on what we still believe is the most powerful element of the mix.
Creativity.
If you’d like to know more about Whole Brain® Branding, Brand Profiling, Brand Symmetry and Brand Trajectory, please give us a call – 0414 209 220. We have a ten-slide presentation that will take just ten minutes of your time.