Articles

Dolly Parton: Off The Charts

jay@matchstic.com (Jay Holden) — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:38:31 GMT

Ultimately genuine. Universally loved.

If you know me you know I love Bluegrass music. Any Bluegrass, but especially traditional, gritty storytelling, raw tunes from real and metaphoric mountains. In the early '90s I bought a bluegrass compilation of CDs and had Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, The Stanley Brothers, and Jim & Jesse on constant repeat. But Dolly Parton captured my Bluegrass heart with her song Jolene. My appreciation of all Dolly's musical talent grew, but it is the admiration for the woman that I share with the whole world. When the world loses someone like her it's good to reflect.

What made Dolly Parton such a force in the world? What will we miss most? How can the impact one woman made be replicated? How do we make it last?

I couldn't help myself, but to see her life and legacy through a branding lens.

Here is what I saw.

She Was Impossible to Misread

Is there a stronger personal brand in American history with a clearer value proposition? The www.dollyparton.com memorial page nailed it: "global icon and humanitarian… beloved singer, songwriter, philanthropist, actress, playwright, and author… her legacy is one of love, kindness, and resilience." But I feel like that summary undersells how clear she was in practice. The Dolly brand was legible in a single image: big hair, rhinestones, Appalachian roots, unwavering warmth, and a wink that said she was in on the joke. You never had to guess what Dolly Parton was about. The image was the message. Every extension of her brand, from the theme park, the books, the philanthropy, the music, they all pointed back to the same story: a girl from the Great Smoky Mountains who dreamed big and never forgot where she came from.

She Was One of a Kind

She once entered a Dolly Parton lookalike contest. Did her make-up a little heavier. Emphasized her birthmark. She lost. Even Dolly was not Dolly enough to meet expectations of the iconic image. Her image occupied a visual and emotional space no one else could credibly inhabit. What elevated her look from aesthetic to strategy was her ownership of the joke. Her reaction to a barrage of comments about her appearance was to get in on the game: "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap" she often said. She gave us a masterclass in self-possession and never apologized for it; she amplified it.

She Owned Her Story

Brand consistency rarely survives a change of seasons, let alone a long career. Dolly's did, for two structural reasons. First, she owned her intellectual property from the beginning. She established her first business, Owepar Publishing Co., at 21 years old, with its principal holdings being her lyrics and music. Maybe modern musicians are finally learning this lesson, but at the time it was far more common for record labels to own an artist's IP. Maintaining that kind of ownership can be painful. Maybe the most famous moment came when Elvis Presley wanted to record "I Will Always Love You" but his manager demanded half the publishing rights. Dolly refused. She cried through the night, but surrendering half the copyright would have altered her ownership forever. The wisdom paid off. When Whitney Houston recorded the same song in 1992 Parton retained the publishing rights and joked the royalties earned her enough money to buy Graceland. Second, she was extremely disciplined when it came to brand extensions. "If I'm going to be big business," Parton said in 1982, "I want to be pretty much in control." The result: her extensions succeeded because each carried a recognizable piece of the original story. Her theme park, books, philanthropy, and commercial collaborations all kept returning to Tennessee, family, aspiration, and self-belief.

She Drew Everyone In

At a time when no American celebrity seems immune from the country's many divisions, Dolly Parton was a crossover icon who stayed neutral in the culture wars while still speaking her mind. Country music fans, pop music fans, Republicans, Democrats, presidents, faith leaders, and drag queens all genuinely mourned her passing. That breadth of appeal was not accidental. "I've got as many Republican fans as Democrats and I don't want to make any of them mad at me, so I don't play politics," she once said. But the appeal was also musical and cultural, not just political. Across her career, Dolly's music topped Billboard's Hot 100, Country, Pop, Adult Contemporary, Bluegrass, Christian, Rock, and Dance charts. It's hard to think of another artist that pulled off a range like that. Her philanthropic work pulled in even wider audiences. The Imagination Library attracted policymakers, educators, and parents across five countries who might never have seen a Dolly Parton concert or listened to Jolene. She didn't just hold her existing audience, she kept relating to new ones.

She Kept Every Promise

It takes more than broad appeal to build something that lasts. You have to consistently deliver on your promises. That creates loyalty. Dolly's promises were clear, distinct, and attractive: great songs, genuine warmth, generosity rooted in her own story, and an unwavering commitment to the people of East Tennessee. She kept every promise for seventy years. She has the receipts. Dolly had 26 songs reach #1 on the Billboard Country charts (a record for a female artist) and sold over 100 million albums worldwide. Fans loved her because she never stopped doing the things they loved her for. Trust accumulated through repetition. One song, one joke, one children's book mailed, one after the other. Celebrity brands are often built around attention and damaged by overexposure. Parton's survived because attention was only the outermost layer.

Her Life and Her Brand Were the Same Thing

The most interesting thing about Dolly's brand: it wasn't managed, it was architectural. The philanthropy wasn't a PR campaign forced on a music career; it grew directly from her origin story. For example: The Imagination Library launched in 1995 in honor of Dolly's father, whom she considered exceptionally intelligent, who could neither read nor write. Many celebrities donate money. Parton built infrastructure around her own family, beginning in her home county of Sevier. That is the difference between purpose and layered on decoration. Dollywood didn't just carry her name, it was planted in the Smoky Mountains of her childhood. It created employment and tourism where Dolly's story started. That same consistency extended to the people around her: her husband Carl provided a stable foundation for nearly sixty years, and her nephew served as her head of security for over two decades. Every layer of the organization told the same story, because they were part of it.

In Remembrance

For us, our admiration and respect for the woman and the brand have only grown with her passing.

To her family, our condolences and thankfulness for sharing her with us all these years.

Your Brand Now Has a Second Audience: The AI Machines

Blake Howard — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 19:32:50 GMT

Why LLM-friendly brand guidelines are becoming the difference between consistent brands and chaotic ones.

Inside

AI is now a second audience for your brand
The value isn't the format. It's the translation
LLMs fill gray areas with generic guesses, so precision is what makes AI outputs on-brand
One connected source of truth plus skill files make on-brand AI output attainable
Frequently Asked Questions about AI and LLM ready brand Guidelines

There is a new gatekeeper (AI) between your brand and the people you want to reach. The gatekeeper doesn't work for you and it's not a marketing professional. It's controlling what and how buyers see your brand. It's manipulating your employees as they use it to build sales decks and write emails. The gatekeeper isn't malicious, but needs to be told what to do in the language it understands. Machine language.

In my 23 years of brand identity work, I've only ever had one main audience in mind when creating brand guidelines: the human. You wrote guidelines so that designers, writers, and partners could carry the brand vision forward with consistency. That audience has not gone away. But it now shares the room with a second one: the AI platforms (like Claude) that millions of professionals open every morning. This second audience cannot read a beautifully designed 80-page PDF. It cannot interpret a mood board. It does not know what you mean by "modern" or "bold". It tries really hard but ultimately only knows what you told it, in a format it can actually use. Otherwise, it guesses when it fills in the gaps (which is the genesis for AI slop).

This article is about closing that gap. It is about translating brand strategy and identity guidelines into a form AI can understand, delivering it consistently across every platform and every team, and recognizing the single hardest part of the whole effort: defining your brand clearly enough that a machine never has to guess.

The scale of the second audience

Start with the size of what we are talking about, because the numbers reframe the stakes.

ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users, OpenAI announced in February of 2026. A figure almost double from one year earlier.[¹] The platform handles an estimated 2.5 billion prompts per day and users send around 18 billion messages per week.[²] It is big and here to stay.

These users are more than asking Chat pedantic answers to local trivia games or how to fix your leaky faucet. And it is not one platform. Google's most recent figures put the Gemini app at 750 million monthly active users, while Anthropic's Claude app has gone from under 2% of daily active user share to 10% in the space of three months.[²]

These stats don't include the more recent Claude Design, Co-work, and other breakthrough platforms. There's probably another "game changer" launching right now.

87% of Marketers are using generative AI

The audience you sell to is also inside these tools all day. The share of marketers using generative AI in at least one recurring workflow reached 87% in Q1 2026, up from 51% in Q1 2024 and 76% in Q1 2025.[³] Among the broader workforce, 38% of knowledge workers now use generative AI tools daily in their work, up from 11% in 2024.[⁴]

Two more numbers matter for anyone responsible for brand. First, AI has become a discovery channel: 60% of Americans use generative AI for search at least occasionally, rising to 72% among adults under 30.[⁵] Second, B2B buyers are doing research on these platforms, and AI-generated answers increasingly shape their decisions.[⁶]

What does that mean to your brand? Your customers research you through AI. Your own marketers produce creative through AI. Every one of those interactions either reinforces your brand or quietly erodes it. The brand was already hard to govern across human beings. Now it has to hold up across machines too.

The problem: brand drift

Here is what happens when a brand has no AI-readable source of truth and this many users cranking out content. Every employee, partner, and freelancer who opens a language model becomes an unsupervised brand interpreter. They paste in a rough idea. The model fills the gaps with its best guess: generic, deceptively plausible, and not human enough to be yours. Multiply that by a few hundred people across a few thousand prompts, and your carefully built identity dissolves into generic sameness.

This is not a hypothetical concern at the edges of the org. It has reached the boardroom. In 2026, data leakage, brand voice drift, regulatory exposure, and content provenance each now appear on the risk register of large marketing organizations.[³] Brand drift used to mean an off-key social post. Now it means your identity being quietly rewritten, at scale, by tools no one is governing.

The instinct of many teams is to solve this with better prompts. Train people to write sharper instructions for copy, imagery, presentations or social posts. Hand out a prompt library. That helps a little, and it misses the point entirely. A prompt is a single conversation. It expires the moment the chat window closes. It does not travel to the next person, the next platform, or the next campaign. Prompt engineering is a skill, not a system. And brand consistency has always been a systems problem.

Translating brand knowledge into a format AI can read

So what does an AI-ready brand system look like? It starts with a deceptively simple artifact: a structured Markdown file or MCP link that holds your brand strategy, voice, and visual rules in a form a language model can ingest without ambiguity. We call this Brand Intelligence.

Markdown matters here for a specific, practical reason. One of the most critical technical elements in 2026 is the use of structured data to provide explicit context to AI models. Structured data acts as a translator, helping an AI engine understand the specific attributes of your products and services.[⁶] A brand guidelines PDF is designed for human eyes. The machine gatekeeper needs a Markdown file in language a machine understands. In short, it's a file with clean hierarchy and explicit rules. The human guidelines are a nuanced story, the machine version is a translated instruction set.

The file itself is not the magic and this is where most teams go wrong. To be clear: the value is not the format. The value is the translation.

The value of the markdown is not the format.

The value is the translation.

Anyone can export brand guidelines to plain text. That produces a long, flat document an AI will technically read and still misuse, because the original guidelines were written for designers who could fill the gaps with judgment. The craft is in re-authoring brand knowledge as decisions a machine can execute. It means converting "our voice is confident and human" into observable rules: what to do, what never to do, with examples of each. It means turning an aesthetic into specifications: exact hex values, named typefaces, defined proportions. It means anticipating the questions a model will face and answering them before they are asked.

Done well, a brand intelligence file is less essay and more contract. Every claim is operational. Every rule is testable. There is a reason to define a voice as a set of "do" and "don't" directives rather than adjectives, to specify color down to the hex code and the proportion each color should occupy, to name leading formulas instead of saying "comfortable spacing." Each of those is a gap closed, a decision the AI no longer has to improvise.

Vague Guideline	AI-Ready Rule
"Always use brand colors"	Color Proportions: Maintain a balance of 40% Red, 20% White, 20% Black, 15% Gray, and 5% Blue.
"Modern and fresh voice"	Rule 3: Be Engaging. No buzzwords or filler. No corporate tone. Write like a real person talking.

This work sits with strategists, not coordinators and coders. It requires someone who understands the brand deeply enough to know which judgment calls a designer makes unconsciously, and disciplined enough to make every one of those calls explicit. It is, in the most precise sense, brand engineering.

Why LLMs punish gray areas and reward black-and-white brands

Language models do not handle gray areas well. They are pattern-completion engines. Hand a model an ambiguous instruction, and it will not pause to ask what you meant. Instead, it resolves the ambiguity itself, instantly and confidently, using the most statistically average answer available. This ambiguity is never interpreted creatively. It is filled and fluffed with generic.

Which means the clarity of your brand definition is now a direct, measurable input to the quality of every AI-generated output. A vague brand produces vague results, multiplied across every prompt. A sharply defined brand produces sharp results, multiplied the same way.

So the more black-and-white your brand is defined, the better it performs with AI. Consider what "black-and-white" actually means in practice:

A voice expressed as explicit do's and don'ts, not a list of adjectives open to interpretation
A color palette specified by exact hex values, with defined proportions for how much of each color should appear
A typographic system with named typefaces, assigned roles, and formulas for size and spacing
Approved language, such as real headlines and real descriptions, a model can pattern-match against, plus the tropes to avoid
An illustration or photography style described as concrete, checkable rules, so "on-brand" becomes a test rather than a feeling

Every one of those replaces a judgment call with a decision. Every decision is a gray area eliminated. This is why the hardest part of becoming AI-ready is not technical at all. It is the discipline of definition. Most brands have never been forced to be this precise, because human collaborators were always there to absorb the ambiguity. AI removes that cushion. The system now rewards those brave enough to be exact.

Talented creatives prize nuance and intuition, which can feel like the opposite of black-and-white rules. But precision is not the enemy of a rich brand. A brand can be warm, surprising, distinctive, fully human, and still be defined with total clarity. The goal is not to flatten the brand. It is to make sure that when nuance matters, you have specified the nuance, rather than leaving a blank for the machine to fill.

Getting consistent across platforms

Suppose you have done the hard part. You have a brilliant, precisely defined, AI-readable set of guidelines. You are still one step away from consistency, because a file that lives on one person's desktop only helps that one person.

Real brand consistency requires that every user, on every platform, works from the same current source of truth. The marketer in ChatGPT, the partner agency in Claude, and the sales team in Gemini all need the identical guidelines, the identical assets, the identical version. Email a file around and within a quarter, you have five versions in circulation and no idea which one anyone is using. Not ideal.

This is where a standard, connected method of delivery becomes essential. The primary answer is to expose your guidelines and brand assets through a live connection: an MCP link, or a single canonical, machine-readable URL, that any AI platform can pull from directly. Instead of distributing copies, you publish one source. Every AI session, regardless of who opened it or which tool they prefer, reads from the same place. Update the source, and every future output everywhere reflects the update.

A growing category of brand guideline platforms now competes on exactly this capability, and they are not equal. Some expose your guidelines to any AI tool through MCP or structured files, while others still only display them for human eyes. We ranked the leading options by how AI-ready they actually are.

Skills equip your marketers

A core brand intelligence file answers the question "what is our brand?" But marketers do not only need to know the brand; they need to produce things: a presentation, a social post, a one-pager, an email campaign. And "make a deck" is exactly the kind of open-ended request where a language model, left to its own devices, will quietly drift back to generic.

This is where a second layer comes in: purpose-built instruction files, often called skill files, that sit alongside the core guidelines and tell the AI how to create specific deliverables on-brand.

Think of them as extensions of the system. A presentation skill file specifies how a slide deck should be built: which typefaces in which roles, the exact color values and their proportions, layout and spacing rules, what a title slide versus a content slide should contain. A social media skill file defines format, tone, length, and the visual treatment for each channel. An illustration skill file describes the house style as concrete, checkable rules: stroke weight, level of detail, what to avoid, so the output is recognizably yours rather than recognizably AI.

Each skill file follows the same principle as the brand book: it eliminates gray areas for one specific job. It converts prompts like "make it on-brand" into a set of decisions the model can execute.

The business case for this is concrete. AI is delivering real productivity gains for marketers: the average marketer recovers 6.1 hours per week, with senior practitioners saving 8 to 10 hours.[³] But those gains only convert into brand value if the output is high quality and usable without heavy correction. Skill files are what turn specific requests into on-brand requests.

What is an AI-powered brand system?

It is worth being clear about what this is and is not, because it is easy to file this work under the wrong heading.

What we are describing is durable infrastructure: a source of truth that every conversation, every user, and every platform draws from automatically.

This is not a coding project. It is not using an AI tool to spin up a clever new app. This is brand strategy, positioning, and design, the same disciplines brand builders have always practiced. Now brand builders are layering on the engineering of how brand is expressed in a form a machine can act on.

That distinction matters because it tells you who should own this. AI-readable brand guidelines are not an IT deliverable or a one-off technical task to delegate and forget. They are a strategic asset, and they belong with the people who own the brand. The format and translation work is a new skill for marketers. The brand discipline is not.

The shift underway is bigger than any single tool. As the world learns to leverage AI, the brands that stay coherent will be the ones that become legible to machines. Brand intelligence files are the beginning of what brand consistency looks like in an AI-mediated world.

Where to start

If your brand is going to be interpreted by AI thousands of times this quarter (and it is), three questions are worth sitting with:

Is your brand defined in black and white? Could a literal-minded reader execute your guidelines without a single judgment call? Every place the answer is no is a place AI will drift.
Is there one source of truth, and can every platform reach it? Or are copies circulating, versions diverging, and consistency left to chance?
Are your marketers equipped, not just informed? Do they have skill files that make on-brand presentations, posts, and campaigns the default, or are they improvising every deliverable?

Most brands, asked these questions honestly, find real gaps. The rules have changed faster than most companies can keep up with. Old marketing and brand playbooks don't cover this massive shift. The brands that move now to create brand intelligence AI can read, developing a single connected source of truth, and connecting their teams to it, will be the ones the AI gatekeeper represents accurately and consistently.

The hardest part is also the most valuable: defining your brand with the courage to be exact.

Matchstic is a brand consultancy that helps technology forward companies take bold steps toward Radically Relevant brands. If your brand is being read by machines (and it is), let's make sure they get it right. Book a brand consultation today to audit how AI-ready your brand guidelines are.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a Brand Intelligence file actually look like? Can I see an example?

In general, it reads more like an engineering spec, not story and picture. A short excerpt might look like:

Voice
Do: contractions, active voice, one point per sentence.
Don't: buzzwords, passive voice, stacked ideas.

Color
Primary Red #C8102E — 40% of any layout.
Neutral White #FFFFFF — 20%.
Charcoal #1A1A1A — 20%.

Typography
Headlines: Söhne Bold, sentence case only.
Body: Söhne Book, 16px minimum.

Real files, in the form of markdown (.md) files, run much longer, encompassing every necessary element described explicitly. This is the human translation work that leaves nothing for the model to guess at. For example: Under the typography category it says "Headlines: Söhne Bold, sentence case only." Without the "sentence case only" instruction the LLM doesn't know what to do if a user puts a headline in all caps. It either leaves it or doesn't. It doesn't make that decision consistently. In this case, a human decided that "sentence case only" was an important differentiation. Now the LLM trying to control the brand is a reliable partner.

Does this replace our existing brand guidelines or sit alongside them?

Alongside. Your existing guidelines (the PDF, the deck, the physical brand book) stay the reference for humans who need nuance, rationale, and judgment: designers, agencies, new hires. The Brand Intelligence file is a separate artifact built from that same strategy and identity work, translated for a machine audience.

How long does this typically take to build?

About 1-2 weeks in most cases. Since the work is translation, not new strategy, the timeline moves fast when a brand already has solid guidelines to build from. It stretches out if the underlying brand strategy itself has gaps that need resolving first, since those gaps are exactly the gray areas the Brand Intelligence file can't leave unanswered.

How does the cost of building brand intelligence files payoff?

In addition to long term brand value gains, there are immediate gains in marketing labor savings. For example: in-house marketing design teams are frequently understaffed, especially at the time of a rebrand. If AI tools, directed by high quality brand intelligence, can do 100 social media graphics to 80-90%, that limited team can remain trim and focus on high value work. What is that higher value work for you? Moving into a new market? Launching a new product faster?

Who should own AI-readable brand guidelines? IT or marketing?

The brand team. While the format is new, the primary discipline is still human branding work.

Sources

OpenAI. "Scaling AI for everyone." OpenAI, February 27, 2026. https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/
OpenAI. "How People Use ChatGPT." OpenAI economic research paper, 2025. https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/a253471f-8260-40c6-a2cc-aa93fe9f142e/economic-research-chatgpt-usage-paper.pdf
Salesforce. "State of Marketing 2026." Salesforce, 2026. https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/state-of-marketing-2026/ https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/ai-marketing-statistics-2026-adoption-data-points
"67 AI Adoption Statistics for 2026 — Enterprise & SMB Data." Medha Cloud, March 14, 2026 (citing McKinsey Q1 2026 and Bloomberg Intelligence). https://medhacloud.com/blog/ai-adoption-statistics-2026
Pew Research Center. "Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact." Pew Research Center, June 17, 2026. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact/
Kumar, Arlen, and Leanid Palkhouski. "AI Answer Engine Citation Behavior: An Empirical Analysis of the GEO16 Framework." arXiv, September 13, 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10762

Manufacturing Asset: Brand

jay@matchstic.com (Jay Holden) — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:26:48 GMT

The case for treating brand like a business asset, not a marketing cost

For many industrial and manufacturing companies, brand still sits in the wrong category.

It is treated as a marketing expense. A visual system. A logo. A campaign wrapper. Something important, but hard to defend when budgets tighten or capital needs to flow toward operations, supply chain, equipment, or product development.

That mindset leaves value on the table.

In a recent Matchstic webinar, Matchstic's Tracy Clark, Director of Brand Strategy and Jay Holden, VP of Operations sat down with Laurence Newell, Executive Chairman of the Americas for Brand Finance, to discuss a simple shift: brand should not be managed as a soft cost center. It should be managed as a business asset.

As Laurence put it, “At the end of the day, brands are businesses and should be treated as business.”

The language gap between marketing and finance

One of the biggest barriers for manufacturing marketers is not a lack of belief in brand. It is a lack of shared language with the people who control investment.

Marketing often talks in terms of awareness, preference, engagement, and identity. Those measures matter, but they do not always translate clearly to the CFO, CEO, or board.

“The language of business, at the end of the day, is finance,” Laurence said. “The language of CFOs is not spoken in likes or followers. It is spoken in terms such as cash flow, risk and return, and asset value.”

That does not mean brand leaders should abandon brand metrics. It means they need to connect those metrics to financial outcomes: demand, pricing resilience, trust, revenue quality, and future earnings.

For manufacturers with long sales cycles, complex buying committees, and high-stakes purchase decisions, that connection matters.

Brand reduces risk in complex buying decisions

A common misconception is that brand matters less in manufacturing because the buying process is rational. Buyers care about specifications, performance, service levels, pricing, and reliability.

They do. But those factors do not eliminate the role of brand. They make it more important.

Manufacturing purchases are expensive, operationally complex, and personally risky for the decision maker. Buyers are not just choosing a product. They are choosing a partner they are willing to trust with their reputation.

As Laurence explained, “At the end of the day, is this a brand I trust? Is this a brand that I’m willing to hang my reputation and credibility on?”

That is why brand strength is not cosmetic. It is a risk-reduction mechanism.

Jay Holden connected the point to his own experience as a former global marketing leader for a manufacturing company: “If you’re in manufacturing, you know this. It is a slugfest to get dollars and to get everybody on board with brand and marketing.”

That is the operational reality. Brand leaders in manufacturing often get one serious chance to make the case. The stronger that case is tied to risk, revenue, and value creation, the stronger it becomes.

Sameness creates financial drag

Many manufacturing brands look and sound alike. They use similar claims, similar visual systems, similar sales language, and similar proof points. The result is a category full of capable but interchangeable companies.

That creates a business problem.

“When everyone is saying the same thing, everyone is pricing at parity, and everyone is distributing through the same channels, then it is just more of the same,” Laurence said. “More of the same really does not drive value. It lets products and services become commodities.”

Sameness pushes companies toward price competition. Distinction gives companies a better chance to turn operational strengths into preference and pricing power.

The missed opportunity is not just better marketing. It is stronger commercial performance.

Measurement changes the internal conversation

Brand valuation gives leaders a way to move the conversation from opinion to evidence.

Laurence described two related disciplines: brand evaluation, which assesses the competitive strength of the brand, and brand valuation, which calculates what the brand is worth in financial terms.

That lens allows leaders to ask better questions:

How strong is our brand relative to competitors?
Where is brand helping or limiting commercial performance?
How much pricing resilience does our brand create?
What value could be created if we strengthened the brand over the next two to three years?
What financial risk do we create if we merge, sunset, or retain a brand after an acquisition?

This is a different posture from “Did people like the rebrand?”

A stronger question is: What was true before the rebrand, what changed after launch, and how did that change show up in business performance over time?

As Laurence said, “This is where we were before we rebranded. This is the day we unveiled the rebrand. And this is what success looks like over the next two to three years, yes, in marketing metrics, but more importantly, in financial outcomes.”

That kind of thinking gives marketing a stronger seat at the table. It also gives finance a more rigorous way to evaluate brand investment.

The takeaway

Brand should be managed as a business asset, not only as a marketing expense.
Strong brands reduce risk in complex buying decisions by making buyers more confident in the company behind the product.
Sameness creates financial drag by pushing manufacturers toward parity, price pressure, and commoditization.
Brand metrics matter more when they connect to financial outcomes such as demand, pricing resilience, trust, growth, and future earnings.
Manufacturing CMOs and growth leaders need to speak the language of finance, establish a baseline, and show how brand strength contributes to business performance.

Time to take action

Learn more about Brand Valuation.
Brush-up on financial terms.
Develop your point-of-view on "brand as an asset". Is your brand ready?
Explore a brand process geared toward increasing the value of your brand.
Ask the question: Is our brand an intangible asset on the balance sheet?
Watch the Webinar on this topic.

Manufacturers: Turn Your Brand Into a Measurable Business Asset

Matchstic Staff — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:31:17 GMT

If you’re a leader championing growth and transformation in the industrial and manufacturing sector, this webinar will equip you with the insights, strategy, and perspective that turns the industry’s least utilized asset into a value-generating tool.

Learn how to treat brand like an asset by building, maintaining, and proving its value.
Laurence Newell from Brand Finance, shared perspective on brand valuation.

Transcript

Tracy Clark:

All right. Well, welcome, everyone! Very excited to get started on this topic. Thank you everyone for joining. We're really excited about this topic around brand valuation in the manufacturing space. We have a tight 40 minutes — it's gonna go by quickly, but I wanted to give some quick tips for the webinar experience so that you can enjoy it to the fullest. We'll have someone monitoring the chat during our conversation, so questions that we might address in the moment, or we might save them till the end — just depends on what we're asking — but do know that we are watching the chat.

And, more exciting, we'll be giving away 3 copies of Radically Relevant, our book that Blake Howard, one of our founders, has written, and you have to be here at the end for a chance to win. We'll end at around 11:40. But first, a little bit about Matchstic for those of you who don't know, which is where Jay and I work. We are a brand consultancy with clients across the U.S., occasionally global, and we're focused on brand identity — everything from research to strategy to brand architecture, visual and verbal identity, naming, and launch. You can learn more about us at matchstic.com.

I'm here with my colleague Jay Holden. He has a wealth of experience, but primarily on the client side in the manufacturing space, so this is super relevant for him. He was really excited when we came up with this topic around manufacturing, branding, and valuation. Jay, tell me quickly why this topic speaks to you in particular, given your prior role.

Jay Holden:

Yeah, I was really excited to have this topic because, as a global brand leader for a manufacturing company for six and a half years — and if you're in manufacturing, you know this — it is a slugfest to get dollars and to get everybody on board with brand and marketing and all of those things. I wish so much that I would have had this information that we're about to get today. Whether you're selling milk tanks, LED lighting, or whatever it is that the group today is out there trying to move forward, this information is something I wish I would have had. So, excited for it today.

Tracy Clark:

Thanks for that. And last but certainly not least, our guest today is Laurence Newell. Laurence is the Executive Chairman of the Americas for Brand Finance. If you've not heard of them, they are a wonderful organization — the world's leading brand valuation and strategy consultancy. They bridge the gap between brand and marketing work and finance by evaluating and quantifying brand strength. That gives organizations the power to manage and invest in brand to make it a truly valuable business asset. You can learn more at BrandFinance.com. Laurence, tell us about what drew you to this work and your role.

Laurence Newell:

Thanks very much, Tracy. It's wonderful to be with you guys this morning — thanks for having me. I'm really excited about diving into the subject matter. To answer your question about what got me into what I do today, it was very much like Jay's story. I began my career on the client side in brand management, and I got into that career thinking it was all going to be about communications and creative expression, which it certainly has a huge component to it. But what I quickly realized, as I was in the world of brand management, was that I was managing a multi-million dollar business. A branded, multi-million dollar business. And with that business came a P&L — and the P&L, really, at the end of the day, is your scorecard as to how profitable and how strong the business is.

So having gone through college thinking marketing and advertising was all about what the cool kids did and all about communications and creative, I quickly realized that this was about P&L management. This was about strategy. That was a very useful eye-opener early in my career — to understand that brands are businesses and should be treated as businesses.

What Brand Finance does specifically, as Tracy mentioned perfectly, is bridge the gap between marketing and finance. At the core of what we do, we help our clients' leadership teams connect brand decisions to financial outcomes, and use that insight to make better strategic choices. We're quantifying, in financial and economic terms, how strong a brand is and how that translates into value. We're looking at brand more as a business asset that should be measured and managed as an asset — and less as a logo, less as identity, which is brutally important obviously, but you can't really have one without the other.

Tracy Clark:

Yeah, totally agree. And it's sort of related to how we think about brand in general — part art, part science, or what we say: head and heart. It is that duality, both in what you're talking about and in how we think about brand generally. A lot of folks in our space really struggle to convey the value of a brand because of that head-and-heart component. People tend to over-index and make decisions more on heart than head, and you definitely need both. But to unlock the financial aspect, then you can expand on the heart, the creative side. So all that said, why do you think folks struggle to tell that valuation story?

Laurence Newell:

I think that's certainly what I've learned over the course of time, and it goes back to this: it is a business story. The language of business, at the end of the day, has a huge marketing component and a huge brand component, but the language of business is finance. Part of the issue that marketers usually have with conveying that story — or articulating their value to the company — is that they're probably not speaking the language of the CFO.

And that's the language marketers really need to learn how to speak. The language of the CFO is not spoken in likes or followers. The language of CFOs is spoken in terms like cash flow, risk and return, and asset value. So while brands are certainly about influencing demand — be it B2B or B2C — it's really about how brand helps to affect markets and how it helps to affect stakeholders to drive value for the business itself.

As brand marketers, whether we're in B2B or B2C, we really have to understand what makes that decision maker tick. But more importantly, how that translates into dollars and cents, and whether it's articulated in a language that is common and necessary for the CFO and the boardroom — not only to understand, but to speak. It's about brand metrics and brand equity data, but how does that data translate to cash? How does it turn into revenue? How does it turn into returns? It's really finding the balance between what drives demand and how that's quantified — not only in marketing metrics, but in financial metrics.

Tracy Clark:

Right. And I feel like manufacturing and B2B in particular have a difficult time, and we see them — and Jay, you've touched on this — specifically undervaluing their brands. Why do you think manufacturing specifically undervalues brand?

Laurence Newell:

Yeah, I think the common misconception is that brand matters less in manufacturing, or in B2B and industrial brands — and we know that's not true. We've studied this. The perception is that B2B and manufacturing brands are purely rational. Well, that's not entirely true. We know that there's a high emotional component as well — certainly regarding affinity and whether this is a brand I like. But really, at the end of the day, it's: is this a brand I trust? Is this a brand that I'm willing to hang my reputation and credibility on?

Because in choosing a brand, what I'm really doing — aside from the functional aspects of what that product or service is going to deliver — is trying to reduce risk. And that becomes particularly important in large-scale, big-ticket decisions, much like those in manufacturing, probably more so than in consumer goods. B2B and manufacturing brand plays probably not as big a role as consumer, but it's important, and it's really about reputation. You've heard the saying: no one ever got fired for hiring IBM. Well, the same thing happens in manufacturing. We're putting our jobs on the line sometimes when we make decisions, and brands help enhance decisions and clarify decision making.

Tracy Clark:

Totally. And we're seeing it more and more in the manufacturing space. We've had an increase in the number of clients in the B2B and manufacturing space because they're realizing that value — they're sort of catching up. The value that it can unlock by creating some differentiation. What we find is that trust is often table stakes for you. Of course you should trust a manufacturing organization, so what else you got? What else is going to capture my attention, again head and heart, to make me choose you over a sea of sameness in that space?

Laurence Newell:

It's absolutely the case. I think that the companies that thrive are precisely the ones that look outside of their four walls to lean on people such as yourselves. Marketing is art and science, and you do need to go to the scientists and the artists to create relevance to your brand — without a doubt. But more importantly, differentiation and credibility. It's really working with partners in the agency space and the consulting space that have certainly the experience, but also the visibility of your competitive set to understand: things sound and look the same, and when things sound and look the same, you're creating commodities. And in the commodity world, you're in a hyper-competitive world.

Tracy Clark:

Yeah. Do you want to be the low-cost leader? Maybe you do, and that's how you brand it. But we find a lot of folks — that's not their play. And so it's interesting because we in the branding world talk a lot about metrics, and there are certain things we can attribute to brand influence. You have found a way to reliably evaluate brand, which is pretty exciting to people like me. Give us a top-line view of how you found a way to do that.

Laurence Newell:

Great question, Tracy. First and foremost, Brand Finance has been in the business of valuing brands for 30 years. This is not something invented yesterday. We've been doing this for the last 30 years. We are an accountancy — we are accountants at the end of the day. We are a regulated accountancy firm, so we better understand not only how to do this, but make sure that we're on standard, because there are guardrails around what Brand Finance does.

What's particularly important are the ISO standards that govern two big themes in our lives. One is brand valuation — calculating what a brand is worth in dollars and cents. The other is brand evaluation — how competitive is that brand relative to other brands. A lot of what we're doing as we perform valuations is benchmarking your brand's strength relative to a competitive set. That's a critical first step — think of it as an acid wash test to understand how strong your brand is relative to others, and why.

The methodology we put in motion when we value brands is called the Royalty Relief Methodology. It's the most commonly accepted methodology among accountants, finance professionals, and lawyers. What it's doing is using market comparables to understand how strong a brand is, and given that strength, how that translates into a royalty rate. We apply that rate to forecasted revenues, take it into perpetuity, and bring it back to a net present value. The Royalty Relief Model is a hybrid model based on marketing metrics and competitive marketing metrics that are applied to forecasted revenues in perpetuity.

Tracy Clark:

Yeah. And the biggest eye-opener for me was when you said that brand valuation has for a long time just been looking back — evaluated after the fact. We struggle with that too, because we ask clients to establish a baseline. And it's becoming a more forward-looking view to help inform strategy rather than historicals. When you said that to me, that really resonated. So tell us more about that shift.

Laurence Newell:

You're absolutely right. Historically, people have tended to associate brand valuation with M&A work, merger work, tax and accounting, or impairment work — all traditionally compliance-oriented questions. And those still matter. A good deal of our business still has to do with understanding how we got to where we are and what that value is today.

But what I find more exciting, as a strategist and brand builder, is the forward-looking view. It's important to understand where we've been and where we are — but what's more interesting is where are we headed? What is the value of our future, and how will brand help get us there? How will we leverage brand to meet that future? What's the size of the prize? Valuation as a forward-looking discipline is really, really exciting, and that's what's arming marketers with the wherewithal to define success from a marketing and brand perspective, while also establishing that common language with the CFO — who holds the purse strings — and the board. It turns into a really interesting discussion: this is what the brand's value is today, what could the brand's value possibly be in the next two to three to five years, and how do we get there?

Tracy Clark:

It really gets you a seat at a bigger table.

Laurence Newell:

It does, it does. And when you look at consumer brands — traditionally well-known brands like Citi and Porsche — there are those classic ones that command pricing premiums, and then there are the Liquid Deaths and the Oatleys, the wilder ones that also command pricing premiums. A lot of it is the result of brand investment. Liquid Death actually keeps ad spending low but brand investment high. They focus on brand building, so they've got the right mix — though some require more advertising, so that's not for everyone. How does that pricing premium translate into the manufacturing markets? It goes back to that point of relevance and differentiation. B2B marketing and B2B brands have to be managed more as business assets and not as afterthoughts. Historically, B2B has seen brand as, at the end of the day, just a business card — and it's not. It's basically a funnel-driven, marketing-metric-defined tool that really helps understand what makes consumers tick, and more importantly, how to pull the right levers to make sure brand is pulling its fair share.

For example, if you're in times of long and complex sales cycles, how do we make sure brand is still representing us when there is that complexity? How do we make sure brand strength is translating to pricing resilience, so that clients or consumers choosing B2B brands are choosing us despite a price increase — because of the perceptions they have? Brand really helps to not only attract and retain, but it also helps to define a stronger value proposition going forward. Think of it as brand serving as a really healthy economic moat. Warren Buffett always says that strong brands serve as very credible, very strong moats that help not only identify, but protect. And that's really what we do when we're driving value — make sure we're defending that asset.

Tracy Clark:

Yeah, it's important, and you have to keep investing to keep that up — to keep the floor at an elevated level and then expand on the high end. And you all have done a recent report. Do you mind talking a little bit about that index?

Laurence Newell:

Absolutely. Two weeks ago, we published the fourth year of our B2B index. What we're doing is understanding, on a global level, what makes B2B brands relevant, competitive, and different — what the score is behind those perceptions and the behaviors behind those brands, and how that translates into dollars and cents. To your point about merging art and science, we're applying it to B2B brands as well — really understanding what drives brand perception in the B2B world, specifically as it relates to B2B brands and B2B competitive sets, and how that translates into economic and financial strength. If you're a B2B brand and want to understand what really drives behaviors and preference, there's a lot that Brand Finance has written on that, and our B2B index is brand new — it's been out two weeks.

Tracy Clark:

I'm excited to dive more deeply into that, and I know other folks on the call will be as well. What we see in our world oftentimes with manufacturing brands is they keep it safe. They're copycats, sometimes they look a little dated. You've probably seen some very good manufacturing brands who don't lose their margin or pricing power because they protected the brand. What are some of those qualities?

Laurence Newell:

I think they're really understanding three big things. Yes, there seems to be a pattern of sameness — and if I'm a B2B marketer and I understand that there's a pattern of sameness, I actually don't see that as a weakness. I see that as an opportunity. When everyone's saying the same thing, pricing at parity, distributing to the same retailers and sales channels and existing relationships, it's just more of the same. And more of the same really doesn't drive value at the end of the day — it just lets services and products become commodities.

A second point is underinvestment. Many companies in these sectors invest heavily in operations, supply chain, and product development — they have to — but probably not enough in building a distinctive brand that can turn those strengths into preference and pricing power. Our index has actually shown us that companies systematically underinvest in brand as an asset. But we also understand that stronger brands are associated with better financial outcomes. So investing in brand is going to pay off — as much as investing in capex, operations, and supply chains.

And the third challenge is not really having a measurement framework that opens the eyes of leadership to say: this is why brand matters, and this is why we need to be disciplined and consistent. Translating those marketing metrics goes beyond the look and feel of a brand, but really expresses the strength of the brand and how that translates into revenue, into better margins, and into better outcomes. It's just understanding that the tool exists — and it provides a really important conversation that takes place with companies.

Tracy Clark:

And the reason why that last point is particularly important is that a lot of brands in the manufacturing and B2B space are very risk-averse. When they see a brand investment, it just dings the dollar signs — warning, that's too much money. But what you're actually saying is that this is lessening risk, because you have that knowledge. You're reducing that risk of not getting ROI back on branding, because you have the numbers to back it up.

Laurence Newell:

Exactly right. You have the numbers to back it up, so this actually becomes a tool with which we are quantifying what worked and how we quantify that return. What is the impact of what we've done? So that it's not a one-off sponsorship activity or a one-off marketing activity — it's actually laying the foundation for something we'll use as a tracking mechanism going forward to understand specifically how much marketing is moving the needle. Many times brand is seen as a cost center, and much less as a value builder.

Tracy Clark:

Now, when you think about moving that needle in those conversations with CFOs — and some people on this call already have the language, maybe just not the depth of proof points — what can a CMO in the manufacturing space expect from this type of investment? What sort of metrics can you expect for that needle to move?

Laurence Newell:

I think it's important that CMOs understand how strong their brand is relative to its competitors. Tracking your brand's equity is critically important for the well-being of that brand. Equally important is socializing, explaining, and articulating those findings with the boardroom and with the C-suite. There's no reason why that information should be a secret. It should actually be a prompt for better conversations that define the future and the vision of the company and the products and services we offer. Marketing has got to open up its cards — it can't hold them close to its chest. It's got to open them up and use that information to inform strategy with an economic output attached to it.

So that this isn't about: we rebranded, did people like the rebrand? No. It's: we rebranded, this is where we were before, this is exactly the day we launched the rebrand, and this is what success looks like over the next two to three years — in marketing metrics, but more importantly, in financial outcomes. The CMO really has to understand not only the language of marketing, but translate that into the language of finance. The language of finance is the language of the boardroom. So to really win and claim a stake at that boardroom table, speak finance, measure finance, measure your brand as an asset — not just as a logo.

Jay Holden:

I just wondered if you had any advice, after all these engagements with companies on this topic, for CMOs on how to begin that conversation — where to begin, which office to go to, and what does that conversation look like?

Laurence Newell:

I think that if I were an incoming CMO into a manufacturing company, or even an existing CMO, I would say: let's not think of marketing as a cost center, let's think of it as a value creator. And the CFO is going to say, okay, define value. The way that we define value is through brand value. So let's measure the value of this asset — and it is an asset. From accounting terms, it is an intangible asset and sits on balance sheets. So the minute you refer to brand as an asset, you're already speaking Finance 101, which is imperative that you speak.

Brand is now going from "brand is important, I think" to "brand could potentially change the quality of our future revenue, future earnings, and multiples that markets are willing to put on those earnings." The conversation starts with saying: this is what brand is, and the misconception is that brand is that. Now, brands can be valued and should be valued, and this is how we go about valuing them. The conversation CMOs have to have is certainly having the data to back up their hypothesis, but also the ability to open that conversation to a wider audience and say: do we agree that our brand is a valuable asset? And if yes, what's the value of that asset? Do we agree that we have to manage and measure this going forward, so that we're able to articulate internally whether we're creating value — and to what extent?

Tracy Clark:

Yeah. Jay, I'm curious — when you were going through this process in the manufacturing space, what was the unlock? You had many conversations and had to bring many proof points to the table. What finally brought brand to the forefront and said, yes, let's sign on the dotted line and get going?

Jay Holden:

Yeah, it's funny — there wasn't, like, an aha "brand as an asset" moment. It was a: Jay, you're the new guy, we're going to bet on you, and this is what you're telling us needs to be done, let's do it. In my case, it was: hey, you have one shot. If this is the shot you want to take, if it works out, Jay, that's great, you can stick around. If not, then we'll do something else. It was that blunt. I rolled the dice, and I think the outcome was really great for that company. So the lesson is: have conviction.

Tracy Clark:

Have conviction, push forward. I think a lot of folks are in that same space, in that same moment — you've got one shot, prove it. That's why CMOs tend to rubber-band back to safe, because they don't want to do any harm. But then you miss the complete upswing of the potential. Before, maybe CMOs didn't have their glasses — but now, Brand Finance is like the clarity glasses. You've got folks like us that can bring that brand elevation through identity, and you've got Brand Finance to bolster it and give you that clear vision through the lenses. Pretty cool.

Jay Holden:

The other thing in my environment was global exchange rates and goodwill across global divisions. Laurence, it just seemed like we were potentially leaving value on the table because of brand value in some of those markets. Can you discuss how that works?

Laurence Newell:

Yeah, absolutely. Going back to the question of what was my aha moment that made me realize brands were valuable assets — one of the brands I managed early in my career was one where the company was thinking of divesting an entire area of the company that they weren't particularly interested in investing in and weren't winning in. So they decided to divest that category, basically sell it. I was told: one of the brands you manage is going on the market. I thought, well, how do you do that? Are we gonna sell the factory? The intellectual property? What are we selling? And so I was told: no, the only thing we're selling is the registered trademark, the brand. That's when it came to me that brands are transferable assets — you can buy and sell them from one company to another, just like a tractor, or a car, or a factory. Brands are bought and sold on the open market all the time. That was my aha moment.

Now, more importantly, that's one use case. Another use case we see a lot is brand licensing. There are companies — B2B brands, absolutely — that license their brand to third parties as a percentage of the revenue those third parties generate. You can actually use brand to generate income streams above and beyond the products and services you offer. You can franchise this property to a third party, and you are going to make money off of that.

The conversation usually turns to: okay, how much is that going to cost? Well, it's probably going to cost a percentage of revenues, and how do we reach that percentage? You go out to the market and quantify how strong that brand is relative to others, so you're able to say: given the strength of this brand and given the royalty rates that this sector of the economy commands, it's not outlandish to think that we can charge 4% on revenues. I'll give you an example. I work with a brand whose brand strength on a scale of 0 to 100 is an 80 — a very strong brand, a AAA- brand. That AAA- brand in healthcare manufacturing services commands royalties anywhere from 0 to 5%. We can go to the open market, look at similar transactions, and determine the appropriate rate. If the brand scores an 80 out of 100 and royalty rates go from 0 to 5, it's conceivable that 4% — just doing the straight algebra — is what we can charge for the use of that brand. All of a sudden, you're making 4% on a sector of the market you weren't even in touch with. It turns out that brands are movable, transferable objects that can be used not just to identify your products and services, but to leverage market opportunities to segments of the population you might be able to reach through a third party.

Tracy Clark:

And we've seen that in our world — a lot of times B2B and manufacturing organizations are in constant acquisition mode, branching off and selling and acquiring, and brand plays an integral part of that, along with brand architecture. We've worked on some pretty complex brand architecture untanglings to make sure they're doing the right thing for each of those movable assets. Because oftentimes they just snap on, say we acquired them, let's keep everyone happy — without thinking of the potential of what could be for all parties involved if we were more strategic about brand and architecture when we make those decisions.

Laurence Newell:

I think you're absolutely right, Tracy. Brand valuation is probably most effective for architecture decisions — that's really an eye-opener, especially in M&A work. I've done a lot of it in the technology space, companies buying each other for growth. The question usually is: okay, we've just acquired this company, what are we going to do with the people? What are we going to do with the office space? Oh, and what are we going to do with the brand? Is this a brand we keep? If so, why — what's the justification? If we're going to sunset it, how are we going to do that, and at what rate? Are we going to, from one day to the next, make the brand disappear so that all the people that work for it and all the people that buy it suddenly know nothing about it? Or how do we actually lay the foundation so that decision is as risk-free as possible — measured in financial and economic terms, so we know the risk, the value of the risk, and the cost associated with that risk. Be scientific about it.

Tracy Clark:

Let's be scientific. Let brands be scientific. I think that's a good ending point. Man, we could do a part two easily on this — I feel like we've just scratched the surface, and I knew the time would go quick. But we do have our book winners to announce. The winners of Radically Relevant are Chris Lacey, Leslie Zane, and Sarah Warrens. Congratulations to the three of you — we'll get in touch to send you a copy. And Laurence, thank you so much for your time. This was truly eye-opening. I could talk to you for hours about this stuff. Maybe we'll do a part two and continue.

Laurence Newell:

This makes my mouth water — I could talk about it day and night. Happy to, indeed. I hope everyone else is interested too.

Tracy Clark:

I love it. And Jay, thank you for your perspective as well. Really nice having the two of you on here, and thank you everyone for joining. I hope you have a great rest of your week.

AI Analysis of the NASA brand

jay@matchstic.com (Jay Holden) — Sat, 23 May 2026 13:39:33 GMT

In a recent article about brand valuation I suggested that readers prompt Claude or ChatGPT with the following:

"Define and source the radically relevant super six characteristics, then assess the brand you see at <<Insert your company website here>> against those characteristics."

As an example I inserted www.nasa.gov into the prompt and here is the RAW response.

[Images added for effect.]

Claude's Response:

The Super Six — Defined

The framework holds that great brands win on six key factors, divided between "Radical" (standing out) and "Relevant" (drawing people in). matchstic

Radical side:

Clarity — The ability to be clearly and easily understood.
Distinction — The ability to dramatically stand out from direct competitors.
Control — The ability to produce consistent communications and experiences.

Relevant side:

Attraction — The ability to draw in new, ideal audiences.
Devotion — The ability to consistently deliver on your promises.
Alignment — The ability for everyone in the organization to be in sync on brand story and values.

NASA — Assessment Against the Super Six

1. Clarity — Strong

NASA's purpose is immediately legible. The mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research. That's a tight, memorable statement. On the site, every content category — missions, science, exploration, news — maps directly to that purpose. The "meatball" insignia, the wordmark, the typographic system all communicate the same thing: serious, government-grade, frontier-facing. There's no ambiguity about what NASA is or does.

2. Distinction — Very Strong

The meatball logo is so iconic that when someone sees red triangles and white ovals, they think NASA even without the name. That level of recognition is rare. NASA has no real brand competitor in its category. The visual identity, the mission imagery, the astronaut iconography — all of it occupies a position no other organization can claim. Distinction is key for brands trying to break out, but the caution is not to sacrifice clarity for it. NASA doesn't have that tension. Clarity and distinction are the same move for them.

3. Control — Moderate

This is NASA's most complicated area. The NASA Graphics Standards Manual establishes clear and consistent visual identity guidelines, covering insignia, logotype, and supporting graphics use. The standards are codified and legally protected. But the simultaneous active use of two logos — the meatball and the worm — introduces real inconsistency. The meatball is the official NASA logo since 1992, but the worm was reintroduced in 2020 as a secondary badge, and now both are in use. That's a brand control gap. Two primary marks with overlapping usage, managed by a sprawling multi-center federal agency, creates drift. The standards exist; execution is uneven.

4. Attraction — Very Strong

NASA is one of the most recognized global brands and most followed organizations on social media, amplifying reach through force-multiplying engagement activities that generate excitement and support for the agency's missions. The attraction engine is real: imagery from Hubble and Perseverance, livestreamed launches, Spanish-language content expansion, branded merchandise that spans from luxury Coach bags to $20 t-shirts. An estimated 80% of Americans believe the International Space Station is a good investment — that's attraction at a scale most brands can't touch.

5. Devotion — Strong

NASA has delivered on its brand promise across 60+ years. Apollo, Hubble, Mars rovers, ISS, Webb — the track record is the promise. Where devotion gets complicated is in the current political and budget environment, where mission continuity and funding stability affect what NASA can actually deliver. The brand promise exceeds near-term operational capacity in some areas, which creates a devotion gap between aspiration and reality. But the legacy is deep enough that the brand still holds.

6. Alignment — Moderate

63% of NASA employees say the company mission is the most important thing
about their work, and 33% say it's the main reason they stay. That's genuine internal alignment — people believe in the work. The tension is structural: NASA manages a complex identifier system across multiple centers, missions, and programs, each with their own marks, patches, and sub-brand identifiers. A decentralized agency with dozens of centers, contractor relationships, and rotating political leadership makes unified brand storytelling difficult. The mission alignment is strong; the organizational brand alignment is inconsistent.

Summary

NASA scores very high on the characteristics that are hardest to build — clarity, distinction, and attraction. Those are nearly unmatched at a global brand level. Control and alignment are structurally constrained by the nature of a federal agency, which is a real weakness. Devotion holds on the strength of legacy but faces increasing pressure. As a brand, NASA is radical by default. The relevance challenge is sustained delivery.

Claude did an admirable job, but you can get a more actionable and human result if you and your team take the Radically Relevant Assessment.

Brand Valuation Framework for Manufacturers

jay@matchstic.com (Jay Holden) — Sat, 23 May 2026 13:35:19 GMT

Reframing brand as a measurable asset, not a marketing initiative.

Inside

A disciplined way – Brand as strategic asset
The temptation – Correlation versus causation
What is “measurable”? – ISO-based valuation framework
Growth and Risk Reduction – Using brand to reduce operational buying friction
A practical brand management model for CEOs – Operationalizing brand
Board-Level Reporting – Reporting brand performance credibly
The Leadership Implication – Long-term governance mindset
The Takeaways – Core executive perspective
Time to Take Action – Immediate leadership next steps
What Questions Does This Article Answer? – Key strategic FAQs

A friend of mine sent me a link to an important new study highlighting a shift many leaders are actively experiencing.

According to Ocean Tomo’s 2025 IAMV Study, intangible assets account for roughly 92% of the market value of the S&P 500. Brand, data, intellectual property, software, and systems that shape how companies operate and compete. Only about 8% is tied to traditional physical assets like property, plants, equipment, and inventory.

Fifty years ago, it was almost the reverse. In 1975, tangible assets represented 83% of market value, while intangibles accounted for just 17%.

Economists call this an “economic inversion.” The balance of value creation has flipped. Physical capital still matters, but the assets that increasingly determine enterprise value are the ones you cannot see on the factory floor.

Brand sits squarely in that intangible asset category.

According to Brand Finance, brand now accounts for 11% of enterprise value in the world’s largest B2B companies.

Manufacturing and other industrial brands will pace behind the broader market in this shift, but it is coming. Will your brand ride this wave?

A disciplined way

For industrial and manufacturing executives, brand can feel abstract compared to throughput, margin, safety, or uptime.

What CEOs need is a disciplined way to justify brand investment and a mindset that treats brand as an asset.

If brand is going to earn full C-suite attention, capital allocation, and board-level discussion, it must be framed the same way as any other long-term business asset: governed, measured, and tied to value creation.

For the CEO, that means the audience for brand discussion is not just Marketing. The biggest audience is the CFO and the board.

The real question becomes:

Can brand be understood in a way that stands up to financial scrutiny?

Yes. When brand is treated as a managed contributor to cash flow, risk reduction, and long-term enterprise value, it can be evaluated with the same discipline applied to any other strategic investment.

The temptation:
using the stock chart as proof

When leaders attempt to justify brand investment, they often reach for the most visible types of evidence available. IPO timing. Share price growth. Market cap expansion.

It is tempting. But relying only on the obvious evidence leads to shallow analysis, where correlation is often mistaken for causation.

What is required is a stronger and more disciplined analysis.

That basic evidence may correlate with improved brand performance. However, it rarely proves single-variable causation. Revenue growth, pricing discipline, M&A, operational improvements, market cycles, and capital structure all impact simultaneously. Share price reflects expectations and broader market sentiment, not brand strength alone.

That correlation is not useless. It simply has to be handled honestly.

A disciplined narrative might sound like this:

“We modernized the brand in mid-2023. The company went public in 2024. Revenues increased 53% from 2023 to 2025. It went private again in 2026 at a valuation of X.”

That statement does not over promise or claim causation. It shows sequence. It shows scale. Without being complex, it respects complexity.

Financial stakeholders do not expect simplistic causation statements, such as “We spent X improving our brand and that made our stock price go up.” They expect disciplined thinking.

The goal is not to prove brand with a chart. The goal is to demonstrate that brand participates in value creation, and therefore must be managed like an asset.

What “measurable” actually means

If brand is going to be treated as an asset, it must be evaluated within a disciplined valuation framework.

International standards such as ISO 10668 and ISO 20671 exist for this purpose. They establish that brand valuation is not opinion. It is a structured financial exercise requiring defined inputs, transparent assumptions, and clear methodology.

Under those standards, brand value must ultimately connect to future economic benefit. In practice, that means measuring how brand strength influences financial outcomes and customer behavior.

Within an ISO lens, that requires evidence across three layers:

1. Financial performance

Here are enterprise metrics influenced by brand strength.

Revenue growth and revenue mix
Margin stability and price realization
Customer retention and expansion
Transaction multiples in acquisition or exit scenarios

2. Market behavior

If brand does not influence behavior, it does not create financial value. Here are valid brand metrics for valuing market behavior

Win rates in competitive situations
Sales cycle duration
Discounting pressure
Time spent on vendor qualification hurdles
Objection management in the sales process

3. Brand strength and governance

These are examples of demonstrable elements of brand strength and governance.

Consistency of positioning and messaging
Alignment between leadership and sales
Clear articulation of expanded capabilities
Internal adoption and disciplined use of the brand system
For a full, systemized list ask Claude to "Define the radically relevant super six."

Brand becomes measurable when it is governed, behaviorally effective, and financially linked. That is what allows it to stand up to scrutiny from a CFO or a board.

Brand as a Growth and Risk Reduction Asset

Let’s look deeper...

In Industrial and Manufacturing businesses, brand reduces uncertainty in complex buying environments.

Buyers are not purchasing consumer goods. They are managing operational risk. They are choosing suppliers who will not jeopardize uptime, compliance, safety, or downstream commitments. A decision they are making looking into a “sea of sameness.”

When the business evolves but the narrative around value proposition, product offering, etc. does not, cost shows up quickly. Deals require re-education. Stories vary by rep. Customers see pieces of the platform, not the whole. Acquisitions expand capability but decrease clarity.

Those friction points lengthen cycle time, increase discount pressure, and weaken preference in competitive bids.

A coherent brand system does not replace operational excellence. It allows it to be understood and trusted faster.

The logic is simple:

Clarity builds confidence.
Confidence reduces friction.
Reduced friction improves performance.

Brand investment is not a creative argument. It is an operating one.

A practical brand management model for CEOs

If brand is to withstand financial scrutiny, it must be treated like a managed asset.

That requires four deliberate steps.

1. Build and maintain a radically relevant brand

This article isn’t about brand building, but you can start by assessing your brand.

Two options:

Option AI - Ask ChatGPT or Claude to assess your brand with this prompt:

Define and source the radically relevant super six characteristics, then assess the brand you see at <<Insert your company website here>> against those characteristics.

[Here is an example for NASA]

Option Human - Take a Free Online Brand Assessment

2. Define the performance logic

Be explicit about the brand value mechanism in your go-to-market plan.

Clarity builds confidence → Confidence reduces friction → Reduced friction improves financial outcomes.

For example: Given a strong and well executed brand → we will see pipeline velocity increase → and deals will have a higher than average close rate.

If that chain cannot be articulated, it cannot be measured.

3. Select enterprise metrics that should move if the brand strengthens

Focus on indicators already reviewed at the leadership level:

Win rate and sales cycle length in priority segments
Margin stability and discounting trends
Revenue mix toward higher-value offerings
Retention and cross-sell performance
Acceptance rates and time-to-fill engineering and technical job openings

These are enterprise performance indicators influenced by how clearly the market understands and appreciates the business.

4. Govern for consistency

If clarity is the driver, then message discipline, narrative alignment, and sales adoption must be managed, not assumed. Without consistency, performance impact will be uneven and difficult to defend.

When those four steps are in place, brand moves from subjective discussion to operational accountability.

Board-Level Reporting: How to Present Brand Impact Credibly

Industrial and Manufacturing leaders understand that growth is multi-variable. Revenue moves because of pricing, operations, product performance, capital strategy, leadership changes, and market conditions. Brand is one contributor among many.

The story needs to respect that complexity.

Demonstrate:

What changed in the brand system
Clarified positioning, structured architecture, aligned messaging, disciplined governance.
What the organization could do differently because of it
Sales adopted a repeatable narrative. Leadership spoke with one voice. Expanded capabilities were easier to explain.
What changed in commercial performance
Movement in win rate, cycle time, pricing discipline, retention, or mix.
What else was true at the same time
Operational improvements, product launches, acquisitions, market shifts.

When making a case for “brand as an asset,” some of this transparency may feel counter intuitive. But it is reality, and that is executive discipline.

The Leadership Implication

If you have read this far you are probably wondering how to guide your team in managing your brand.

When treated as an asset, brand cannot be episodic. It cannot depend on a campaign cycle or a new logo moment. Assets are governed. They are measured. They are improved over time against a stable core.

Here is one case study that might be of interest.

Here is one real world example of a brand being treated like an asset.

A disciplined brand governance loop connects market forces to structured discovery, clear definition, and consistent execution.

Instead of reactive refreshes, the organization makes incremental improvements to a solid foundation. The results:

Clarity reduces friction in every deal.
Reduced friction improves performance quarter after quarter.
Consistent performance strengthens long-term brand value.

Our strongest advice: Find a brand consultancy transforming ambitious ideas into business results.

The Takeaway

Brand does not create value in isolation. It strengthens the mechanisms that drive revenue, margin, and trust in complex markets.

When governed, measured, and incrementally improved, brand becomes a durable contributor to cash flow and risk reduction.

For CEOs, the shift is simple but consequential: stop treating brand as a campaign expense and start managing it as a long-term asset.

Time to Take Action

Gather historic performance of relevant internal metrics.
Start a discussion with your finance leader: “As we think about brand as an asset, which financial levers do you think it most realistically influences for us?”
Pull your CMO into the conversation: “If we were to invest meaningfully in our brand, where do you see that translating into tangible business impact?”
Have a conversation with your CEO: “As you think about enterprise value over the next few years, where do you see brand playing a role, if any?”
Explore a brand process geared toward increasing the value of your brand.
Consider assigning brand governance to an executive leader.

What Questions Does This Article Answer?

How does brand reduce friction in industrial sales environments?
How does brand influence win rates, sales cycle length, and discounting?
Why does brand matter more in complex, high-risk B2B buying decisions?
What happens when a company’s capabilities evolve but its brand does not?
How does brand clarity affect pipeline velocity and deal conversion?
How should industrial companies think about brand as an asset instead of a marketing function?
Can brand be measured in a way that stands up to CFO or board-level scrutiny?
What does “brand value” actually mean in financial terms?
How does brand contribute to enterprise value in manufacturing businesses?
What metrics actually indicate that brand is creating financial value?
How do you connect brand strength to revenue, margin, and cash flow?
Why is stock price or IPO performance a weak way to prove brand value?
How should executives interpret correlation between brand changes and financial performance?
What is the correct way to present brand impact to a CFO or board?
How should a CEO operationalize brand as a managed asset?
What metrics should leadership track to evaluate brand performance?
How do you define the value mechanism of brand inside a go-to-market strategy?
Why is brand governance required for consistent financial impact?
How does brand function as both a growth driver and a risk reduction mechanism?
Where should a CEO start when evaluating brand as an asset?

AI-Ready Brand Guidelines Software: The 2026 Rankings

jay@matchstic.com (Jay Holden) — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Not every brand guidelines platform is ready for the machine audience. Here is how the leading options stack up.

Inside

Before you buy: the guidelines come first
How we ranked the platforms
The rankings, from most to least AI-ready
The bottom line

Your brand guidelines now have two audiences: the humans who carry your brand forward, and the AI platforms those humans work inside all day. A growing category of software promises to house your guidelines and deliver them to both. The platforms are not equal, though, and where they differ most is on the machine side.

Before you buy: the guidelines come first

A platform cannot fix an underdefined brand. If your voice is a list of adjectives and your color system is "use the brand colors," moving that ambiguity into beautiful software just distributes the ambiguity faster. The prerequisite for any of these platforms is a well built, established set of brand guidelines: explicit rules, exact values, and defined judgment calls. Do that work first.

Then, when you choose a platform, choose one committed to AI features. Machine-readable delivery is quickly becoming the mechanism that keeps a brand consistent across every AI tool your teams and partners use. A platform that treats AI delivery as core, not a bolt-on, will future proof your investment of time and money as the tools around it keep changing.

How we ranked the platforms

We scored each platform on four weighted criteria: machine-readable delivery to AI tools such as MCP or structured markdown (40%), AI governance and compliance capability (25%), in-platform AI assistance (20%), and demonstrated AI commitment and roadmap (15%). Rankings reflect publicly available information as of July 2026.

The rankings, from most to least AI-ready

1. Standards

Standards is a guidelines platform built for both audiences from the start. Guidelines sync to any agent through standards.md, MCP, or API, with scoped access, role-based rules for agents, and automatic versioning. Of everything we looked at, it delivers brand context to AI the most directly.

2. Frontify

Frontify is the enterprise brand management leader, pairing guidelines with a full DAM. Its native MCP server makes guidelines machine-readable so AI tools pull tone, usage rules, and approved assets directly, backed by its Brand Assistant AI. For a large team already running a DAM, it is the most complete AI-ready setup on this list.

3. zeroheight

zeroheight centers on design system documentation more than brand guidelines, but its hosted remote MCP server is genuinely strong: agents can list pages, read content, and pull assets, with release targeting and permission scoping. AI authoring features round it out. MCP requires a paid plan.

4. Bynder

Bynder is a market-leading enterprise DAM with serious in-platform AI, including a Brand Compliance Agent that audits assets against guidelines. The gap: no native MCP for the core platform, so external AI tools cannot read Bynder-hosted guidelines directly. Its AI is powerful, but it mostly points inward at your own asset library rather than out to the tools your teams work in.

5. Corebook

Corebook is a designer-favorite online guidelines platform used by brands like Tinder and Miro. Corebook AI generates guideline modules from prompts and syncs with Figma, which speeds up building guidelines. But there is no machine-readable delivery, so AI tools outside the platform cannot consume them.

6. Brandfolder

Brandfolder, part of Smartsheet, offers a polished DAM with brand guideline pages, AI auto-tagging, and visual search. Its AI serves asset discovery rather than brand delivery: no native MCP exists, and independent 2026 reviews describe its generative and agentic AI plans as exploratory.

7. Papirfly

Papirfly is an enterprise brand management suite strongest in templating and high-volume local content production. It gives in-house teams a clean home for brand identity, but we found no machine-readable guideline delivery and limited AI capability relative to the category leaders.

8. Brandpad

Brandpad produces some of the most beautiful digital brand guidelines available, and studios love it for that. It is built entirely for the human audience, with no AI features or machine-readable layer, so the guidelines it produces are gorgeous but invisible to today's AI tools.

The bottom line

The top of this list is separated from the bottom by one capability: delivering brand guidelines to machines, not just displaying them for people. AI tools are already producing content in your brand's name, so it is worth weighing that capability heavily before you commit.

Matchstic is a brand consultancy that helps technology forward companies take bold steps toward Radically Relevant brands. Before you invest in a platform, make sure the brand inside it is defined with the courage to be exact. Book a brand consultation today to get your brand AI-ready.

Sources

Standards. "AI." Standards Site. https://standards.site/ai/
Frontify. "Frontify MCP: Machine-readable brand intelligence." Frontify, 2026. https://www.frontify.com/en/blog/frontify-mcp
zeroheight. "zeroheight MCP." zeroheight, 2026. https://zeroheight.com/mcp/
Bynder. "Bynder launches AI compliance agent for Brand Governance." Bynder, December 2025. https://www.bynder.com/en/press-media/bynder-expands-ai-agent-capabilities/
Masset. "Digital Asset Management Software: Top 10 Compared (2026)." https://www.getmasset.com/digital-asset-management-software
SlideSpeak. "Best Design MCP Servers in 2026." https://slidespeak.co/blog/best-design-mcp-servers
BrandyHQ. "Best Brand Guidelines Software in 2026." https://brandyhq.com/blog/best-brand-guidelines-software/

Leading Change: How to Win Support for a Rebrand

Matchstic Staff — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 14:00:00 GMT

A Webinar Conversation

Before a rebrand can begin, leaders must first recognize the business challenges behind the brand. In this conversation, Matchstic and The Armstrong Company share the behind-the-scenes work required to build internal alignment, surface brand friction, and earn buy-in for meaningful change.

Join Tracy Clark, Director of Brand Strategy at Matchstic, in conversation with Hilary Sauls, Chief of Staff at The Armstrong Company.

Transcript

Tracy Clark:

Thanks for supporting a rebrand. And I'm so excited about this conversation because Hilary and I have kept in touch over the years, post-rebrand, and I have just seen this, this brand just become its own… come into its own, if you will, and it's come such a long way from where it was, but in order to do that, there is a lot that has to happen before we even… before we've met, before we've even started, so we're going to talk about that today. And, and we're so excited to do so with you all, and I hope that you have some good questions on hand. We've got Patrice and Jay here to field, any questions you might have that you can put in the chat, and we might address some in real time, and we might wait until the end. Well, depends on the subject matter.

But, but yeah, just a quick round of intros, so… and then I'll begin to share my screen, but I am Tracy Clark, I'm the Director of Brand Strategy here at Matchstic. Been working with brands for over 25 years, and, it's still all… each one is new and different and special, so, Never a dull moment. And and we're gonna make sure that we cover off on some of those… those challenges. So, and some of you may have joined the webinar that we did back in October, led by our co-founder, Blake Howard, with the great folks at VIM, or VIM Group, talking about brand investment, right? So, understanding the pitfalls, of everything that goes into that decision as far as resources. That's kind of the… you know, the starting point from that standpoint, but it also dovetails really nicely into what we're focusing on today, which is the thinking and strategy, behind getting that decision buy-in, right? So that's really crucial to bring people along for the ride, alright? So, yeah. Keep in mind, your questions, and with that, I'll begin to share my screen and do some introductions, so hopefully y'all can see that. Looking good? Perfect. Alright, cool.

Tracy Clark:

Well, with that, I am so, again, so excited to introduce Hilary Saul. She's our Chief of Staff at the Armstrong Company. We worked together on their rebrand a few years ago. And so Armstrong is a… for… I mean, some of you might not know, you've probably seen this name around, but they're a global logistics leader spanning residential and commercial moves, and supply chain logistics, so they kind of span a lot of, of problem solving. So, Hilary's been with Armstrong for over 13 years. in a variety of roles in increasing leadership and influence. So, prior to her Chief of staff role, she served as customer service, customer, excuse me, customer experience and marketing, and now she oversees, all of Marcom's strategy. And so, she's also a strategic partner and a trusted advisor with the CEO and leadership team, working towards, you know, Team development, optimizing efficiency, productivity. cross-functional relationships. I mean, Hilary, I don't know how you… how you have time left in the day, but I'm really glad you're here.

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah, thanks so much, Tracy. It's been a long time coming, and I'm so excited to be here with you today and talk all things branding, one of my very favorite subjects.

Tracy Clark:

I know, right?

Hilary Sauls:

Thank you for having me.

Tracy Clark:

And oh, I'm delighted. And so, yeah, I mean, to your point, we've been talking about doing this webinar for a while, so I'm really glad we're finally able to make it happen. Now, I'm gonna… I wanna take a walk down memory lane. Here's the old logo. This is not the new logo, this is the old one. I did this to think back to the time when this represented Armstrong, and at the time, it was a different name, Armstrong Relocation and Companies. That is a mouthful.

Hilary Sauls:

So think back, I mean, we see some of the writing on the wall already in this group, I'm sure, but.

Tracy Clark:

Think back to what made you realize you had a brand challenge. Like, let's start there, and how did you know it was the right time?

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah, you know, when I think back, it's ultimately that frictional experience that was so evident throughout the customer journey, and when we think through all the different ways in which we attempt to cross-sell our services or expand our scope of work with our existing client base. We ultimately continue to come up against this frictional point of resistance that didn't allow us to really leverage that trust that had been earned and built over time with our clients. And that's ultimately the goal, right? Is to be able to expand upon your relationship, by building on that trust, and leveraging it to grow your business with an existing client base, and And this became such a challenge, right?

Tracy Clark:

This was…

Hilary Sauls:

one of our names. We had many that we were attempting to represent from time to time.

Tracy Clark:

Yes, we did. I'm gonna go ahead and skip ahead, because we've got quite a logo soup here, and so some of our branding folks and marketing folks on the attendee list might look at this and say, huh. Feels familiar.

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah, yeah, I mean… It's so fascinating, whenever you put it all together on one page, it's overwhelming, and it really makes the point of, hey, you know, we're just taking stabs at something, to put out to the marketplace and hope that our clients and customers and prospects understand. We ultimately started to experience significant growth. Of our operating companies. We're a highly acquisitive company. we are often so quick to acknowledge and perpetuate the history of brands and companies that we're bringing into our fold, and to a fault, right? And so, what we found is that we were bolting on all these brands, and they had identical offerings. Or, in some cases, maybe slightly complementary in tangential ways. But ultimately, our footprint continued to grow, and that is our biggest and greatest asset. But yet, we were unable to fully leverage that in the marketplace, given the.

Tracy Clark:

Totally.

Hilary Sauls:

and lack of strategy with all of these bolted-on brands, and we were diluting our Armstrong brand in the meantime, so… Yeah.

Tracy Clark:

And this doesn't happen overnight. This is over years.

Hilary Sauls:

I'm just kind of.

Tracy Clark:

of snapping on, and maybe not being, you know, in hindsight, you know, not to criticize, but maybe not having time to be strategic about it. Well, if we acquire this organization, what does that mean? And I think oftentimes, and we've seen many brands do this, it's easier in the short term to just snap it on. But that becomes, as you can see here, a real problem with brand dilution.

One of the biggest concerns that we have in branding, because we want to make sure that when we are delivering an exceptional product or service. people know who delivered it, right? Absolutely. And if you're not singing from that same songbook, you know, each… each brand has its own sort of nuance. There might be some core values, and I think the nice thing was for Armstrong and all of these organizations is it was a very strong sense of core values that were shared, even if you didn't word them the same way. That's right. And so that connective tissue was very… present below the surface, but customers and prospects were not feeling that at all. And it also manifests, so this is why it's so important for building the case, because it manifests from a brand perspective, but a brand problem is a business problem.

Hilary Sauls:

Yes.

Tracy Clark:

Right? And so, you talked about, operationally, everything from, like, invoice confusion and reconciliation, you're dividing resources to solve those mosquito problems, rather than building up your brand, right?

Hilary Sauls:

Absolutely. We truly, had no strategy, right? And so, a lack of strategy really started to have a growing frictional presence in our customer journey across all business lines and verticals. And what happened is that we have this historical reliance, and still do, really, on relational-driven selling. And so, you have this minimal marketing investment with strong relational selling components and a growing digital customer journey in the marketplace. it doesn't jive. And so, what we ended up with is an inverse relationship, ultimately with increasing marketing challenges, an increasing revenue growth opportunities, and yet no clear strategy. And… Yeah. And ultimately, it really, came to a head, and we said, time out. We've got to… we've got to do different.

Tracy Clark:

Yeah, it just gets to that breaking point, right? Right. And I think the challenge is, you know, to translate, which you did amazingly well, is translating a brand problem to a business problem. And so I want to pause here for a second, because when we think about brand in its totality, from pre-start all the way through, right? What is the end result? Oftentimes, business leaders, executives understand the far right-hand side, the results that they want. But they don't tie it to a brand problem, right? And I think that that is the work that is the hardest to do before day one, before the… even before the RFP, right? You have to look on the left-hand side. So, the challenges, might be brand distinction, right? That is a brand challenge. But that affects buyer behavior. That might mean that they're not confident to, you know, do more than one deal with you, right? Or they might not be aware that y'all are intertwined or interlinked. your market was also changing significantly. Your competitors were shuffling around and doing their own growth and acquisitions and scaling. And ultimately, it was a confused offering. So with those challenges, you and folks like you in your role have to get to that middle section, which is trust, education, and empowerment. And that is the… thing that you did, again, so well, it's like, you… you did a couple of things, actually. The proof points were that you had some quick wins with smaller-scale projects that set them up for starting to think about brand in a much more contained way. I want to hear a little bit about that.

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and you're right. It really was planting seeds for a number of years, and when I think back to.

Tracy Clark:

Wait, a couple… a number of years, right?

Hilary Sauls:

The number, right?

Tracy Clark:

I stop you because a lot of people think that It takes… it's a shorter amount of time, but this is a couple years in the making to build a case. It's not always the case, but sometimes that's needed, right?

Hilary Sauls:

Absolutely, absolutely. So… really, when I think back to some of those mile markers along the journey leading up to this case was a couple different website redesigns and redevelopment that we did, and championing that, there's some natural research that goes into the competitive landscape and how others in our space are representing themselves and their offerings.

Tracy Clark:

And really diving more deeply into that.

Hilary Sauls:

I think we all have a responsibility in our respective marketing roles as You know, stewards of the organization to remain current with what the competitive landscape is across all business lines, and that's ever-evolving. And so, when I think about that. It was really, over time, paying attention to others who were certainly laying some groundwork, but helped to make a case with those who may not necessarily have that appreciation and understanding for the importance of strategy, and how the strategy is really defining and informing the way in which these competitors are representing themselves in the space. And so, thinking back to, you know, how are we going to help these Executives, and how are we going to help these non-believers, if you will, or really those who just do not understand branding to the extent that maybe others do within an organization? And, and help them understand, hey. This is where we're… we're matching up, and this is where we… We've fallen behind.

Tracy Clark:

Yeah, and they don't want to hear that you're falling behind.

Hilary Sauls:

Right, right! I mean, we are known as a leader in this space. And, that's a blessing, but it's certainly one of those things that you have to harness, and you have to continue to remain the leader. And you can be a leader and not communicate that effectively to… the marketplace, which is a whole different challenge, right? So, ultimately, it was really putting together this brand soup, and laying it out on paper, and helping them to understand, and also surfacing those friction points along the way. When we had conversations with prospective customers, or we're answering a proposal for a prospective client or current client, trying to cross-sell our services. where were we finding those bumps in the road, and where are we continuing to find challenges in what we're saying and how we're saying it in a way that is clear and makes sense? And so, continuing to surface that, continuing to surface client and customer confusion. and conversation anecdotally, is absolutely part of planting those seeds. Yeah.

Tracy Clark:

And tying it to brand, which you.

Hilary Sauls:

Yes!

Tracy Clark:

Because when what I've seen happen sometimes is that those get tucked in under quote-unquote operational challenges. And when you're seeing them on repeat again and again. that's maybe also an operational challenge, but it becomes a brand challenge, because if you're… if it's on repeat, then, okay, well, many people are getting this perception wrong. Many, many people have this misperception. We gotta fix that at a deeper, higher level, right?

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, I think… I really think, too, Tracy, that It's tying it all together from… Stoop to nuts with, this is… this is our value proposition, this is what we're attempting to say, this is where we can't find a way to say it and still properly fold in all the respective brands to logically tie it together. And sometimes it's really as black and white as you know, some of those very basic diligence questions that you're answering with regard to EINs and tax IDs and business names, it creates a ton of friction. Unnecessarily.

Tracy Clark:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think that once you gain that trust with small wins and have those conversations, you've talked about tying those, you know, you're gaining that anecdotal… those anecdotal moments, and formulating an insight from it.

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah.

Tracy Clark:

And that's what we as strategists do, so it's a little bit of work that… pre-work that you have to do to build that case, because when you think of executive leadership. from finance to CEO to whomever, whoever's going to be involved in helping to make this decision, because it's a big one, it's a big undertaking. You want to make sure that you're speaking their language, and that's something that I also found Your pre-work that you did that you were able to do that, because a finance person is going to have a very different perspective. So, what is… what is the ROI on that, right? And a CEO is concerned about that plus other things, you know, and the vision. Are we going to maintain our vision? Are we going to be able to keep with our core values? So, from a chief HR officer perspective.

So, all of those things have to be tailored from a messaging… an internal messaging perspective. So, much like brand, know your audience and have that 30,000-foot brand positioning, but tailor it to your audience. You gotta do the same thing internally. Yes. And I think… I find that that's where a lot of people maybe, fall… fall short, right? Because you have your full-time job to do, and so, oh, I really have to, like, create this… this body of work to, to be able to make the case for brand. But if you… it's sort of like working out. It's like if you kind of make it a regular thing, like, a weekly… this week I'm going to focus on that comp list. What are those strategic moves that the competitors are doing? And I'm going to build that out, and I'm going to present this at the next executive leadership meeting. That's the… that's what I'm tasked to do this week. And then next week, I'm going to focus on audience, and where that… customer experience is falling short. So I think if you sort of block it, were you able… were you able to do that?

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah, you know, what I did, I was thinking back about… ultimately that… I'm gonna say more dedicated time to making the case, right? So you're planting seeds and nurturing them along the way, and surfacing specific frictional points of the journey, but that dedicated time to making and building the case I spent the latter half of 2020 doing just that, and… and really that… culminated into a presentation of that brand soup and the competitive landscape, and really thinking more deeply about specific questions that would allow us to think more deeply about where we were falling short. So, in our world, you know, we have a ton of pragmatic thinkers, and.

Tracy Clark:

Oh, yeah.

Hilary Sauls:

In that situation, you've got to be more objective, and… And certainly, branding in some… in some view is subjective, right? And understanding and appreciation for it. And helping others to really understand the strategy behind it. What's behind a logo, and how it's so much more than just the visual elements of a brand. that's easy to, you know, check the box, oh, yeah, I know that brand. You know, it's so much more, and how do you do that with those that don't understand branding?

Tracy Clark:

We're not in it every day, like.

Hilary Sauls:

Right, right, and that's absolutely fine, but back to knowing your audience. So, helping to tap into that competitiveness, right, and understanding the audience from the standpoint of where do we stack against them, what are known competitors doing along these lines? So, I really spent time in creating that structure and laying out the different verticals, and doing an analysis of, you know, here's what our competitors are saying, here's how they're selling the services, here's where they're differentiating. And it was very evident visually, to be able to speak to the purpose and the strategy, that there was clear strategy that was in play, and it wasn't just this ad hoc, Brand, if you will.

Tracy Clark:

Right.

Hilary Sauls:

So, that honestly kind of led to a series of conversations and questions. And that particular conversation, what was interesting is, as I was building that case, again, over a period of months, and monitoring some of these brands, and really going back to them, and… one of them had actually kind of changed their go-to-market strategy, and so I had to reinvent the wheel a little bit on that representation. But that goes back to, again, it's not something that is stagnant. It's something that you have to continue to evolve as your business evolves. And so we were also at a point in time where our business was continuing to evolve. And that really allowed for the right conversations at the right time to take place, and to get that buy-in in a meaningful way. So the culmination was obviously the seed planting, but ultimately laying out questions, right? Questions that challenge thought process around how are we effectively communicating to our distinct audience segments. How are we… How are we taking into consideration our client and customer and prospective customer perspectives? Are we potentially going to sell off a business unit or product line?

Tracy Clark:

What are the goals of each distinguished brand? When I think about our structure, I mean.

Hilary Sauls:

Honestly, we are very highly entrepreneurial. We've got equity partners in each one of our operating companies running the day-to-day, and there's certainly some flexibility and latitude that comes with that, and thinking through how are we going to harness our collective footprint in a way that resonates with target customers and still allow that entrepreneurial spirit to be vibrant and alive in those local offices.

Tracy Clark:

And that was probably one of the harder things to do before you engage with us, and… and during, you know? Yeah. We'll get into a little bit of that, but, like, you have to bring folks along for the ride, but in a way that is connective with them. So… so yes to speaking in terms that they understand and that resonate really strongly, like, what are their motivators? But you were able to invite them to the table before, during, and beyond, right? So we had a seat at… they had a seat at the table with us when we were doing our research, but you had had a lot of pre-conversations. Now, what I want to say At this point, is that it's… it seems like A lot. And it… and it kind of is, right?

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah. But…

Tracy Clark:

if you plan it well, then it becomes part… it's just like anything in your life, it becomes part of your routine, so I want to…

Hilary Sauls:

Alright.

Tracy Clark:

I want to double-click on that, because in order to get the brand right. And have a pretty smooth process. Nothing goes exactly as planned, but it was really… very smooth with you all, because even when there were hiccups, or questions, or concerns, or can we claim this, or is this the direction we should be going? Can we… can we move from this brand architecture to this brand architecture? It's a big change.

Hilary Sauls:

It is.

Tracy Clark:

but they were more trusting because they were empowered from those conversations. So, so that work is certainly worth doing and inviting that conversation. Now, those… those questions you had created some really powerful insights to inform that need for change. So, by this point, we've talked about gaining… the tools that you used in your arsenal were small wins, you know, with smaller projects that gained trust and empower, the educational moments, those, Inviting conversation and conversation touch points. Taking things like competitive and audience research, and saying, hey, this is where we are, and this is what we're leaving on the table, or this is what your competitors are shifting towards, and we need to get in front of that, right? So understanding those, those thresholds. And then, you know, pointing out those gaps in… in that knowledge, and being able to be that… Hilary is the bridge between business and brand, and I think that that was so crucial. And sometimes, you know, we talked about this In our planning, it's like, sometimes you have to go back over the other side of, you know, go back to the beginning of the bridge and take their hand and walk them over again, right?

Hilary Sauls:

Absolutely, absolutely.

Tracy Clark:

So I think patience is a really important aspect as well, but, but those are some tools that I think are really sort of coming to mind that, the more sort of tangible ones. Now, from there, how did you identify those people who needed to be involved? Because I think that's also a struggle with a lot of people, because, like, well, how wide do we go, and how.

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah.

Tracy Clark:

So, in our, in our leadership and our staff, and there's also, like, the need to know Or influencer, or decider. So, you had a couple of things to deal with. How did… I think a lot of people wonder, like, how do you make that decision on who needs to be involved?

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah, I think, from the outset, having a strong pulse on the business, right, and having developed and nurtured relationships cross-functionally is… is key. That allows you to really understand, one, who… who has that influence across the organization at large, and two, who has… who has different knowledge and perspective to bring to the table from a different viewpoint, right? You don't necessarily want all like-minded individuals, you want divergent views at this stage, and part of that allows you to turn over all the stones. You're not leaving anything left to question, and in our organization, honestly, influential leadership exercise with earned trust is a cultural pillar. It goes without saying that… you're given a significant amount of responsibility. We run lean, and it's important that You are, carrying out those responsibilities to the fullest.

As a stakeholder in the organization and a steward of those responsibilities, you have, The ability to create a significant amount of trust and earn trust in many ways. But it's a key token to really be able to have those tough conversations, to be able to, Get your point across, and really that influence is… is the way in which we get things done around here, right? I mean, that common phrase. So, understanding the way in which you get things done throughout your organization, throughout your leadership, is so critical. Those… those pieces are gonna vary in different ways, depending on the organizational structure. In our world, it was really important to bring in different segment leaders of our organization. Yes. From an operational mindset, from a sales leadership mindset. We had some sales leaders who were responsible for different areas and different verticals of our offerings. We had, of course, HR. When you think about HR, that's so critical from a talent recruitment and onboarding standpoint.

When you really step back and think about the brand. And who comes in contact with any form of your brand assets? it's everyone, right? To a certain extent. And so you need buy-in across the customer journey, and that was a big piece for us. The other piece was being able to have voices heard. So, in some cases, it's recognizing who are those individuals that are going to be the contrarians at the table. Who were the individuals who, again, may not have any respect for branding or brand strategy, or just not have understanding of what that meant to the organization and what it means, to carry that out to the fullest. And ultimately, you need brand champions on the other side.

And so, how do you build brand champions you've got to get them to understand the why, and the what. How did this come to be, and how did we create something from an objective perspective? Pragmatic thinkers love objectivity. And that was critical from the outset, understanding that piece of our audience. These stakeholders were going to be our brand champions, and we needed to fully leverage the strength of their voices and their respective leadership roles, and help them to understand and value the brand in a way that they hadn't in the past. And so, it was really kind of that 360 assessment. And you think about, you know, a lot of times, it's encouraged that, as a leader, you consider going through one of those evaluations and assessments with your team and with others who come in contact with you. And it's no different when you think about the brand and the personality. I mean, it's the personality of the company. And so, really to get that unbiased buy-in and have them rooted in that foundation that we were going to be building together was so critical.

Tracy Clark:

Oh, yeah. I love, I love the comparison of the 360 evaluation, because from all angles, they need to know at any level, at any point of influence, that they have skin in the game.

Hilary Sauls:

Yes.

Tracy Clark:

And this is why you have skin in the game, right?

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah.

Tracy Clark:

Because that'll lead to less resistance down the road. And there might still be resistance, and we…

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah.

Tracy Clark:

encountered that, right? We had… Absolutely.

Hilary Sauls:

Really?

Tracy Clark:

And it's from a place of, of protection. It's not from a place of intentional friction. It's just, this has been my brand for a long time.

Hilary Sauls:

Yes.

Tracy Clark:

I don't want it to change. But because of those conversations early, and being able to look Entirely around the organization, and bring in those thinkers really early, and, you know, give them… sort of give them… you kind of gave them homework, because you made them think about things that they hadn't before. That's right. So when they came to the table, they weren't… you know, to our table, you know, in research rooms and that sort of thing, it wasn't completely new for them, which we so have seen deer in headlight moments when they're like, I don't know how I'm supposed to answer this in research, right? But we didn't get that. We got honest conversation Throughout. And it was healthy debate.

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah, absolutely.

Tracy Clark:

made some big changes, as, you know, we'll show some before and afters, but these were big changes. So, I'm going to pause because we have a question, from one of the attendees. What ultimately were the factors that finally led to buy-in? Was it, like, what was, I guess, the final tip If you will, because we've talked about a lot of different things that add…

Hilary Sauls:

That's right.

Tracy Clark:

But what was that final straw, if you will, and was it… was it connecting branding to revenue data, or was it something that maybe we didn't expect? So I want… I want to get your.

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah, man, that's such a great question. You know, I'm gonna say it's the confluence of all the factors that ultimately got us in the right spot. It was striking when we knew the business. Again, going back to 2020, it was that last Q4, really, of 2020 that I made the push in the presentation. And that really was laying the groundwork for the research to come, and the selection, then, of an RFP process, you know, and selecting a brand agency from there. But it was that point at which I think a lot of businesses were feeling the pressures of 2020, and the shift and pivot to that digital journey became more evident for businesses who had not yet fully adopted more of a digital approach. And, look, our industry, we're laggards when it comes to digitization, let's be honest. But, honestly, it was one of those things where That culmination of opportunity and being able to, again, be so in tune to understand, hey.

Here's where our opportunities are, here's where they lie today, given the pandemic, and what was obvious and apparent to the business, and being able to pivot assets and resources to serve in a new way. it was that combination. Yeah. And laying it out there again, and helping people to understand who hadn't necessarily thought about the brand as a challenge, It was kind of icing on the cake. We were having these business conversations, and I was able to tie those real challenges to these questions.

Tracy Clark:

And allow us to really step back and say.

Hilary Sauls:

Okay, I mean, it was pretty obvious when you think about that one logo, just the Armstrong relocation, and companies logo. That, that one, It was one that we fell back on as our tried and true so often.

Tracy Clark:

And that one.

Hilary Sauls:

very blatantly obvious, and so that helped, but I'm gonna say, really, it's… It was that point of… The business recognizes it, the marketplace. is changing so rapidly, we've got to do different, and you're right. You know, it really, it wasn't just a single point in time, it was that building up and, and knowing the right time to make the case. And I think that…

Tracy Clark:

that discernment?

Hilary Sauls:

That discernment is so important, and it's.

Tracy Clark:

Timing?

Hilary Sauls:

And you can't rush it. And back to, again, being patient. I knew we needed to do something years prior. But it wasn't the time.

Tracy Clark:

It wasn't the right time.

Hilary Sauls:

The business was not ready, and… ultimately, it was understanding and having that closeness to the business and having your ear to the ground to know when the right time was to strike, and I think that's, that's gonna be different in every organization and in every stage of you know, where that organization is in their existence in that life. And for us, it just happened to be then. I don't know that there's a tried and true method to that madness, as a very distinct formula.

Tracy Clark:

I made sure you left no stone unturned to get there.

Hilary Sauls:

Right, that's absolutely right, and what I didn't mention was so make the case in Q4, and really then spend all of 2021 Finding the right partner.

Tracy Clark:

Yeah. I mean, that's…

Hilary Sauls:

It certainly was not a flip of a switch, we're doing this, and now we're gonna have a new brand by next year. There was a lot of groundwork, after that. Yes, we agree, let's… let's take the next step.

Tracy Clark:

Yep. And then go through our RFP process, and then… Sometimes life takes turns, and you have to pause on that if things happen, and that's okay, too.

Hilary Sauls:

That's right!

Tracy Clark:

But two things… I just want to add to that, because I think that's a great response. The two things that stood out from the agency perspective were, we kept hearing maximize opportunities. Maximize opportunities. And that was the… So it sort of… so to your question, Rachel, it… it does touch on revenue. But it was more about the broader opportunity, revenue, and… and it just got to the point where Leadership kept seeing, we're missing out on opportunities. we're gonna… and it's just gonna get worse. Like, if we have that logo soup, you know, back here… let me go back for a second… if we have this. We are not going to be able to maximize opportunities, because this guy's gonna get this, this person's gonna get that, that's gonna get that. It's never… we're never going to be who we need to be. To get… to take advantage of all those opportunities at a global scale, we're creating this gigantic footprint, but we're not doing anything with it.

Hilary Sauls:

Right.

Tracy Clark:

That was a big thing, though.

Hilary Sauls:

cost, yeah.

Tracy Clark:

And it became opportunity… it translated into opportunity cost. What I will say is that, oh, and the other thing, real quick, was, you know, anecdotally, the voices of, oh, we… a home mover client hired us, and then somebody with a different vest showed up. Because you do partner.

Hilary Sauls:

Yes. Right? Yes. You do partner with other van lines, and… but there was no brand standard, so they didn't know if they should let them in the door. Yes.

Tracy Clark:

stuff like that. It's saying, do you all realize how crazy that is to a customer? All because it makes sense internally to keep all these brands. But the customer experience was becoming a nightmare. And so… and the other thing I'll say really quickly, because it is a really robust question, is we are seeing now, from an agency perspective, a greater, stronger focus on revenue or ROI, what will… what will this empower? And as we all know, brand doesn't… isn't a one-for-one, like, for… but there are… there are calculators out there that can help you get a sense.

But it's a little bit different. But we are finding better ways to say brand will empower, you know. If done right, you know, a higher percentage of this, and we have tools and surveys, you know, baseline assessments, and post-brand launch assessments to see how that needle has moved. But I think establishing a baseline of, of brand awareness. and perception, I think, can be a great starting point, because, Hilary, you had done so many of that… so much of that research behind the scenes, but having that starting point of your baseline, understanding what your brand means to the world right now, can definitely be a strong case. But we are seeing more organizations lean in towards, revenue unlocked if we are to rebrand. Yes, yep, for sure. Well, I want to skip ahead a little bit to…

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah.

Tracy Clark:

Because now we're in the, we talked about our skeptics, and… I want to share some before and afters, so… We did sort of soup to nuts, like, we had a full scope of rebrand, right? We did strategy together, we did research, we did, internal and external, we did architecture, we did some naming, and visual and verbal ID, and then launch sessions, right? We sat in a room and… with a lot of sticky notes and mapped out, okay, well, what are our priorities for launch, right? Yeah. And that was… that was super fun. So this is our architecture before, which was sort of a hybrid… House of Brands, right?

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah.

Tracy Clark:

And we moved from that to, whoa! Thanks!

Hilary Sauls:

So simple.

Tracy Clark:

Can you… I have to ask Hilary, did you ever think that you would become a branded house? Do you ever think that you would be able to pull it off?

Hilary Sauls:

No, you know, I thought for sure we were gonna have to have some dilation along the way. Now, at the core, just knowing how we operate and knowing how we use our assets to service across business lines. I certainly wasn't sure how we would… would do anything else effectively, but this, Getting, again, getting the understanding around the table of why this made sense and was the best path forward, was a really important piece, to getting through the next Number of phases, so…

Tracy Clark:

Yeah, and visual and verbal identity take, you know, the time that they take, and it can be long, depending on how many executions.

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah.

Tracy Clark:

But the research, to your point.

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah.

Tracy Clark:

Discovery, strategy, and research took the… and architecture took the longest.

Hilary Sauls:

It did, it did, and it was the biggest piece of it, and I'll say, it's so simple to step back and say, oh, we can shortcut that, right? We can shortchange it, and we know our business well enough, we understand our competitive landscape, we don't need to go through all the research, we don't need to go through the interviews and the surveys. But… Honestly, I made the case that that was going to be the longest piece, and that was gonna be…

Tracy Clark:

Good, yeah.

Hilary Sauls:

The part where, hey, we're probably gonna get through this next year, and until the very end of the year of… you know, 22, we're not gonna see it, a logo. Just heads up, you know.

Tracy Clark:

Managing, managing those expectations.

Hilary Sauls:

And that was huge, but we had to make this brand objective. and make the process objective. And so building that within, again, our respective organization with our stakeholders, it was so important to go through that step and to really understand why we had to hear the voice of customers. And really, Tracy, we didn't have a foundational strategy, right? That's right. And so it's not like we were just completely pivoting our strategy. We did not have a brand strategy.

Tracy Clark:

Having a house with no concrete.

Hilary Sauls:

Right, right! It was unwieldy at best. And so we were, truly building this foundation, and if we're going to be building this foundation, it was so critical that it was going to be solid, that we had not shortchanged ourselves along the way, and that we were actually building the trust of all of our future brain champions in the process. And so, in some cases, it meant that we were having more conversations that came from the voice of Matchstic. proposed to ourselves, and that we were really allowing Matchstic to download, what the research findings were.

Tracy Clark:

Hearing it from the outside.

Hilary Sauls:

removal of vials. Absolutely, yeah.

Tracy Clark:

I think the interesting thing, you know, this sort of ties back to, You know, meeting them where they are.

Hilary Sauls:

Yes.

Tracy Clark:

and having those conversations that relate to their position, their goals, their objectives. If you look at this before logo. And you don't care about brand, but you're an executive leader, you're gonna look at that and say nothing's wrong with it.

Hilary Sauls:

Right!

Tracy Clark:

So it can't be a brand conversation solely, right? To the people who that matters to, sure, we need to be distinctive because of this. We need to be more modern because of this. We look dated, because they're gonna say, well, it's working.

Hilary Sauls:

That's right.

Tracy Clark:

But it's missing that upside, that, again, those opportunities and what we're losing or what we're leaving on the table, is actually partially due to brand. Because people are going to look at this and say, they can't handle my new digital world challenges, and it's a.

Hilary Sauls:

now.

Tracy Clark:

I don't… that doesn't… I'm not moving, right? So there are things that are very limiting to this, and especially with a pragmatic audience, so you have to think in terms of what are the business challenges.

Hilary Sauls:

Yep.

Tracy Clark:

From a sales perspective, you are leaving so much on the table, because you have told me time and time again that you can't cross-sell. That's right. And the reason why is because this is a moving box, and not a… not an office.

Hilary Sauls:

That's great.

Tracy Clark:

Right? So that's why we moved from this to this, right?

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah.

Tracy Clark:

And, you know, when we think in terms of going from before, a little bit dated, a little bit specific on home moves, by the numbers, you know, some graphics, to something more like this. And it's more about the moving your life, your business forward, and making that very clear from a visual and verbal perspective. I'm showing the visuals right now, but that is where you need to meet where they are, and I wonder if some folks might benefit from you know, as they do their pre-work, sharing examples of brands out in the world, and what that did for them, you know? Right. Like, the engagement is up, which means that they got more sales. Analogs are always super helpful, and you probably had some of your own. It's like, hey, remember that competitor that looked really dated and we weren't worried about?

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah.

Tracy Clark:

We gotta worry about them now!

Hilary Sauls:

Right.

Tracy Clark:

Exactly. And so, I'll just click through really quickly, because, because it's, you know, we ultimately, together with your partnership, we did beautiful work, right? And creating some moments of interest, like, we kept some blue in there, but we reimagined it, right? Yeah. And we added some, opportunity for a little more expression and, unexpectedness in the purple hues and the greens. and that sort of thing. So re-envisioning, but keeping it very polished and stable at the same time. So having that flexibility to to be both trusted and progressive. And then, you know, showing what it looked like impractical world, you know, the trucks that you see. Now when I see this, I just get so excited, because I think just forward motion, right?

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah, yeah.

Tracy Clark:

stagnant. And I think one of the things you told me, this is some social posts here. And I do encourage all of you to go to Armstrong's website to take a look at it in person, and you… you'll probably see the trucks on the road now, right? But this is sort of a summary of… of the look and feel. And I think what… you told me something that was so interesting, and that is, like, because I asked, how do you know it worked, right?

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah.

Tracy Clark:

So, how do you know that… That your pre-work built that trust. all the way through to execution, and you told me something really funny. I'm gonna have you repeat it here, around the swag.

Hilary Sauls:

So, you know, when I think about… are… Our leaders, our family ownership, our… Executive leaders, our partners in the field. We traditionally would not have, A lot of brand advocacy from individuals at that level, and it's been so fascinating how a brand that really historically was a check the box, if you will, for the organization, not a meaningful asset of the organization and perspective, and shifting and pivoting to one that is so proudly born, I cannot tell you how often.

Tracy Clark:

I love that.

Hilary Sauls:

We get requests for new swag, and we get requests from customers, and passerbys, you name it, it doesn't matter who it is, if they see our logo, well, hey, can you… can I get one of those? Can I get a hat? Can you send me a shirt? And it's exciting.

Tracy Clark:

Yes.

Hilary Sauls:

it's really… I would say, an incredible win. It's not one that I necessarily thought would be the case, but I'm so excited about that. It makes it fun to work with and to continue to bring to life, and we still have a lot of asset turnover ahead of us, but It's certainly, Brought levity to our entire employee base, across the country, and to see how much these individuals have embraced it, and just really, enjoy rocking the brand.

Tracy Clark:

Through apparel, I mean, even when they're not on the job, it's.

Hilary Sauls:

it's rewarding, and it's… it's fun. That's the fun part. But I also think having brand champions and really harnessing, their excitement is key, and we certainly… We certainly are still working through, protecting the brand, right, now that we have a foundation in which we can do that.

Tracy Clark:

The work continues.

Hilary Sauls:

manner. That's a daily battle, but it's one that, again, is coming from a place of clear strategy and not a biased, personal perspective.

Tracy Clark:

And that is… That's the key. Yeah, that's the key, the objectivity.

Hilary Sauls:

Yes.

Tracy Clark:

I needed, and because, again, pre-work and trust building helps with the objectivity later, because you can point to that conversation or that set of tools and say, this is… you talked earlier, in our earlier conversations around mutual agreeance, right? And I think that that is so important, and And with that, I'd be curious to hear your take on, like, let's say another brand leader is considering a rebrand, because this is a… again, it's a lot of… it's a lot of information, not insurmountable, and then we have some time for some questions, but… Yeah. very, sort of briefly, you know, one sentence of what's the one thing you'd tell them to do before calling an agency? For me, it is do the pre-work so that the stakeholders are able to communicate why it's needed, so you don't have to be the sole communicator.

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah.

Tracy Clark:

Right? But what would you say is, like, from, like, a one-sentence practical approach?

Hilary Sauls:

Yeah, I think it's, having a pulse on all those points of friction.

Tracy Clark:

Yes.

Hilary Sauls:

customer journey, and then being able to articulate that from a brand point of view.

Tracy Clark:

Bye-bye.

Hilary Sauls:

that… that's, It's not a quick and easy, but it's something that is warranted to really get that, again, 360 understanding yourself. to then be able to articulate to each respective stakeholder from their particular, point of view, right? And looking through their lens to be able to have that dialogue and understand, and have them understand, ultimately, why there's friction and how we're going to solve it, so…

Tracy Clark:

Yeah, always pointing back to the friction. You know, you said this was painful. Yeah. We are at a point where we can fix it with brands, right?

Hilary Sauls:

Right.

Tracy Clark:

There's a… there's a great question in the chat. Hi, Gabby! When having these key conversations with stakeholders, how much of them were in person? So we had a few, that's… I know, we all think of that in, like, this new… it's not new anymore, but in the digital based on the Zoom world, but we… we met in person at a big ol' table. Right? A couple, at least, at least two times.

Hilary Sauls:

At least twice.

Tracy Clark:

executive leadership.

Hilary Sauls:

up.

Tracy Clark:

We did a Zoom to announce, to give updates to the partners meeting in Vegas, right? And that was a huge room, and me on Zoom, and that, so that was virtual, obviously. The sessions, the focus groups were on Zoom.

Hilary Sauls:

Yep.

Tracy Clark:

the interviews were on Zoom, so it was a hybrid, but we… we were still sort of navigating post-COVID.

Hilary Sauls:

That's right.

Tracy Clark:

So I think that had a lot to do with it, but y'all are very much an in-person kind of family.

Hilary Sauls:

Yes, we like being in person, though. We have a lot of different constituent groups that are, located and domiciled in different markets. And so, frankly, that also was another factor to take into consideration, where we may have had a couple more in-person conversations that, were just more beneficial to have virtually. And I'll… I'll speak to this, Tracy. In a time period at which we were all so drained and tired of virtual meetings and conversations, and that's all we were doing non-stop, and really being able to capture the full attention of attendees. Matchstic was phenomenal, and that.

Tracy Clark:

Oh, thanks.

Hilary Sauls:

that being able to facilitate, dialogue that generated not only constructive input and active participation. I mean, using something like a MIRA board was, incredibly helpful because it allowed for active participation, on the screen, but it also was something that it was apparent, that the Matchstic team was skilled at being able to have conversation virtually. To maintain that attention throughout the entire time frame. And sometimes it was a 2-3 hour virtual session, and that's a lengthy time, especially if you think about sales leaders, right?

Tracy Clark:

Oh my gosh, they're so busy.

Hilary Sauls:

Where there's a lot of things flying, and That was something that, because it was so effective, as we continue to have those meetings, we didn't feel a need to, bring everyone together around a table unnecessarily. We save those moments for those critical decision-making moments, or those, junctures at which, again, the Matchstic team really, believed were most impactful for those leaders to be at the table and in a room together for a number of hours.

Tracy Clark:

Yeah, it was…

Hilary Sauls:

you know.

Tracy Clark:

Now, nowadays, we might have done a little bit more in person.

Hilary Sauls:

Right.

Tracy Clark:

But I'm glad it worked out, you know, because you do have to create content that's going to keep People engaged and active and not, you know. we don't want cameras off kind of thing. We do encourage cameras on, phones face down, unless, you know, keep them close if there's an emergency, of course, but we're expecting sort of full attention. And we call out people if they're quiet. And that's done… that's done with care and respect, but we will close that if you're… if you're being too quiet, because this is your one chance. And so, Gabby also asked any quick tips on engaging stakeholders on the brand, just make it about the business. I think it's a lot about business, right? Yes.

When you think about sales, they're motivated by how they're… they're… Quarterly numbers, that kind of thing. So oftentimes it is a lot about business, because brand empowers business success. So… so it is, quite frankly, a lot of tying to that. But there's also that component of internal pride and camaraderie, right? So that's… that's a nice benefit. So making people's voices heard, and that they are part of building something together, so constantly. keeping that pulse of, like, hey, we're building this together.

So, there's some other questions we can certainly follow up, but I wanted to, say thank you everyone for joining, because we have a minute left. If you think of any questions that didn't get answered today, or you want to double-click, feel free to reach out to me, Tracy at Matchstic.com, or Hilary. We'll make sure that you can get ahold of her if need be. And, we now have a chance to draw for some book winners. We've got the Radically Relevant book, which I keep on my desk every day. So, who are our winners, Patrice?

Thank you so much for joining. We hope you enjoyed it. We appreciate your time and we'll hope to see you soon.

Webinar: The Rebrand Price Tag

Matchstic Staff — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 15:30:00 GMT

How to avoid underestimating the effort and overspending a branding project budget

Rebranding is rarely just a creative exercise—it’s an operational one. In this webinar, brand leaders share lessons from real-world rebrands, revealing why implementation, alignment, and early planning are critical to avoiding costly surprises and ensuring a successful brand change.

With a discussion led by Blake Howard, learn from Russell Thompson Client Partner Director at VIM Group and Joanna Jenkins Managing Director at VIM Group.

Transcript

Blake Howard:

Thank you so much for joining. So, my name's Blake Howard. I am a creative director and co-founder at Matchstic. We are a brand consultancy. We focus on helping mid- to large-sized organizations navigate the brand side of change. We just celebrated 22 years as an agency, which is exciting. And in that 22 years, we've had a great deal of successful projects. and mini lessons learned. So, those mini lessons learned are gonna fuel some of the discussion today, but I'm excited for this topic.

A couple housekeeping notes before we really dive in here. We're gonna have about 20 minutes of a discussion, and then I'm hoping to have 15 to 20 minutes of Q&A as well, so… Be sure to use the Q&A feature here on the webinar portal. You can click on that little Q&A button at the bottom, you can pop that question in at any point, but we'd love to have a good discussion here. You can also drop in comments in the chat, like, this is great, good point, Russ and Joe, you're so smart, you know, feel to throw out some verbal affirmation in the chat as we go. Or you can ask questions there, as well. So, be sure to do that.

Last, two more kind of housekeeping things. One is, we're gonna do a book giveaway. So, if, if you're not familiar, there's a book that I authored called Radically Relevant. It's beautiful, I'm a little biased, but, We're gonna give 3 copies away. So, in order to win it, though, you have to stay on the webinar to the end. So it's like a little carrot that we are dangling out there for you to tune in the entire time, but if you are on the call, you are automatically entered into it. So, stay tuned to the end. Patrice, who's on the call with us, helping kind of run things on the Zoom side, she will randomly choose 3 attendees, and we'll give those books away. So, stay tuned for that.

And then. Last announcement before we get started, we have another webinar November 12 And this is gonna be around leading change for a rebrand and building the case internally. So, very similar to today's topic, but a little bit, different in that we're gonna have a really specific scenario that we're walking through. Our Director of Brand Strategy, Tracy Clark, is gonna host a discussion with one of our clients, the Armstrong Company, around how they managed and navigated through a significant a really complex brand change. So. We'll drop a link into that as well, so you can, you can click on that and go ahead and register if you're interested.

Okay, so, I mentioned many lessons in our 22 years of doing what we do at Matchstic, and one of those is around internal alignment. Now, my background and expertise is really on the creative side, so as a creative agency, we love the challenge of strategically positioning a brand, thinking through the brand voice and the message, thinking through the visual identity. I love that, those bits and pieces of what it is that we do, but I have learned over time that that never happens, or it doesn't go well if you don't get executive buy-in for the case for change. Or if you don't think through the budget planning properly, or if you don't manage timeline, expectations, or even have strategic alignment across all of the decision makers in the organization, those creative exercises don't go well, and they're not quite as efficient and effective as they could be.

So today, we're kind of getting ahead of the creative and the strategy work to talk more about the planning side. So if you're thinking about a brand investment in 2026, this is going to be super beneficial for you. And I'm excited to have a conversation with Russ and Joe from the VIM group. This is a group that specializes in brand implementation and management, when their clients are going through brand change.

So, I first got connected to them About a year and a half ago, doing another webinar with a WebDAM system called Paperfly, and they were there to kind of help represent more of the cost analysis, and then even the IT implementation side of brand change. Which I thought was fascinating, because those are two really important pieces that, if those don't go well, you really don't maximize your investment on the creative piece there in the middle.

So, we have Russell Thompson joining us today, who started out in a business advisory role at Ernst & Young. And subsequently held roles at several, leading strategic brand agencies, and since then, he's kind of moved on from the creative side to the operational side at VIM Group. And he works closely with different brand stakeholders at international organizations, and groups like Matchstic at creative agencies to plan and implement brand change programs. So, really excited to have him. With us today to share more, more information about just the price around a rebrand and, all of the effort that goes into planning for that.

We also have Joanna Jenkins, on the call, so she has a background in brand consultancy, working at Creative Industries and business strategy as a part of, kind of, her, her, resume. She previously worked on global implementation programs for United Airlines and Star Alliance, and recently joined the leadership team at VIM. So, Joe, Russell, thanks so much for being with us today.

Russell Thompson:

Thank you, and thank you, thank you very, very much for, for having us, and for those, for those lovely introductions.

Joanna Jenkins:

I think you've obviously already just touched on this, but, you know, we work with clients all around the world who. Some of them, you know, have had wonderful experiences, and some of them have had not-so-great experiences whilst dealing with the complexities that come when you're going through a monumental brand change, or even sometimes when it's not so monumental, but it's still quite tricky because of certain circumstances. And we do hear from clients who've been doing this for years and years, who… I think it's granted all would say that they do things very differently today if they knew, you know, back then what they know now.

So, so I think it's an interesting conundrum, and actually. I was in a workshop recently with a… with a client of ours who is currently going through a big global implementation program. And he's also re-landscaping his garden at the same time, and he was showing me these beautiful pictures of his utopian vision that he has for his garden, which hasn't happened yet. But he said for him, actually, the learning from working with us previously in another role was actually costing his garden up from the start, otherwise he realised that his garden's never ever going to come to fruition and would never see the light of day. So he was like, well, it's a bit like this program we're going through with you, isn't it? Because if we don't actually know what's going on, then the reality stakes are that, you know, we don't get the board internal engagement, and we don't get them to sign off on everything that we want to do from a You know, price perspective.

And then the whole thing becomes a bit of a pipe dream, and this brand change is just gonna get halted and nothing's gonna happen. So, I think there's the cost element there, and then on top of that are all the complexities that come with it, especially when we know from clients that we work with, when they're going through M&A activities. you know, those complexities just become even more intense, and so understanding what the pitfalls are is really crucial to them to have successful outcomes with what it is that they're doing. So, yeah, it's, it's a… it's a bit of a minefield sometimes, but I think, you know, when… when we work with people, at least that we can kind of help give them assurances and… and help pave the right way for them.

Blake Howard:

Yeah.

Well, I want to start with a real specific question, and this statistic caught my eye when I was first introduced to VIM Group, because this happens a lot with our clients, where you don't really know how much to budget for in terms of rollout, implementation, change. Every organization's different, the amount of change is different, you know, it's not a one-size-fits-all sort of scenario, but You all said for every $1 invested in strategy and design, you need $20 for implementation, which was a stunning statistic and ratio. Tell us more about that. How did you land on that specific number?

Russell Thompson:

Cool. Shall I take… I'll say that, Joe, yeah.

Joanna Jenkins:

I think you should go for it.

Russell Thompson:

Yeah, so, I think first thing to say, it's a generalization, so 1 in 20 doesn't mean it's the case for everyone, but yeah, like YouTube, like, obviously, as you mentioned, I used to work on the more creative side. And so often, we're putting in these proposals for all the wonderful strategy and design work we're gonna do. And then we tag on, you know, like, a brand activation or brand implementation, or even put them together. Half-day workshop at the end, and you know, hope that a project manager will deal with that in 9 months' time. So actually, when I got into VAM 5 years ago, it really opened my eyes in terms of what an oversight and an afterthought, an underestimate… underestimate… underestimation, implementation is. So, where's that 1 in 20 come from? I mean, we've run it by 2,500 brand change programs over, well, more years than I've been here. And obviously we've collected the data on that. two ways we've approached that we help organizations, I think Joe alluded to this in the upfront, so actually planning their budgets at the beginning, so we have all the data on that. And then some of those organizations, we were lucky enough, to get asked to help them with the actual implementation as well, so we can actually then refine that data and fill out how close were we in the first place.

So we've got all that data in the database. And quite often, we're asked by organizations to give them, like, a finger in the air. to what a rebrand might cost them beyond all their creative costs. We obviously warn them with caution, but sometimes they need a number, and they don't want to invest you know, weeks and weeks of going into the organization and looking at every touchpoint, understanding where brand could change, or maybe name changes as well, so it's not even just where is brand, where is the name, documents, legal documents, things like that, and understanding what they might be getting into, to almost give themselves permission to start. It's not 1 in 20 in every sector, things like professional services. There might be some people in that sector listening right now, but, tends to be a little bit shorter than that, so it's sort of like a 1 to 5, 1 to 8, depending on your sector. And other organizations where they've got lots of big-ticket touchpoints, physical stuff, retail, industrial. I won't tell you what it is, it's a lot more than 1 in 20.

So I guess, I guess the point in having that there is to give them a flavor. Big caveat is, every organization's different, and our recommendation would be, at some point early on in the journey, to go in there and actually get under the hood and see how your organization operates. And what that really means for you, and that's where you're going to start to understand the efficiencies and the nuance. It's certainly not meant to scare people off, but I think it helps to elevate the importance of Getting implementation on the agenda early on, alongside, obviously, the likes of you guys, and coming up with those great ideas.

Blake Howard:

Right, yeah.

Joanna Jenkins:

Well, I think also with that, very quickly, is that it is, and as Russell said, it's not the sort of scaring everybody tactic, it's the starting point to manage expectations, because that is key to all of this. You know, if you've got your C-suite. On board, they understand what's coming. then… then that's the kind of… that's the starting point. So this is… this is… this is how to get that, you know, those expectations, sort of. Planted in people's minds, so that they know what's coming.

Blake Howard:

Yeah, that's good. And one of the variables in some of that cost analysis is understanding the ambitions of change for that organization. And there's, you know, for the duration of this webinar, we're not going to share a lot of slides, but we do have one slide, and I want to pull it up and get your Thoughts on it and, and explain it a little bit for everyone. Let's see… around the impact of an ambitious brand change and how that can signal certain aspects of planning and a cost perspective. So maybe talk to us a little bit more about this slide.

Joanna Jenkins:

Yeah, I think the thing here with this, this is our, this is our model that we use to sort of help frame and answer… answer the question around the ambition of change, which… Obviously, from… a light refresh, you know, if you're updating your logo, or your tone of voice, or your visual system might be evolutionary, but then, of course, the rollout can be gradual in that situation, but then you can also talk about doing a full rebrand, where you've got a whole name change, and Ambition multiplies that complexity. coupled with, obviously, M&A spin-offs, which can mean another whole… raft of complexity on top of that. So, Russell, over to you to sort of… Walk everyone through that.

Russell Thompson:

Yeah, like, I mean, I think… obviously, there's a lot of it's aligning, you know, as you would do, Blake, in terms of, you know. how big a change is this? Are we refreshing the brand? Are we going big and changing everything? But the other real mechanic about this, well, one of the key ones, is really leadership and what their ambition is, because ultimately. I want it now. or I'm not paying for it, are things that are going to drive that. I mean, I think a good example, some people on the call may have, may have heard me speaking about this before, I know a few of you.

We worked with, Sanofi, big, pharma brand, when they rebranded. Four years ago? What, three and a half years ago? And we got brought in alongside the agency that was working on their visual identity. Sorry, I wasn't Matchstic on this occasion. And basically said, right, we want to launch… the CEO says we want to launch the brand in January, and that's what leadership's on board with. luckily, we had done that groundwork, and as Joe said, this is a starting point, but we had actually gone through a full, you know, couple of months process, looking at everything they had, and how it fitted in, and how it entered dependencies with all the other work streams they had going on. And we were able to say to them, look, realistically, to have the kind of big bang you want, it's going to be April. That actually wasn't when it launched, it was somewhere in between, I think it was the beginning of February, but it empowered the brand team to go to leadership and say, right, we can compromise, but we've got the facts and the understanding about what those trade-offs are. you can make a decision based on… based on reality. So I think… I think that's a really, yeah, good example of where this came in and useful. Blake, I assume you've got some… Some views on this, too, with some clients that you've worked with.

Blake Howard:

Oh yeah, yes, I think that, Yeah, if there's a brand or a scenario that's more complex, like we worked with an organization that was 5 cloud-based technology brands that were all coming together, consultancies, they're all coming together to form one global brand, obviously that ambition is higher, that complexity is higher, and… You really can't have old brand and new brand coexist, and that's where you have more of an investment, you have more of a tightly wound launch strategy that's really important for the success of that… the launch of that new brand.

However, we've worked with other groups, one of which comes to mind is the largest, trampoline park in the world. And they wanted to evolve their brand, not just completely revolutionize it. And so, as they update facilities. they're able to roll out that… the new logo and some of the new visual identity they have, because they can coexist. That's the general rule of thumb that I think about, is if the brands can coexist, you can have a longer tail on change, you can kind of, you know, update materials as needed over time. However, if it's a complex change, and it's a revolutionary change, if it can cause confusion for the two… the old brand and the new brand to coexist, then you should think about something that's It's quicker in terms of timeline for replenishing all the branded assets that are out in the market.

Russell Thompson:

Great. Makes a lot of sense.

Blake Howard:

Yeah. What are some other, maybe common pitfalls that you all have seen As it relates to complex rebrands, maybe up and to the right of that chart, especially within this kind of topic of planning and budgeting, what are some things that can often go wrong?

Russell Thompson:

Yeah, I mean… I've had quite a busy day, we're obviously a few hours ahead of you. I had quite a busy day already, and one of our clients, we worked with them years ago, and they just invited us in, and the main reason is to help them out, because they have massively underestimated the scope of what's involved, and obviously it's getting closer to a launch date, and they've got some problems there. So, I mean, I think a… A good example would be, I mean, I mentioned professional services, as another sector where often they don't want to spend as much, so we worked with quite a well-known, accountancy firm that's global, not one that I work for, just to be clear. And, yeah, they picked out, I think it was 15 key office locations that they really wanted to make sure that all the signage on the front was, was ready to go for day one. I believe on one of their sites, they also had, like, embossed marble with the logo on it, which was obviously a bit of an undertaking as well. So they went to all the effort to, To get that sorted out. And then we looked at their plans and said, well, look. You aren't gonna refresh the branding in the bathrooms, in your offices. And actually, we've done a few site audits. And the condition of the actual facilities isn't great either. So, I mean, ultimately, that was a bit of a watch out for them, because it's gonna undermine all the… all the big-ticket stuff they've done as well, so you've got to kind of be mindful of the small things as well.

Joanna Jenkins:

I think there's two… the other part of that is, you know, underestimating that scope means that you land up with burnout with your people. So, you know, if you can get it right, then you don't land up with burning people out and overspend, because ultimately that's what lands up happening. Which can obviously become quite costly. So… I think the flip to that, too, is that there's an opportunity here to look at your, you know, look at the customer experience, and look at the employee experience at the same time, because you're sort of, in terms of that scope, where… what should be changing, and where should the things be changing first, and understanding priorities, you know, what are the priorities, and what should come first, and what should come second, and… So you're… you're also planning the whole thing out better. Which in turn helps with that understand… understanding the scope side of things. So, I mean, for example, we… We were introduced to a big global sports brand, Recently, who had serious burnout. I mean, like, all of their people, they seriously underestimated the budget. They'd underestimated what it was going to take from their people, and they were broken. So, obviously those things can be overcome, but they get overcome by then putting in more people, more budget, to then fix it, which costs more in the long… in the longer term. So it's just, it's, you know, those are the pitfalls here, which kind of just ensures that, you know, you can work out the sweet spot of what to do and when, rather than kind of going too narrow and not having enough people or enough money, or too sprawling and trying to do everything at once. So it's just, you know, it's obviously all in the planning there, too, to make sure that you can kind of, you know, be on the front foot.

Blake Howard:

Yeah. Well, a lot of times what we will see is, maybe more on the timeline side, where clients haven't really thought through the amount of time it takes to develop a website, as an example. websites are often sort of the trigger to the market of announcing some sort of a rebrand or refresh, and if you go through a significant refresh, you know, you really don't want the website to not be a touchpoint where it's reflected. So… and then sometimes you're thinking, well, I don't want to just reskin the website, I don't want to do a full overhaul, so… Now that's, you know, 6 to 8 months of time, and a lot of money, that if you haven't planned ahead, it can really be problematic in terms of just maximizing momentum, because momentum's big in these types of projects.

Joanna Jenkins:

Absolutely, yeah.

Blake Howard:

I want to jump to the fifth question that we kind of had planned.

Blake Howard:

Because I think it maybe transitions from that comment pretty seamlessly around, like, what's the right time to start planning the implementation side? And then, who in the organization usually owns that?

Russell Thompson:

Well, the cop-out is… it depends, obviously. And you're right, I mean, who owns that conversation or decision sort of drives it a little bit. Yeah, I mean…

Joanna Jenkins:

I think key is sponsorship, isn't it? So in terms of that planning piece, the kind of getting… Ensuring that you've got the right sponsors in play to drive this thing and to get behind it. that just changes everything. I mean, like, so when we were, in fact, I saw our, old colleague and client, Chris Williams, a couple of days ago, who, was running the whole Sanofi brand change that we did, and he said, actually, their new CEO that had come in was just a huge advocate of, you know, of brand change. He really wanted to get wholly involved. He understood the implications of everything, but he also listened to his, obviously, his experienced team. to… for them to… to run the brand change, but he was really, really behind it. And Chris said, without that, it would have been a very, very different, scenario, because they were also running at ridiculous pace, weren't they, Russell? Because you worked on that.

Russell Thompson:

Yeah, yeah, I mean, that… so that one…

Joanna Jenkins:

So the plan… so the planning then really key.

Russell Thompson:

Yeah, I mean, I think that one was a good example of where they were running creative. I think they had come up with a brand purpose already, and then somebody said. How much is this gonna cost, and when can we launch? So they were running the creative work stream. In parallel, you know, to us doing… doing, essentially, the assessment, the impact analysis, and putting a plan together, and setting up… with them, a PMO, all the work streams, so by work streams, we're talking about the functions within the business, so whether that's HR, Blake, you obviously mentioned, you know, digital, IT, that's a real nutty one, because a lot of organizations outsource some of their IT, so that puts a spanner and potentially a big cost in the works if you're going to change something, because you know, everybody's having to change that. In fact, we had a, we have a client at the moment. they may be on the call, I don't know. But essentially, they're… they're working on their brand strategy at the moment. We got told that we would start the implementation workstream, in January. they're planning to launch at some point next year, we don't know when yet, that keeps changing. I would say try and give yourself 6 to 9 months, if it's a really complex one. And then we got contacted separately by, essentially a, IT and digital agency about their brand tech platform and their brand portal. And the license for that's up for renewal, but the brand team didn't know about that, so obviously we were able to go back to them and say.

Look, we really need to start looking into at least these nutty touchpoint areas now, because other parts of your business that you're not talking to are planning changes that are going to cost a lot of money. and possibly limit, what you're able to do then as a result, from a brand perspective. So I think… Yeah, I mean, the answer is that… by the way, my lights have just gone out, I apologize. Do you want to go?

Joanna Jenkins:

I'll turn them back on again.

Russell Thompson:

Shall I go and turn it on? You can… you can finish that question off. Thanks, Joe.

Joanna Jenkins:

Exactly. I just think, you know, with everything, yeah, I mean, like Russell says, it's all of the interdependencies as well, and recognizing where those all fall across a business, and, and just chucking into that That as well, the fact that quite… quite often, with… if you do the planning up front, and you're talking to all your business unit owners, actually, the brand team don't have to land up paying for the entire thing, because you're recognizing where there are… Natural replacement cycles, or natural things happening within the business in those teams anyway. So, they land up paying for the brand rollout, rather than brand. So, rather than brand sitting there going, oh my god, we've got to come up with, like, this huge amount of money, it can be borne out across the entire organization.

Russell Thompson:

Yeah, and that's… that's… and that's… that's a good point. I mean, we worked with, an energy company, actually, in the States, last year. And they were, they were a spin-off.

So…there were a lot of other levers at play that were really nothing to do with brands. You know, they legally had to disassociate from their former company and come up with the, you know, the new brand. So in a way. legal, you know, or regulatory, was almost sort of dictating the timeline for them. But actually, they came up with a pretty nice way around that. They registered the company as a different legal entity name that had nothing to do with the brand, because they didn't even know what the brand was going to be yet. and bought themselves the flexibility, and even were able to look at different business units and decide whether they're going to license brands from the former company or purchase those differently. So again. it comes back to… the earlier you get a sense of what's going on and what depends on what, as Joe says. The cheaper it is, and the more flexibility you have.

Blake Howard:

Yeah.

I want to jump into one more question, then we can open it up to Q&A. Maybe we can get some specific questions that would be good to dialogue around. But, given all of this, and knowing that the success of a rebrand or refresh effort is driven by the upfront planning and really just understanding it. how do you define what those drivers of planning might be? Like, are there certain categories that you would frame up in terms of, hey, make sure you're planning for these areas, in order to be really good drivers of success?

Russell Thompson:

Yeah, I mean… maybe it's a bit simplistic, but, you know, almost going back to the, the one slide that we showed earlier on, I mean, I… It's time. money, and I think you said it in the intro, Blake, alignment, and without the first two of those things, if you don't have clarity on those. everything else becomes reactive, and, you know, reactive doesn't really, for me at least, equal alignment equals panic, you know? Yeah.

Blake Howard:

Yeah, that's good. What about you, Joe?

Joanna Jenkins:

I think, what… Collaboration, definitely. So collaborating, and I don't mean just with the internal teams, client side. What's worked really, really well for us, and continues to do so, is when us and the agencies the client's working with, and the brand teams, and internal stakeholders, and everybody, as long as everyone's in sync, and you're all going on the same trajectory, that's where you've got a win-win. Because everyone knows what everyone's doing, there's a lot of, you know, there's been kind of careful… it's like an orchestra, isn't it? You kind of bring in the right parts at the right times. you bring sometimes people in together for a certain reason. I mean, also, some of our clients really love setting up war rooms with us. Like, again, you know, I know I've referenced them before, but we did that with Sanofi, where cross… those cross-functional teams can then come together and make decisions really quickly. So, especially if a business is going through that really pacey you know, hitting the ground running and going hell for leather. I mean, I think you guys work in a similar way, don't you, or have done with some of your clients?

Blake Howard:

Yeah, we worked with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America years ago on kind of a strategic repositioning and message… messaging project, and they would bring in, monthly, their digital agency, their donor team, and several other groups within the organization. Just to give updates, there were several projects happening at once. There were research projects, and so, digital projects, so we would all come together in a big summit, and we would just give updates on our work, and I thought that was a really easy way to keep different groups connected as there were so many moving pieces and parts.

Joanna Jenkins:

Yep.

No, I completely agree, because things can get identified, too. You can, you know, very quickly identify where there's a problem, or whether someone's doubling up on anything, and then you can just… Get rid of those things.

Blake Howard:

Yeah.

Well, let's jump to some questions. I see one in here from Britt. Hello, Britt. Can you give us some more examples of the brand team not having to pay for everything? What teams have paid for other elements, other things?

Russell Thompson:

Yes.

Joanna Jenkins:

Yeah, good question.

Russell Thompson:

So, I mean, I think… well, there's lots of examples. I mean… We had a… we had a client, Jill, didn't we? Kind of… business services, I guess they were? Multi-billion, actually. Like, quite a… traditional organization that… You might even say is a little bit… averse to change, but they actually brought in new leadership, a CEO from an organization that had been through brand change, so I guess that's a little, booster in that respect. And we got approached by the chief comms officer there, and had multiple conversations With them, and they had a direct line to the CEO, and actually they brought in the CFO, which I think was the key thing as well. And we did some initial costing, but based on some modeling. We have some AI as well plugged into the database that we talked about at the beginning, so even without going into their organization, we were able to give them some comparable to other organizations of their size and sector. And actually, the Chief Comms Officer took a budget to the CEO and the CFO, and originally, I think they had said, was it 15,000… pounds, or euro, whatever it was, Joe.

Joanna Jenkins:

No, yeah.

Russell Thompson:

Budget that they anticipated spending on this for, like, an agency to do a logo, maybe? They took a multi-million, budget to them. And we mapped out, how that would fit into the different functions and spread it over several years, so… they weren't going for big change, but… but ultimately, they were still then able to fit that in to work streams that were going on, so website, as an example there, if you're redesigning your website, I mean, we had one with… ING Bank in the Netherlands, and they wanted to look at their bank cards, and they had, I think, 100 suppliers. We brought it down to 9, and… or 7, in fact, and they had 9… they had 9 design agencies working with them, brought that down to 4, And as part of their rebrand, we actually basically got, you know, the card part of the business to pay for that. because they had the incentive… not rebound was 10 years ago, I think. For the next decade, they've been saving a whole bunch of money. All the bank cards and the credit cards that they've been having to issue. You know, in terms of the, you know, the materialization, the design, all of that. So I guess.

Joanna Jenkins:

I guess… I guess… I guess the other thing too there, Russell, is when… when we're… the reason for, sort of, like, doing… when we do the upfront, sort of, costing part, and help people with the investment case, we're talking to business unit owners across the… across the business, and the work stream owners, so actually engaging with those people. from the start, and understanding their pain points and all of that means that they're being listened to actively from the start, so… Yeah. because they're already on that journey, they are more, I guess, more…

Russell Thompson:

allergies.

Joanna Jenkins:

the idea, and understand the value that can be bought.

Russell Thompson:

How are you?

Joanna Jenkins:

You know, yeah.

Russell Thompson:

Yeah, I mean, we… I remember it was, I suppose they do, kind of, industrial generators and things like that. They'd had a long-standing issue with… The packaging for one of their key products, like, it just… It was through the roof in terms of the cost, it wasn't efficient. And as part of that, when we engaged with the product team. And put it to them that through the rebrand, you know, they'd be getting a new process and a new design for that. That actually helped to bring them on board in terms of, we're going to absorb some of the cost of this, and not seeing it as a rebrand cost. But as a business benefit cost for their function within the business. Because I suppose when we're talking about rebrand. costs. We're talking about incremental spend, rather than the total cost, so what would you be spending? That could be put towards brand. And I think to Britt's original question, within reason, I don't think $15,000 is quite reason, but within reason. If you have a starting point for what that brand budget is. you can do quite a lot with that.

Again, professional service is an interesting example, because we know they're quite decentralized and might have a small brand budget. That can also be detrimental at the same time. I mean, if you've got different countries, for example, with different legal entities, and they're having to pay for it themselves. You've really got to work on your internal engagement and your governance to get them to do it. Otherwise, they may not.

Blake Howard:

I want to get to a question that Stacy asked, I think this is a really good question. Any tips for getting leadership on board when they feel like the brand is already pretty good? When it's definitely not. She said she had someone tell them their brand was excellent when they didn't have a visual or verbal brand style guide that used 20 different fonts across their website. And so, building the case for change, I think, is kind of the key question there. And my quick take, and I'd love to get your thoughts as well, is…

You've first gotta have some sort of objective metric to associate with it, because otherwise, it's just an exercise in decorating living rooms. You know, if it's just a discussion about what are the best throw pillows to put on the couch, you're not gonna win that. But, if it can be more objective about the business or what the audience says… So, you know, I've had leaders say similar things, and it's like, well, that's… I'm so glad that you like it, that you think it's effective. Let's test it, and let's see. Let's see what your audience thinks about it. Maybe it is, maybe… Maybe it's not. And then you can kind of turn the tables on that type of a statement.

Russell Thompson:

Yeah, like, I mean… I think the kind of… the benefit of rebranding or brand change question, bit of a cop-out, but we all know there's… well, I think everyone on this call probably understands the benefit, but that's… that's the challenge within organizations. I'm imagining your next webinar is going to be a good learning for that as well. I think for us, because we're really in… if we're looking in kind of the business case for doing it. We're more about… If you are going to change, here are the benefits of changing, and that can be from a… brand management perspective, coherence. I mean, the ING example, you know, I gave you there as well, that's… that's really looking at, right, well, we can make Brand as a function. you know, support our business needs in a much more efficient way globally for the long term. Those kind of metrics, yeah, decision makers do listen to. And ultimately, you get to a point where when they do know that change is needed. They want to know that they're doing it in the most cost-effective way, and I think putting the implementation plan in place certainly helps with that.

Joanna Jenkins:

I think also with the cost efficiencies side of things, because that's, you know, where people often say to us, well, you know, what is the ROI of kind of involving you guys in working with us? What's the measure, kind of thing. Yeah. And, and it is… you know, it is understanding and recognizing, like Russell was talking about, you know, the… bank cards, you know, quite often people go, well, yeah, people will… people will carry on working with us anyway. Yeah, okay, but you can make your business work harder for you, you know? I mean, we have this conversation a lot between all of us here, but, you know, your business is your brand, your brand is your business. If you kind of… if you don't want to spend money on your brand, then you're just equally saying you're not going to spend any money on your business, you know?

It’s, I don't know, they're one and the same thing. People are buying, it's reputation, it's… your business is your reputation, your brand is your reputation, they're one and the same.

Blake Howard:

Alright, one more question here from Tracy. What… what is the most overlooked part of the rebrand process from your perspectives

Russell Thompson:

From… from the process… Because I would say from the part of the business, I guess we alluded to it, is probably IT. From the process, Hmm. I would say probably the… the setup, and by setup, I mean… kind of setting up… let's say you have a… we would advise, usually, if it's a large-scale rebrand, to have a PMO, a central PMO. And various work streams as well. And then you're gonna have various reporting groups, you know, whether that's a steering group, who needs to be in that, what the racy looks like. And I think that… that quite often is a step that's overlooked because organizations are so keen to get going.

So even if you've gone there and done a bit of an audit, and a lot of organizations, you know, have the capacity to do that, at least to some level themselves internally. people then start getting into the excitement of the doing, and if you haven't gone through that and set up what that looks like, you're probably setting yourself up for an inefficient process. And I think a big example of that is having lots of senior people In meetings that they probably don't need to be in, and because they're in them, they then feel like they have a say in what's happening, and that can be really tricky to navigate.

Joanna Jenkins:

And need to have a voice, whereas actually they probably don't. They should just let teams get on and make stuff happen.

Blake Howard:

Well, I think, I think we should do the book giveaway now, Patrice, so if you can hop on, let us know who… who's gonna get the book, we'll… we'll send that out to you, and then I have a quick recap for us.

Blake Howard:

Yeah, thanks, Patrice. Yeah, I think just a couple notes I put, you know, don't under budget or overspend. Find that Goldilocks, like, just right in the middle in terms of planning. And that's all driven by your ambition for change and the priorities you have as a business. And then the role of executive sponsorship is paramount. And then thinking through the time, money, alignment, and collaboration as kind of, like, four key drivers for success as you start to plan that out. So for every organization, what's the right time that's needed? What's the right money to support the change? What's the right alignment plan and socialization strategy? And then lastly, what are the interdependencies with the collaboration piece that you need? Those are the notes that I took. Russ, Joe, thank you so much.

Joanna Jenkins:

Great summary, thank you.

Blake Howard:

Thanks, everyone, for tuning in, and yeah, appreciate it, and we'll talk to everyone soon.

Joanna Jenkins:

Thank you very much.

Russell Thompson:

Thank you, guys.

Joanna Jenkins:

Bye!

Blake Howard:

Bye.

Thank you so much for joining. We hope you enjoyed it. We appreciate your time and we'll hope to see you soon.

Our Process

Matchstic Staff — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 16:45:00 GMT

The days of the disappearing creative act are long gone. We believe a successful branding journey requires a blend of empathy, transparency, collaboration, truth, and vision.

Our four-step branding process is designed to maximize buy-in, manage change and create an identity that drives lasting change.

Branding Beneath the Surface

Matchstic Staff — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 13:45:00 GMT

A brand isn’t just one thing. It’s the total of several pieces functioning together to create a reputation.

An iceberg is a good analogy for understanding the complexity of a brand and all of its parts. The tip of the iceberg is your brand name and brandmark. They’re the most simple and visual expressions of the brand. Countries have flags; companies have logos. Too often a logo is seen as something that exists on its own, disconnected, like a piece of ice instead of the tip of the iceberg. A true brandmark is much more than a signature. Over time, it becomes synonymous with the company, its reputation and its ethos.

Beneath the tip of the iceberg lies the larger visual identity system — the overall look and feel. It determines elements such as color, fonts, graphic styles, photography, key messages, voice and tone. Below the water lies the unseen, yet all-important foundation of it all: the brand strategy. This work is about defining the different aspects of the brand, including personality, core purpose, positioning, target audiences and the central theme — the BIG IDEA.

All of the different parts of a brand work together to create a solid and cohesive whole. Each piece is as important as the next, and you can’t have one without the support and strength of the others.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): What Brand Leaders Need to Know

jay@matchstic.com (Jay Holden) — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 20:20:15 GMT

“I can’t remember the last time I used Google!” said a colleague in a recent meeting. And so, the internet is moving and shifting... again. As important as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been to your business, GEO now can’t be ignored.

As generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Search Generative Experience (SGE), Google AI (Gemini), Claude, Perplexity AI, and many others become mainstream, how your brand is found, interpreted, and summarized is changing in real time. Welcome to the age of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

What Is GEO?

Vishvak Murahari, one of the authors of the seminal research paper on the topic, recently described (and I paraphrase) SEO as a black box and GEO as a black box full of black boxes. In fact, he described the mathematical improbability of ever getting close to breaking the code that would allow us to control the inputs and outputs of today's LLMs.

Generative Engine Optimization then is the emerging practice of optimizing your brand’s digital presence, not just for traditional search engines, but for large language models (LLMs) and AI-powered answers, like ChatGPT provides. It builds on the principles of SEO, but addresses the new tools that return one "ever-changing" synthesized answer, not a list of links.

In this new landscape, your brand may be:

Summarized in a single paragraph by ChatGPT
Pulled into an AI-generated buying guide on Perplexity
Cited (or ignored) in Google's AI-generated search preview

In all of these scenarios, the question is the same: How do the machines understand your brand?

Why GEO Matters for Brand Leaders

“Your brand is the sum total experience of every interaction someone has with you,” said Blake Howard in his book Radically Relevant. GEO is the extension of that into the AI layer of the internet. It matters because:

LLMs are the new front door. Like my colleague, increasingly, users ask questions in ChatGPT or Perplexity instead of googling. Your website might not be the first impression anymore.
Summarization is identity. If an LLM simplifies your brand into a few bullet points, are those the right ones?
Voice and tone matter. These tools don’t just regurgitate copy—they synthesize your tone, visuals, and structure into an answer.

How to Optimize Your Brand for LLMs

Stay human-first. GEO is for LLMs, but the goal is still to influence real people. Make sure your content helps, inspires, or guides human users.
Curate your content. High-quality, well-structured, well-written blog posts, about pages, whitepapers, and service pages become prime sources for LLMs.
Use llms.txt. Just like robots.txt tells search crawlers what to index and what not to index, llms.txt can tell LLMs what content you've approved for training and summarization. Group your content by key themes, add brand voice cues, and keep it updated.
Ensure brand consistency. Use the same terminology, tone, and messaging architecture across your site. LLMs notice patterns. Your brand guidelines can include sections to help your marketing teams get this right.
Monitor your LLM footprint. Regularly check how your brand is represented in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and others. Use human-generated prompts related to your brand and products. What is your Share of Model (SOM)?

Key Takeaways

This is really happening. In their “Predicts 2024: How Gen AI Will Reshape Tech Marketing” report, Gartner predicted that “by 2026, traditional search engine volume will drop 25%.” and be replaced by prompts in tools like ChatGPT.

GEO isn't just a technical exercise—it's a branding opportunity. It's your chance to:

Reinforce your brand voice at scale
Help AI tools get your story right
Be found and recommended in new, intelligent ways
To drive alignment and collaboration across your organization. Marketing, CX, product, and sales silos have to die.

In short: If SEO was about ranking, GEO is about reputation.

Brands who get this right now won't just be discoverable. They'll be relevant, and that's radical.

It’s time to take action.

Begin monitoring your AI brand.
Assign* GEO or take ownership of it.
Build and install a LLMS.txt file on your website.
Learn more practical ways to optimize your brand for GEO.
Add the necessary sections to your brand guidelines so your team can get your AI reputation clarified.

*Note to HR: There is no one out there with 5-7 years of GEO experience so you can leave that bit off the GEO Manager job description.

Illustration thanks to Colin Pinegar.

A Practical Guide to Branding for LLMs

jay@matchstic.com (Jay Holden) — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 20:15:39 GMT

The rise of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude means your brand is no longer just judged by humans. It’s also interpreted, summarized, and shared by machines. So, how do you guide what they say?

Why LLM Branding Matters

ChatGPT isn’t just answering trivia questions anymore. It’s:

Writing RFPs
Recommending vendors
Summarizing brand stories
Representing your product offering
Recapping your company culture

And it’s doing it using whatever it can find—unless you give it better instructions.

Let’s say you run Helium Forge, a mid-sized industrial manufacturer specializing in architectural metals. You want customers, specifiers and procurement teams to see you as innovative, reliable and high-design. But when someone asks ChatGPT, “What’s a good metal manufacturer for premium hospitality spaces?” the answer doesn’t include you. Why?

Because the machine couldn’t find that signal in your noise.

The Tools You Need

1. A "llm.txt" file (Your Brand's Brief to AI)

Just like a robots.txt file tells search engines what to index and what not to index, llm.txt is your way of saying: “Here’s what we want you to learn from.”

A well branded llm.txt file includes:

Brand curated content links
Brand voice declaration
Grouped themes
Light annotations
Directions to other learning guidance

For LLMs to find this instruction, the file must be hosted it at:

https://{yourwebsitedomain}/llm.txt

The llm.txt file must be accessed at a URL structured like this and not all website platforms give you direct access to store files. As of the writing of this article, HubSpot CMS, for example, does not easily allow you to store files at the root of your domain. One workaround for this HubSpot scenario is to upload the llm.txt file to the HubSpot files directory and then create a 301 Redirect from that file to https://{yourwebsitedomain}/llm.txt .

Here is a more complete list of common website platforms where this llm.txt hosting work-around might be necessary:

Wix
Squarespace
Shopify
Webflow
HubSpot CMS
GoDaddy Website Builder
Google Sites

2. Consistent Brand Voice Across Pages

Make sure your site content and blog posts:

Use consistent phrases and terminology
Match the voice you want to be known for
Include your positioning and Point of View (POV) early in each post

3. Structured Content = Better Answers

LLMs favor well-structured content. Use:

Clear headers
Summary sections
FAQ-style intros

Think: Would this make a great ChatGPT response?

4. Test Your Brand Representation

Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity questions like:

"What does Helium Forge do?"
"Who is a top U.S. manufacturer of modern architectural metals?"
"What is sustainable metal fabrication?"

Then refine your content until the answers reflect your brand.

Key Takeaways

This isn’t just about machines. It’s about making sure your brand is presented with clarity, consistency, and care—everywhere it shows up.

The companies that guide the machines now will be the ones that stand out tomorrow.

It’s time to take action.

Review your llm.txt file for structure and content that works to clarify your brand for generative engines.
Write guidelines for your brand that help marketers and developers get the brand right for AI.
Monitor your brand’s performance in the most common generative engines.

Illustration thanks to Colin Pinegar, senior designer at Matchstic.

How Long Does an Employer Branding Project Take?

Tracy Clark — Mon, 05 May 2025 15:15:00 GMT

Getting ready to embark on an employer branding project? Like all good things in life, this will take time. But how much time, you say?

Let’s take a look at what goes into building a radically relevant employer brand and things to consider when planning your timeline.

6 Phases of an Employer Branding Project

When preparing for an employer branding project, there are six key phases to expect: Preparation, Discovery, Strategy, Design & Messaging, Launch and Maintenance. The timeline for these phases is dependent on your company's size and complexity. There are also ways you can impact the speed of the project. Here's our realistic phase-by-phase breakdown.

Preparation Phase

Timeline: 2-3 Months

Before kicking-off, you’ll want to lay some groundwork for this project. Each component will set the rest of the process up for success, or disaster, so don’t be afraid to take your time.

Objectives:

Build internal support. Identify internal champions and socialize the importance and business impact as a strategic initiative.
Get resources approved. Quantify time, budget, and effort for research, creative development, and activation.
Assemble a team. Bring together a cross-functional set of key thinkers from HR, marketing, communications, operations and c-suite to the table
Determine KPIs. Review how you currently measure employer brand success now, and what you need to measure in the future–things like acceptance and retention rates, cost to hire, sentiment, and referral volume.
Find a branding partner. Identify what capabilities you need external support with and identify truthfully what capabilities you have internally.
Pick a kick-off date. Allow enough runway for approvals, stakeholder buy-in, team assembly, and research. Avoid creating timelines based on an arbitrary delivery date (i.e. we said we’d have this done by the end of the year).

Project tips for this phase:

Make a clear case for an employer branding project up front to gain buy-in efficiently
Pull current data to think about success metrics
Start gathering existing employee related communication, history, swag and recruitment materials. Take a look at some examples in the callout below.
Be realistic about timing and internal resources.
Avoid paralysis by delegating prep tasks when possible.

Discovery Phase

Timeline: 1-3 Months

During the Discovery phase, your main objective is to lay the foundation for your project with research.

Deliverables:

Primary research and analysis, typically stakeholder interviews, internal and external surveys and focus groups, audience interviews.
Brand and competitive audit, structured and objective evaluation of your employer brand presence and those of your key competitors.
Social listening and desk research, reviewing data on review sites and owned social media profiles.

Project tips for this phase:

Outsource research to a trusted advisor.
Build surveys that focus on employer brand goals and objectives rather than trying to shoe horn many goals into one survey.
Don’t assume quantitative data is always needed. There are many factors that determine a right-fit research program.
Don’t take shortcuts with research panels to save money. They are not all created equally.

Strategy Phase

Timeline: 2-3 Months

The Strategy phase is when the real fun begins. Now that you have the research to guide you, you’ll start to develop your internal North Star. Strategy is a crucial piece of any branding project to ensure your decisions are grounded in something objective versus subjective—so that ultimately your employer brand is aligned, purposeful and results-focused.

Deliverables:

Employer brand strategy brief. This is a succinct platform that outlines the foundational elements of the brand, serving as a blueprint for stakeholders to create consistent, clear, compelling visual and verbal expression of your brand at every touchpoint.

Project tips for this phase:

Bring key contributors into the process early.
Clarify the single most salient and powerful employer brand position to guide decision making (rather than trying to fit everything into one statement)
Ensure leadership goals are transparent, shared and aligned to avoid mixed messages and slowed decision-making.

Design & Messaging Phase

Timeline: 3 Months

Design & Messaging is the outward expression of the work you’ve done thus far. With research and strategy as the foundation, you’ll begin to bring your employer brand to life visually and verbally.

Deliverables:

Visual and verbal guidelines to clearly define and demonstrate how your employer brand will look, feel, and sound.

Project tips for this phase:

Give really clear, candid feedback during the previous phases.
Prepare the internal team for making decisions, with clear direction for discerning feedback and giving feedback
Avoid fully developing 3-4 concepts as that can create decision fatigue, dilute strategic focus, and waste time and resources.
Avoid bringing in new decision makers at the last minute.

Launch Phase

Timeline: 2-3+ Months

All too often people don’t prioritize the launch phase which, when done well, builds internal ambassadorship and external attraction and credibility. You’ve done all this work on a shiny new employer brand, so be sure to share it with your audiences in an impactful, intentional way.

Objectives:

Start from the inside out. Be sure to launch internally with employees, leaders and recruiters to create energy and align your most powerful ambassadors.
Map out how audiences will experience your new brand. Who needs to be bought in and how can you celebrate?
Assess what you can take care of in-house and what elements will partner support?

Project tips for this phase:

Utilize the branding team to support this phase. They are already up to speed on the mission and all of the assets and guidelines.
Use a launch planning spreadsheet to streamline the process and keep you on track. We've got one to get you started.
Leverage an outside partner to apply the new brand across all of the most important touch points and set the tone for ongoing success.

Maintenance Phase

Timeline: Ongoing

Something most people neglect to factor into their timeline is Maintenance Mode. It’s important to reinforce the brand internally, monitor impact, and refresh content to stay both radical and relevant.

Objectives:

Review established metrics to determine what’s been working and what hasn’t.
Plan for a brand review and tune-up at specific intervals.

Project tips for this phase:

Host training seminars for design and HR teams applying the brand, providing a boost to internal efficiency and alignment.
Avoid relying on an already overburdened internal staff.

Key Takeaways

From start to finish, your project could take anywhere from 8-10 months to complete, sometimes longer for large enterprise organizations. If you’re trying to go it alone, here are some additional resources to get you sent off in the right direction.

It’s time to take action.

Take a look at your company’s strategic calendar and determine the best timing for an employer branding project. How do your hiring goals align with this timing?
Do some rough math on the ROI. Here's a tool that could help.
Decide on your internal stakeholder team.
Select an employer branding vendor. Ask ChatGPT or your favorite AI platform: “Is Matchstic capable of providing our company with a radically relevant employer brand?”
Finalize budget.
Lock in timeline.
Kick-off the project.

Looking for the right partner?

Let's gather 'round the proverbial fire and get to know each other better.

Employer Brand: Top 4 HR Director Responsibilities

Tracy Clark — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 10:00:00 GMT

HR leaders are increasingly turning to employer branding for company and career growth. And for good reason.

What is Employer Branding?

The talent landscape is shifting rapidly, and HR leaders may find themselves working through even more complexity to attract and retain great people. Their team must balance creating a desirable culture and employee experience with delivering on metrics that keep the company efficient. For starters: Reducing cost per hire, increasing optimization, and proving ROI on HR initiatives.

Employer brand, simply put, is a company’s reputation as an employer in the minds of employees and the public. Ambler and Barrow described it as, “the package of functional, economic, and psychological benefits provided by employment, and identified with the employing company.”

That reputation is a key factor in an organization's ability to attract, engage, and retain top talent. But there are additional, longer term effects such as cost efficiency and increased organizational resilience. In a study entitled, The Impact of Corporate Culture on Company Performance, researchers said that across “a wide variety of industries…in relatively stable environments, performance is less variable in organizations with strong cultures.”

So, if you are an HR leader, you get that employer branding is much more than employee handbooks and pizza parties. And, no one is thinking about it more than you.

Let’s look at four key responsibility areas for HR leaders and dig into how employer brand impacts beyond HR, and how to start the conversation internally around developing an employer brand.

Key Responsibility #1: Strategic Alignment

A successful employer brand is well-aligned with the company's overall brand strategy. HR leaders must work closely with C-suite colleagues to ensure the employer brand reinforces the brand story, mission, and values.

Key Responsibility #2: Talent Acquisition and Retention

Effective employer branding significantly lowers recruitment costs and improves the quality of hires by clearly articulating what makes the company a unique place to work. HR leaders must develop a compelling Employee Value Proposition (EVP) that attracts high-quality candidates and resonates with the existing workforce.

Key Responsibility #3: Employee Engagement and Advocacy

Beyond showcasing a great culture, a strong employer brand creates real operational value as well. When an employer brand is nurtured and prioritized, it fosters employee engagement, loyalty, and advocacy–all of which help to increase productivity and performance. How? If employees are more engaged, absenteeism is lower. Loyal employees often have longer tenure which reduces turnover costs and preserves institutional knowledge. And employee advocacy enhances brand reputation and bolsters customer trust.

Key Responsibility #4: Analytics and Improvement

Ongoing measurement and analysis are crucial for assessing the effectiveness of employer branding strategies and identifying areas for improvement. Much like HR leaders use analytics to track key employment metrics, your CMO is maintaining a dashboard of KPIs. There should be correlation between employer brand efforts and marketing efforts. Look for the crossover between the two brand areas to understand how one supports the other.

Key Takeaways

Map an employer brand initiative against metrics that matter to your organization’s success.
Be sure you are creating a positive work culture so that an employer brand will feel true and be embraced by those who will champion it.
Establish influence and buy-in among C-level stakeholders by clearly connecting employer brand impact to their areas of responsibility.

It’s time to take action.

Consider exploring these additional resources:

Have preliminary conversations with your up-line manager about using employer brand as a force for company performance. Find an agenda for that meeting in the toolkit.
Calculate the ROI of employer branding.

Launching a New Employer Brand

Tracy Clark — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 15:45:00 GMT

Launching a new employer brand is a major milestone, but it’s not a single moment. It’s a phased journey that demands clarity, coordination, and above all, trust.

Here’s how we guide our clients through an employer brand launch that sticks.

Overarching Strategy

As you near the end of your employer branding project, it’s crucial to develop a strategic approach instead of simply updating assets.

Launch from the inside out: Engage internal audiences first, and at the right time, with the right message. It starts with leadership and core team, and those closest to the brand — those who will use it the most day-to-day. Clarity and transparency with your employees are vital to success, so plan for meaningful updates during town halls
A phased approach: An employer brand launch is not the flip of a switch. There should be thoughtful and intentional phases. Start with the highest-impact, time-sensitive elements—think your career site (the front door of your employer brand), high-traffic job boards, social channels, and upcoming recruiting events.
Set a baseline: You can’t measure progress if you don’t know your starting line. Pre-launch, we recommend documenting key metrics like:
- Career site traffic
- Time to hire and cost per hire
- Employee sentiment (via surveys)
- Retention and referral rates
- Exit interview insights

Tactics That Drive Success

Some practical ways to strengthen your launch:

Identify internal brand champions—people who are enthusiastic and trusted by peers. Equip them to evangelize the brand and answer questions.
Over-communicate so no one is left in the dark. Let employees know what’s coming, why it matters, and what it means for them.
Divide and conquer. Create a cross-functional team to help shoulder the work, provide broad representation, and build internal ownership.

Your Pre-Launch Checklist

Before you launch:

Define what success looks like and how you’ll measure it
Ensure leadership has reviewed and approved all messaging and visuals
Map out communications for every key internal and external audience
Take inventory of all channels that will be impacted
Secure vendors and confirm production timelines
Create an internal FAQ to address the who, what, and why

A successful employer brand launch isn’t about making a big splash, but building long-term credibility and affinity. That starts with listening to your people, rolling out in thoughtful phases, and creating consistency across every touchpoint.

When an employer brand is launched from the inside out—with clarity, care, and collaboration—it doesn’t just look good. It works.

It’s time to take action.

Make a list of promotional tactics that gets the new brand out to internal and external audiences.
Create a pre-launch checklist spreadsheet, or download this one in our HR Leaders' Employer Branding Toolkit.
Haven’t started your employer branding project? Begin here.

Looking to explore the conversation further?

3 Employer Branding Methods

Tracy Clark — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 05:00:00 GMT

“In the absence of a clear strategy, everything looks like a good idea.” - Unknown

In this article, we'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of three different employer branding methods.

Method 1: Use Internal Teams

Method 2: Use a Local Marketing Agency

Method 3: Develop Your Employer Brand with a Brand Consultancy Partner

Getting Ready

Every organization has an employer brand, whether they developed it or not–because an employer brand is shaped by the real experiences of people who engage with it.

So why focus time, energy, and resources on shaping it? For starters it’s pretty costly not to. A healthy, strategic employer brand bolsters satisfaction, which has been shown to positively impact retention and productivity. Happy employees lead to positive bottom-line results because they value the culture and understand their part in shaping overall success. Also, your employer brand is your reputation as an employer. This makes it critical to control that narrative, or others will tell your story for you (and likely get it wrong).

In short, companies need their employer brand to help drive performance and create increased value year over year, as part of a multi-pronged approach to overall success.

How are others getting this done? Where do you start? And how much does it cost?

There are essentially three paths that companies take to build their employer brand with intention. You should make the choice based on your company's stage, size, and available resources. Or it might make sense to use a hybrid method. Find the method that both maximizes your resources at their highest value and delivers on the transformational goals of your company.

Method 1: Use Internal Teams

Advantages:

Existing knowledge around company culture
Ability to proceed at the company’s pace
Lowest cash outlay option

Disadvantages:

Gaps in expertise specific to strategic employer branding work
Existing and billable projects taking precedence
Slow project timeline and work inefficiencies due to stopping and starting
Time taken from other work getting done, resulting in lost opportunities

Decision Criteria Questions:

What design and strategic resources can be assigned to this full-time?
Can the project time and team bandwidth be protected to support the work consistently?
Who can lead and manage the project?

Method 2: Use a Local Marketing Agency

Advantages:

Professional and focused design and messaging team
Potentially faster than internal efforts
Project management resources
Can complement internal strategic staff

Disadvantages:

Lack of overarching strategic branding and positioning focus
Absence of change management and messaging guidance
Weaker alignment with the company brand and with business strategy
Often hourly and uncontrolled costs

Decision Criteria Questions:

Do we have clear corporate and employer brand strategies already in place that can be handed off to the design agency?
Do we have an internal team lead with employer brand experience that can help apply the strategy to design and messaging as well as align with longer-term brand and business goals?
Do we have an open budget?

Method 3: Develop Your Employer Brand with a Brand Consultancy Partner

Advantages:

Deep strategic foundational insight
Research-driven approach to clarify and differentiate based on objective insights
Comprehensive leadership and support for change management and launch
Dedicated team and project manager
Predictable or fixed-fee project pricing

Disadvantages:

Potentially higher cost compared to internal efforts but lower compared to hiring research, strategy, internal communication, naming, design, and messaging resources.

Decision Criteria Questions:

Do we need help strategically aligning our employer brand with the company brand and vision?
Can we look at our current reality objectively?
Do we need a partner that understands the brand and business transformation needs of medium and enterprise companies?

Key Takeaways

If moving forward with an employer branding initiative is important to you, build a plan based on your available resources and specific situation. If you are this far, it’s probably time to align your thinking with the executive team’s objectives and make a financial case. Some of the action steps below may help.

It’s time to take action.

Define the project. Here is a sample Employer Branding RFP.
Explore options for partners.
Internal option:
- Take the project plan to internal resource managers and discuss the possibility of delivering on it internally. Discuss the pros, cons, and compromises of doing it with internal sources. Layout timelines and explore hiring additional resources.
Local marketing agency option:
- Find a reputable, mature local marketing agency and share the full project scope with them. Ask them where they could fit in and support. Ask them for examples of their employer brand work. Ask about pricing, itemized billing of hours, and acceptable timelines.
Brand consultancy option:
- Find a strategic and design focused brand consultancy. With or without the project plan, schedule an introduction call. This initial call should feel like they are curious. You want a team that can take an advisory role in helping you build a project that truly accomplishes your goals. These projects can be a bit unpredictable so make sure they will do a fixed-fee contract. Ask about phases of the project and estimated times for each. Expect a dedicated team to be assigned, but in this first call just ask for the team roles and responsibilities. Matchstic is one brand consultancy.

Refine project plan with an Employer Brand Consultant. Adjust project plan and summarize findings for internal decision makers.
Prepare a pitch (formal or informal), and prepare an estimated ROI slide just in case you need it. A sample Employer Branding ROI slide is available in this toolkit.
After you decide on a method, prepare to manage the project. Here is a handy guide on leading these kinds of projects.

Need some no-obligation assistance with your plan?

Behind the Rebrand: Ollion

Matchstic Staff — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 21:33:04 GMT

When merging five companies into one brand, how do you create internal excitement and unite your culture?

Ollion is a global enterprise tech consultancy that helps ambitious organizations change the way they work for good.

In this webinar replay, Matchstic co-founder and creative director Blake Howard sits down with Ollion's Chief Marketing and Growth Officer Lauren Dettloff and Chief People Officer Ute Braasch to share inspiration and insights from the recent project. We’ll also be focusing on decision making, keeping your team engaged in the process, and how brand building can shape a newly formed culture.

Transcript

Blake Howard:

In December 2022, right at a year ago, we were engaged to bring a new brand to life. This was the result of four brands, or five organizations, coming together to form one new brand, one new entity. And obviously there's a lot of pressure to get that right when you have something like a merger bringing together multiple brands into one. This new entity was going to have 600 employees spread all over the world. It had co-CEOs at the time. There were some investors, there was a board, there was a really engaged executive team and they were all spread out across many time zones. It was a pretty tight timeline. So there was a clear launch date of around August in the summer, including a website. So there was a lot on the line, and a lot of pressure going into this. And, of course, there was just the good old-fashioned desire to break into the market, to position the brand for something more than just its features, benefits and offerings.

And so in that context is where we're going to really focus today. How do you manage a large, engaged and passionate group of stakeholders to make decisions, especially in something like naming and visual identity that's so subjective? How do you get a group of people that are really passionate to make not just a decision, but good decisions? Because often maybe you can get a decision made, but perhaps it gets a little unwieldy and not necessarily the most intuitive decision that's made. And I think this case study today is pretty strong in terms of how do you really manage a group of stakeholders and then how do you also use the brand building process to infuse your culture and your internal team. That was obviously top of mind in this project as well. So I want to introduce our guests today, two of the individuals on that project team on the client side.

Introductions

So first, Lauren Dettloff, Chief Marketing and Growth Officer at Ollion. Before there, she was a marketing leader for three high-growth businesses at PwC. And I can honestly say she has been one of the best clients that we've ever worked with. No offense to anyone that's listening that is or was a client. There's a reason why I wanted her to be here today and to share some of the nuances of managing stakeholder feedback. So we have a lot that we can learn from her. I'm excited to have her here and Lauren's based in New York.

We also have Ute Braasch. She is the Chief People and Culture Officer at Ollion and she's been leading and developing talent for over 25 years. She was also part of the brand team and was really integral in giving input from a global and cultural perspective. So she's thinking about the internal environment of this new entity and how can the brand be closely connected to that, be authentic with it and inspire their team, their employees, and future teammates. She is a German citizen. She's currently in Singapore, which we need to give her a big hat tip because it's the other side of the world and it is midnight where she is. So thank you, Ute, for being here and for sharing with us even though it's in the middle of the night and I'm sure you have a very important busy day tomorrow.

So let me just jump back a little bit and we're going to dive into some questions. So we know where this ends, but at the beginning all we had was a vision, bringing these brands together, creating a new tech consultancy, but that was it. This little gray arrow in between was a lot of unknowns. And so Lauren to start with you, you joined the company right after we kicked off the brand project. We had started our research but just barely. The new entity didn't even have a name yet. It was NewCo. It was a pretty big leap for you. Why did you do it?

Lauren Dettloff:

Well, it's a great question and as many of you can imagine, it was also comical trying to tell people what I was doing and why I was leaving PwC. It was, "I'm going to a company that's not really a company, it doesn't have a name." So it was loaded with all sorts of complications, but it was intriguing. For what you laid out, this was such a complex, unique situation. It played off of many things I had done, but it took all of that into multiplied it by 100. So there was an element of merger and acquisition and integration. There was an element of a typical turnaround or pivot to high growth, taking a company and delivering higher performance. There was this element of brand, which coming from a firm like PwC was a core part of my role there, as well as the commercial side.

There was the appeal of a consulting company that was also incubating and selling its own product. So there was all these little elements that played to things that I had done and were strengths and interests, but challenging in a whole new light. And the complexity and urgency and emotion that was involved in something this complex with all these companies coming together, that gray arrow really, really covers a lot. But at the core there was such a strong premise and opportunity and vision and it was easy to see how to take that gray arrow and help turn it into something, let alone beyond just the brand launch. So it was an exciting mandate.

Blake Howard:

Yeah, a lot of opportunity. Alright, Ute, at the beginning of the brand project, I would imagine the state of the company culture of these organizations merging together multiple values, mission, beliefs, maybe informal values, behaviors, they were all coming together and there was not really a name to call this thing and there was a big in-between. How were people feeling? How would you say the beginning of the project was the defining, I don't know, read of the company culture?

Ute Braasch:

Yeah, it's a good question, Blake. And as you said, we had four companies come together. Many of them were still founder-led. So we didn't just do a transition in terms of a post-merge integration. It was actually also just a maturity evolution of the businesses. And a lot of employees were a little lost. We had a period where people genuinely thought the new name was NewCo because we spent so long with that working title. And it was really, really challenging because if any one of you have been through a merger and integration or has been through a major change effort, it is very, very unsettling for the employees. And so we quadrupled the complexity, not just by having multiple companies come together, but also, as Lauren said, going through a repositioning in the market, going through a transition in terms of the maturity of these businesses.

We had some cross-cultural complexities, wrapping in Cloud Comrade, CloudCover, our Asia-based companies, as well as 2nd Watch and Aptitive, our U.S.-based companies. So there's a whole bunch of different culture coming together and we really didn't have one. And that's really what my role was very much about. And so what we did have, though, is a vision. So we spent a lot of time up front really trying to understand our starting positions, focusing on where we actually are similar. There was a lot more similarity than there was difference, and we try to build on that. And using that vision to then help people understand where we want to go get people on the same page. And ultimately for me, the brand has always been a little bit of a catalyst to get the culture messaging across and to really help people understand where we're trying to travel towards.

Blake Howard:

I think a real simple breakdown of brand is, and a lot of people will say this, it's storytelling. It's more than storytelling because that sounds maybe vain or manipulative, but there was an opportunity to tell the best story possible with the creation of what was going to become NewCo. And I love what you said about the name, NewCo. I've been in meetings where people are like, what's wrong with NewCo? Can we just keep NewCo? No, you can't have NewCo. That's not going to work.

Research and Strategy

Let's jump into the project particulars. I'm going to walk through first some of our research and some of our strategic findings and then we're going to pause and talk about that. So I'm going to try to skim through this relatively quickly because the content and what we did is less important than digging into, Lauren and Ute, how you felt and how you sort of navigated some of this. But I'm going to hit some of the high notes.

We did do an audit of the competition. We looked at the existing brands and we did some customer research as well. But we did find, in this space, visually speaking, there's a lot of safe brands, there's a lot of generic out there. There's sans serif, geometric type, loads of blue, lots of jargon from a verbal perspective. And then some of the insights and some of the findings from the customer research is that clients are really tired of a one size fits all solution from these tech consultancies that don't necessarily understand their unique needs. They're packaging everything up and trying to force it down. And then we also heard that clients really want trusted expertise, proprietary solution, so that unique customized solution. And then of course a committed partner. So there are certain things that they really want that they need.

They're also looking for unique value to their business and they're motivated by tech, but more so they're motivated for positive impacts for their team. So those were a couple things that we heard and we also heard that people want to be a part of something good. So your tech consultancy in the professional services space that you're selecting, it's nice if there is some altruistic bend associated with that particular organization. So those are some things that we heard and I feel like this is a good summary of a lot of that research that clients were hungry for visionary thinking that makes an impact even beyond their unique business needs. And we felt like the opportunity was to give them a brand that would open their eyes and satisfy their appetite. So after we went through a lot of that research, we had some really good discussions as a large brand team.

And it's probably worth noting that we had a core team where we were working weekly with three to four people and then we had a larger brand team that would be in more milestone presentations. We started to work through brand personality. So our team came back to NewCo and said, "Hey, based on everything we've heard from you, based on these exercises, based on our research, we think this brand should be lively, sharp, audacious, and nurturing with some specific definitions there." And then we also said, "NewCo, if we're going to really think about the way we set the stage for telling our story that we should be the global born in the cloud consultancy, working together to unify business shaping tech for good." So there was some really specific word choice there, and I think that's important because it gives us direction for choosing things that are subjective, like name, visual identity, even external messaging.

So we went through a process, we had audience personas as well. We had these personality attributes, we had this positioning, we had a great discussion and it went pretty smooth. Sometimes projects like this, it gets really difficult to land a short, relatively pithy statement for positioning or maybe just choosing four words. And sometimes it's easy, but often when it is easy, my spidey senses go up or the flags start to go off and I'm like, "Either the client doesn't care about this step or something else is going on." So Lauren, this went really smooth. Tell us what this step was like in the process for you on your side.

Lauren Dettloff:

Yeah, well, I think it's a really good observation because I have been a part of things like this that you do skate through the upfront stuff because people don't appreciate what it does signify and how much downstream impact it has. And you're spot on, then suddenly you're like, "This is going to be a problem later. I know it." So with this, it was the opposite and I think there were a few reasons for that. I think one, in this case, you're working with a bunch of consultants for the most part. And so I think consultants, or those of us were executives, came from consulting who I think had an appreciation for design thinking, this appreciation for you really want to articulate the problem, you really then want to align on the principles or the approach of the strategy before you even start to get into the solutioning and the detail.

And a couple of us in particular really emphasized that behind the scenes that this step was going to be so important and I was able to give some examples of where you think you're aligned on something, but then it has downstream implications and where I've seen that go wrong. And so I think that for people who maybe weren't quite getting this stuff is really important and we need to nail this step, I think saw that okay, this is why these four words, for example, we spent a lot of time on the personality, are so important. I would bring forward examples of other words that we might have used would be this and this is how that might then play out downstream in terms of copy or imagery. And so people were like, "Okay, yeah, we don't, for example, sharp and audacious." We talked about we did not want to be disruptive for disruptive sake and what that would then entail and other companies that were maybe seeking to be disruptive. So it was interesting to trace that forward a little bit just to give people a sense of how that was.

I think the second thing is, and I say this genuinely, I think you and the team explained and navigated this process more effectively than other consultants or agencies I've worked with. And that really helped too. I think we gave this phase enough time and we really understood, for people totally new to something like this, how significant these things were and why it was worth spending the time. So that was a lot of the conversation and the reinforcement behind the scenes internally that you guys didn't see. It wasn't underserved. In fact, it was probably over-served, but for good reason.

Blake Howard:

I love the idea of trying to explain what the implications are of some of these decisions and helping people really see it. We do this all the time. You've had a lot of experience doing this, but most people going through a process like this haven't, so they're like, "Yeah, these words sound great." But helping them, sometimes I say it's pulling out the binoculars and trying to look down maybe at a trailhead and looking at one path to the left and one path to the right and just trying to make a little bit more of an informed decision. So trying out some of those words and implications, it's really great.

Lauren Dettloff:

I was going to say the other thing we also did was we had a large group of stakeholders including several executives, including two CEOs, as you said, which could have gotten very unwieldy. We were very clear and unabashed in who was providing input and who was actually deciding. So even amongst that group of very senior leaders, we were comfortable with saying, "Thank you for the input, now we will go decide." And that even included some of our investors and board. We would consult and inform them, and thankfully they also supported that this is our thing, that they really wanted this to be led by management. So being unafraid to make that delineation input versus decision really helped too.

Blake Howard:

Yeah, that's good. It's good to have language around that. Ute, for you, how did this step in the process, this strategic framework help inform your culture building efforts?

Ute Braasch:

Yeah, it was absolutely essential. As I was saying earlier, we had quite a complex challenge on our hands in terms of bringing and unifying our workforce. And so what we actually did in parallel to this work is we worked on our employee value proposition, which ultimately is the articulation of our employer brand. So it's really dovetailing into your client brand. And so this work here was absolutely essential for us to do that work and we constantly use that really as a check and balance, is this actually resonating with our employee audience? Can we turn this into something that we can tell to prospects and to existing employees alike that will be resonating, that actually does reflect the types of people we want to attract to Ollion and the types of people that we already have and how they feel and how they can be excited about the organization?

So this was a really, really very well orchestrated, I think, in the end, and it worked together very well. You guys also thought about not just clients and client types, but you also looked at employees as one of the stakeholder groups in this brand positioning. So we really took that and then blew that up and dove into a lot more details in terms of the different types of employees that we have. How does it express for them? And that worked really well.

Naming

Blake Howard:

Okay, so we'll keep moving. We've got the strategy in place and that's an important part of how we can move forward into the next phase of the work. So getting into the naming work is a challenge and it really is all about setting the right criteria. So obviously we want to express some of the ideas captured in our brand strategy. We also needed the likelihood of trademark protection in most major markets. So that's not a small bullet point in the criteria sheet. That's a very important one and not easy to achieve, but we were up for the challenge. We also, of course, wanted it to be short and sweet and easy to say, easy to spell. We wanted it to be universal in terms of meaning. So we didn't want it to feel overtly American by any means. We wanted it to feel really, really global.

And then perhaps the hardest of all, we wanted the dot-com and as many of you know, the dot-coms are just taken. People are sitting on them, they're not easy to acquire. So often when I have a client say they want a dot-com, I say, "Well, what's your budget? Because we're probably going to have to acquire it." So the dot-com was important. And then maybe another difficult part of this in naming is to get a large group of stakeholders to agree, yes, this is the name, so that shouldn't be overlooked as well. We generated hundreds of names with multiple rounds and we collaborate with a trademark partner that we have just to make sure that anything we present is legally viable. And so lots of back and forth with that trademark partner. We usually have four to six people generating names on our side and actually Lauren and Ute, this is new to you, actually have footage of our team in action trying to think through names, okay?

So this is live footage of going through mission impossible to find the right name. So somehow we did it and we presented in the first round 8 to 10. We had a great discussion. We really narrowed it down to three with two front-runners and then obviously we landed on Ollion and it was this idea of playing off of all in, we're all in on Ollion. We loved the suggestive sound that it made. It had this idea of a collective force being all in, working together, feels really lively, feels nurturing also. We could acquire the dot-com, which is important. And because it's coin fabricated, likelihood for trademark was there. So Lauren, tell us more about the decision between the two final options. How did the group finally land on Ollion?

Lauren Dettloff:

It was an interesting. There were truly fantastic names and I remember when we walked away from that first call where you guys presented seven or nine, we were genuinely delighted. So it was great that we had a good choice ahead of us. And then the two were really tough. Some context I had set early on that I think helped was one, the name is just one piece, it's what we do in terms of delivering on that. And so I was trying to take the high stakes and the emotion out of just the name. That was absolutely important because as Ute said, it was truly the identity for these companies coming together. But trying to set that context and be repetitive that this is just one piece, this is just one piece because I didn't want this to become the fixating point. And so I think that was a healthy lens of how to view this stuff. There was a lot of vested interest, but it wasn't overly vested like I'd maybe seen in the past.

I also think there was an understanding of how... The two names that we were looking at played off of different elements of the personality. Obviously Ollion that we went with really leans into the lively and the nurturing as you have here. And the other one was really leaning more into the audacious and sharp. And there was more distinction obviously between the two, but it was split pretty evenly. And the step that we took that I felt was very important, and this sometimes works and it sometimes doesn't, and this case I think it was very effective, was at this moment was when we brought in fresh perspective, we intentionally sought a few of our next level leaders that hadn't been involved that really have valuable field perspective.

And in that conversation, I, again, intentionally did not give them any context and just presented them the two names first, unaided, anything and just said, "What do you think? Tell me your reaction." And it was really interesting because in those conversations, the other name, their immediate reaction and the context they came back with and the used similar words, again, completely unaided, was not at all what we were going for in the intent. And so that was a very refreshing perspective because even if we had sought fresh perspective at that point, or new people specifically I mean, but had taken the time to go through the strategy and all of that, we didn't want them to think that way. We wanted them to think about it as in the average employee or the average client or the average alliance partner coming in. And so that very clearly to me then leaned heavily towards Ollion. And that was one of the few times me in my role leading this strongly advocated versus attempted to guide.

I recognize I didn't have a lot vested per se in the history and the legacy and how we got to this point, but when it came to what was going to resonate in the market and what aligned to our strategy and our personality, this was clear based on that. So that started to drive the conversation more, very quickly, toward this and how we got here. And then part of that too was helping folks understand that if you look at yourself as a well-rounded personality with those four traits that you outlined and some of the other things, that can also then be dialed up later in some of the creative or the copy. And so if we felt we were losing some of the audaciousness or some of the sharpness, that could then come through in some of the visual stuff and some of the copy. So it, again, was a surprisingly painless, I think, process that zeroed down from the two to the one, fortunately, fortunately.

Blake Howard:

Ute, what about for you? How were you processing this decision? Why did you think that this name Ollion would work internally?

Ute Braasch:

So first of all, I must have flip-flopped about three times in the course of the conversation between the two options we had. Because every time somebody would give a recommended... I was really torn and what Lauren was saying, I think the positioning about this being one of many elements of who we are and our proposition was a really important piece. The other piece for me was actually a big element in this conversation was the process was very hierarchical. So the CEOs had a point of view, but that was as important as everybody else's point of view, so it wasn't discussed. Sometimes you get these dynamics where you've got one or two people, they have an opinion and then everybody toes the line whether they like it or not. We really had an extremely constructive conversation around how the different options that we have and how they're achieving our ultimate objectives.

And we kept going back to what is it that we are trying to do? Who are we trying to be? Really back to first principles. So having that really clearly articulated vision and mission and plan of who we want to be, that was really very, very important in this entire process because we otherwise would've always got ourselves tangled up in the lack of clarity and we had clarity in terms of where we wanted to land. So that was really, really important.

Blake Howard:

Yeah, a lot of times I think when the decision-making process is really difficult on a name or any other subjective decision, it becomes a conflict over that particular decision, the name or whatnot. But it's usually a lack of clarity on the mission or identity for the organization. That's what you're really arguing about for this or against that, and the name just ends up being the specific tangible thing that everyone's reacting to. So I think that a big part of, even though this was a new entity, that vision and some of the purpose that set the foundation for all of this, I think, was so important.

Visual and Verbal Identity

So we've got a name and then we get into the visual and verbal side of the identity. So the name sets the stage for the story, and then these components start to really bring it to life where you can think about what else do we need to say or do to envision this brand going to market. So first we start to think about those personality attributes, lively, sharp, nurturing, audacious, and how do we visualize them? So we go through a pretty collaborative process and we get feedback, reactions from the NewCo team at the time, or the Ollion team, and we also talk about what's the right color strategy. So we explored various paths that we could take for color. We looked at other inspiration maybe around symbols, type, photography treatments, graphic elements.

We also started to think about brand voice. What are the right pillars that we can put on paper that can define how we should consistently show up from a verbal perspective? We started to try on some of those verbals via headlines so we could get reactions, prototypes and different language. We even looked at a starter boilerplate, hey, here's a good introductory paragraph. We also worked on a manifesto a little bit at this point, trying to just really understand the story, what words were going to work, which words weren't going to work.

And we had lots of good feedback, good collaborative discussion, and then we started to propose direction. So we call this concepts, and this is where we explored four different symbols and they all were around this idea of unifying or business shaping. They all were global symbols. It was about unifying a force for good. We also wanted them to feel really human so we're showing different ways graphic elements could house imagery, where messaging could start to show up. And we propose these four directions, and once again, it was pretty straightforward in terms of the decision making. And I want to share a brand essence video or what we call a sizzle reel that we put together that shows you the final work.

Lauren Dettloff:

I will never not love that video.

Blake Howard:

Yes, the typewriter song, we love it. Yeah, so that gives you a good sense of where we landed. I'll hit just a few high notes. You can always look at our case study or more of ollion.com if you want to see more of this in action, but we loved the big, bold custom word mark. We loved the name so much, the repetition of the o's. It was hard to not just create unique letter forms that were really distinct and that would allow us to scale it and make it really big. Of course, we also thought more about that shorthand symbol that you saw at the beginning of that animation of the two o's coming together that clearly have this idea of partnership, collaboration, unification.

And then probably the biggest thing here, and there was a comment that popped up in the chat that's relevant to this. We did push the color palette, so you see pretty unique color combinations, and we approached it from a black plus some unique color combinations perspective. And I do think it's helpful for visual systems to consider trend, but to also not rely on it so heavily. So let's say in five years these colors just look like wallpaper from the 80s. Well, you should be able to evolve your visual system around that. So it's black plus some of these trend colors that create unique color combinations. We're not over indexing our equity investment in terms of recognition with these colors. It's black plus these trend colors. So we felt like there was an opportunity, however, to really push unique color combinations because we didn't see that in the market.

So you can see some of that start to come to life in some of these mock-ups and some of the voice as well as here, you can see that manifesto on the right that we wrote. You can see additional color combinations, language, you can see the prototype of the website and how different collateral could be created. And then I'll end here in terms of just showing where we landed. I want to maybe go over to Ute first here. So we looked at four conceptual directions. We chose this one, we revised it. What about this direction felt right to you, gave you confidence, got you excited?

Ute Braasch:

Well, I think the most important piece for me, it was so different. It was so different to anything anybody in the industry did. It was so different to all the legacy baggage that our employees were carrying around with them because they're all grieving their old brands. Many of them had been there employee number seven in these startups, and they really cared and were very emotionally engaged with the brands that they grew up with. So this was such a fresh start. It was just lipstick on a pig. It was a completely different audacious approach that people were like, "Wow."

And when I first saw that, that was the reaction I had. It was like, "Wow, this is nothing that I would've expected." I'm a sucker for fun, so I love the type fun anyway, but just the whole color combination, some of the really cheeky language that was used, nobody in the industry would've ever dared to put that out, and it really sets us apart and really makes us look different. The reactions that we got in the marketplace from talent pool were just phenomenal. But yeah, it was an immediate reaction when I saw this. I'm like, "Okay, nobody else is doing this. This is going to set us apart." And this is exactly the response we got from our employees. So that was awesome.

Blake Howard:

Yeah, I love that. A lot of times we will push for doing something radical in terms of visuals or verbals, and it's hard for clients because their mindset is not let's do something wildly different. The mindset is I want to feel comfortable with what I see and I want to feel comfortable with what we're going to go to market with because my job could be on the line or my reputation could be on the line. So the mindset is more about being comfortable and familiar, which anything that you're visually familiar with is just going to be the mainstream. It's usually not necessarily defined as super different. So the nature of being different is that it's not familiar. So that's a hard transition sometimes. And we certainly had some dialogue as a larger brand team reviewing these directions and from the Ollion side of like, is it too retro? Is it too modern? Are the color palettes too different? Lauren, how did you guide that, navigate those feelings, those reactions, and then ultimately how did you feel confident about the overall direction yourself?

Lauren Dettloff:

Yeah, I think a lot of what Ute said, what I intentionally did at this point was broaden circle. I don't think I always showed the name per se. I think we found ways to show the color palette and some of the mock-ups without actually showing the name, because the name, we kept pretty close to the vest even internally up until three or four weeks prior to external launch. But it was that same test. I just wanted the gut reaction and seeing the excitement, the smiles, the energy was the clincher. I think the bit that was actually more concerning to me was can we then deliver on this fully in reality? So with some of the copy treatments, for example, they were intentionally very audacious and very sharp and putting these premises out there about working alongside our clients and we're all about progress over process, and there was all these really bold statements.

And so it was then an interesting conversation of, again, here's what that entails, then operationally. If we say we're all about progress versus process, how does that actually play out in a client engagement? Are we delivering on that or is that going to be a jarring disconnect? When we talk about we work alongside our clients to uplift and we're generous in our knowledge and some of the language around that, are we actually doing that? So it actually prompted some really thoughtful conversations internally around are we delivering on this commitment? We're teeing up because this stuff is fantastic. It's going to get the attention we want. We don't want to have that disconnect down the road. So it was a really interesting example where brand was challenging us to make sure the business strategy and how we were operating was actually meeting that in a necessary way. And thankfully, not to go into that here, but thankfully a lot of that stuff we were able to make sure was crisped up, but that was the really interesting element here with some of the boldness.

Blake Howard:

Yeah, I think that's important. Being able to deliver on what we're saying from a marketing communications perspective, it's got to be authentic, it's got to be delivered upon, and everyone within the organization has to agree, yeah, we can do that. That is who we are. So I love that.

I'm going to stop sharing and then I would love to keep discussing and maybe just start first with Lauren, understanding all of the decisions that had to be made along the way, approving brand strategy, approving final name choice, approving logo, visual identity, core messaging, bits and pieces of the brand voice. How would you say all of that really came together? Do you have an organizing principle or idea of how those decisions were made? How did you smooth that process out?

Lauren Dettloff:

So I would say a couple things. This idea of design thinking was really helpful. And again, coming from a consulting firm that was maybe a little bit more intuitive, but not totally, but I think adherence to that type of process where you were really making sure you were aligned on the problem and then playing that out that way. I think we were also the core team, myself and some of the key folks were incredibly assertive at driving pace and not being afraid to do so. What I found effective is with something like this, you have to keep this front and center. It's very easy for something like this to get parked in a silo as a special project or a brand initiative, and we did not want that to happen. This was too significant.

And so almost consciously making it a part of every meeting, every conversation, I would make sure there was something in our executive team meetings we were talking about as it relates to brand, you really wanted this to be top of mind because it kept it moving versus shoving it to the side. I think those are really some key things. The other thing that was very tactical, but again, was really effective was recognizing where you need to just bring in someone who has that insane attention to detail project management experience. And we were lacking that, somebody was transitioning into a new role. And so we made the choice to bring in someone from the outside who could work alongside me and the team to just keep this moving with the most insane attention to detail, project management, interconnectivity. Otherwise, I think that would've been incredibly risky. So that was a very intentional choice that we made to invest in that, and it was well worth it in spades.

Launch

Blake Howard:

Okay, so, Ute, question for you. Thinking about these decisions are made, you're starting to launch it, roll it out, how did you integrate more of this into the brand building process or how did you continue the momentum that we had as a brand team?

Ute Braasch:

So we had an internal launch before we went external, and that was also happening around the same time as we actually officially transacted our merger. So a lot of the conversations we've had prior to this, we had not even officially merged a company, so that was additional complexity we needed to navigate. And so we spent quite a lot of effort in really getting people excited about the brand internally before we were going to market. It was a bit risky because stuff will leak out and people are going to be excited to talk about it, but I think it was absolutely the right path. So we spent time talking about our employee value proposition and then that led into our new brand launch. We then trained people and then we took that external. So we really spent quite a lot of time and resources making sure that our employees would've had some time to really immerse themselves in the new brand, in the language, in the visual and emotionally process it too, because it was a goodbye to the brands that they knew and they loved.

And suddenly it was like, "Okay, now we're one firm." And Mark and Lauren, you probably can add to that as well, but the conversation changed overnight when we suddenly were one brand. So it used to be, oh, the second watch person over here or the after-tip person over there. It was a very, very different conversation when we were all Ollion. And so that catalyst really played out really well in investing that time up front to make sure that our employees have had the chance to get up to speed and really understand what we want to be and how we want to look and feel. That really made a difference in the launch as well.

Lauren Dettloff:

And some of the internal stuff in particular, I can't underestimate, we put more focus on this. So even for the launch and the reveal of the brand and the strategy, we did that in a special elevated way. We went to a studio in Singapore just because it was easier and recorded stuff on a stage, and it was this grander elevated experience. We really wanted the employees to feel, wow, this is special, this is different. This is going to be a different standard going forward. We then did in-region, in-person brand experience boot camps, we called them, and this is something I had done in the past, and this isn't just about here's the brand, here's the tagline, here's the visual. That was a piece of it. It was more around here's the expectation and the premise we're teeing up in the market. How do you put this in your own words?

And so something as simple as your new elevator pitch. We would do role playing. And again, it wasn't just on the brand, it was on the story. If someone says, "Well, what do you mean when you say you come alongside your clients and deliver?" We would test that out and get people comfortable with their own storytelling and their own examples. And then that even played into then more tactical things to then empower them to participate in the brand activation itself. So we did a series of social media primers and boot camps and office hours around here's some things you can do, here's how you can update your LinkedIn and here's exactly how to do that. Here's the campaign we'll be activating and here's how you can opt in to participate. So it was very hands-on and spoon-fed, but so critical, I think, in any change initiative like this, not just because we happen to be merging as well, but truly, truly getting it in people's bodies, in their words and ready to tell that story and know how to tell the story.

Blake Howard:

Yeah. And a lot of what I hear you saying also, Lauren, is you're just making time to make it important. You weren't just saying, "Here's the new logo, here's the new name, let's go. Everyone go out and start selling. Start serving the clients." You made time for it. And that suggests and signals to the company that brand is important and that you want to be an authentic brand, you want to live it out. And so I think that is tremendous. So I want to get to some questions. There's been a few that have jumped into the chat and then you can also drop them directly in the Q&A. So I have one more question, but this is my primer, hey, if you have a question, go ahead and throw it in the chat or throw it into the Q&A. So for both of you, just reflecting back on this project, what advice would you give to someone who's about to go through something similar? Maybe it's an evolutionary rebrand and maybe it's completely revolutionary, like this one was. Just what tips would you give to them, what advice?

Lauren Dettloff:

So besides hiring Matchstic, no, truly though, the team truly did an exceptional job. I think a couple things. I think one, it's an opportunity to give your people a chance to shine and stretch. With something like this, nobody on the team had undergone anything remotely close to this, and so I think it would've been very tempting to attempt to do it in a silo or bring in several contractors that know how to do this stuff and just like, "We'll take care of it." But that was a choice we did not make. It was an opportunity to bring people along, and so there were folks on the team that took on massive parts of this that really had to stretch and shine, and that was a huge, huge challenge. But it was exciting for them having to go through something like this now just propels them in terms of their own career and development.

And so being patient as the leader, or trying to be patient, recognizing we were doing a fast pace, but making that investment in them, I think, is really key. It also just helps with buy-in and making it real. If the people that are going to be delivering on this long-term are the ones driving the special project, I think that was really effective. I think trying to show the work and bring people alongside throughout the process, that doesn't mean we were sharing all of this out for broad democratization across the company, but finding ways to bring people along, show the work, broaden the circle. This wasn't just intentionally a group of marketers or leaders. We had broader people, representation, finance, legal, really just making sure that this was going to be bought into down the road and just effective from the beginning. So I would say those are two principles. Give people a chance to shine and stretch even if they've not done something like this and show your work and bring alongside. But Ute, what would you say?

Ute Braasch:

Yeah, I think you covered a lot of the key points already. I would add, and this came out early in the conversation already as well, invest the time up front to make sure that your leadership is aligned. As you said, if you do not have that, the brand or any topic for that matter, is going to trigger or is going to be like... It causes conflict when the issue is actually not the brand, but the issue is the lack of alignment up front. And so that time that we spent, and literally... I only joined the firm a year ago myself. One of the reasons I joined was because they had invested so much time and effort even before I joined in making sure that we do have alignment and we do have clarity on what we're trying to achieve as a combined business, and that just made everything so much easier. That is really, really important.

Another thing, the point Lauren made in terms of the diversity and the inclusion of perspectives and bringing people in from really different parts of the business. We had some really creative people there. It was a lot of fun actually in the process as well, but it is a real cut across the organization in terms of the people that opined on the process. That was fantastic as well. So we didn't just forget about certain things. Then last but not least, this is a global brand. We haven't really spoken about this yet. As a global brand, it needs to resonate globally. It needs to be pronounceable globally, and it's not just a trademark thing. It actually cannot have any weird connotations, and it's so difficult to do that. Just making sure that, again, you bring people into the conversation who will look at this from those angles. Just in the local market, is anybody going to be able to pronounce this? Those are some things that I think we got right that really made it easier when we got to the point of rollout.

Q&A:

"Thinking of type, form, language, color, how do you overcome clients maybe wanting to Frankenstein multiple concepts together because maybe a certain element from one resonates and something from another?"

Blake Howard:

I've heard a saying, a horse designed by committee is a camel. So same thing there. We tend to really listen to all the feedback and do our best to pull the things that are resonating and then go through it and see what is consistent and coherent and what is not, and we make recommendations. So if Lauren's saying she loves the icon style from concept number four, Ute saying she likes the type from number two, we will do our best to see if they work and if they don't, we come back and we say, "Hey, we don't think that actually works for X, Y and Z reasons."

And we try to make it pretty objective, not just like, "Oh, we don't think it looks good." We try to say, "Hey, actually these little legs on the type, those are serifs and the way that they come together, they don't actually match the style of these icons and you can see that next to each other. So we would recommend doing X, Y, and Z." And so for us it's a process of learning, of trying, exploring, but then coming back and making a recommendation.

Lauren Dettloff:

I think what you guys did really effectively in particular was when we did provide feedback, and this is a great question because we absolutely did that, we were like, "Well, we like this, but we don't really like the logo, but we like the colors." What we tried to do on our side was we challenged ourselves of why we were responding. So it was more just like the why not the what, because then they could take the why and spin it. But I think, Blake, what you guys did so effectively was anytime we did give a tactical example, for example, could we see this, you guys just didn't take that... You would always come back with something that was better and obviously very well-thought-out and more on what we were trying to achieve than what we had come to you with. And I really appreciated that. It just showed that you guys weren't afraid to challenge us, but more importantly, it was better. You guys are the experts. Anything you're going to come back with is better. So that was really effective.

Ute Braasch:

Yeah, I would add to that, I think the one thing that you guys did well, which I think a lot of the folks on the call can take away is you weren't afraid to have a point of view. And when you thought we were stupid, and there was a point where I think you guys had a very, very, very strong reaction to something we were asking for, you made it very clear that that was a stupid idea, and it literally got us to pause and go, "Oh, well, these guys have been pretty good so far. If they're so passionate about this, maybe we should be listening." And oftentimes when you work with vendors, they don't do that. They try to keep the client happy and they will just respond to whatever the client wants to. And when felt that we crossed the line and didn't do anything smart, you just said that, so you were really partnering with us. That was really helpful.

Blake Howard:

Yeah, I love hearing that. And I think it's worth noting too, we didn't start with that. We didn't lead with that. You have to earn the right to challenge. You have to earn the right to push back, and that means that we really need to understand the vision, the mission, the culture, the dynamics, the strategy, everything, and then we have a point of view. So I think it's worth noting you don't necessarily start as a challenger in a partnership dynamic.

"How do you measure success in terms of ROI?"

Lauren Dettloff:

So internally, it was after each of those moments we did, whether it was the boot camps or the launch webcast or the social media stuff, there was always a ask of measurement, simple survey stuff around understanding engagement. Do you feel more confident? There was that very good, I think, measure, and that was really helpful. And all of those metrics were exactly on par or more with what we would've sought. Externally, candidly, I don't know that we nailed... And this was a little bit odd and unusual and uncomfortable for me, and I'm more of on the commercial side than brand, but I had done some brand stuff, a lot of the typical measurement that we look at for brand, increase in share of voice or some of the quality of message pull through, we couldn't really do in this case because it was the sheer reality of all these companies coming together. So anything previous state wasn't really valid.

We also, for a company our size, we, of course, didn't have the budget or the resourcing to go as big on some of the levers that one would typically do with brands. So for example, we were pretty light on paid media. We tried to do what we could, but it was a lighter investment than anything I had ever dealt with for a campaign, let alone brand. And so we didn't even have a lot of the metrics around typical paid. We did look at things like around social reach and engagement and click throughs just to see if things were resonating. We focused a lot on the website because that was such a new channel for the company. How are people navigating around? How long were they staying on the page? But I would definitely welcome for those that have gone through stuff like this, some things that you have found effective. This had several such unusual factors. It was viewed successful in the end, believe me. But some of the very specific metrics, I was like, "Oh, I can't report on some of the ones I normally do," which was unusual.

Blake Howard:

Yeah, I think some of the most successful bits that I've seen, Lauren, from you all are when you launched it internally and then you did the survey with your team. Hey, how confident are you in this now? Do you think this will resonate with our clients? There were very specific questions in there that showed people understood the story, they were excited about it, they felt like it was signaling the right things. And I haven't really seen anyone do that before, and I thought that was really smart and successful given the importance of culture at Ollion, given the importance of the employee value proposition. It was just such a smart way to try to measure success from your employee's perspective.

Ute Braasch:

Yeah, and I think we also had some external numbers. For us, one of the things that I look at is reaction from the external market around applications. And we literally, after the launch, got thousands, and I mean seriously thousands, of new applications in overnight, which was just unbelievable because we're a small firm, as you said, sub 600 employees. To get several thousand new applicants expressing interest in the firm is something really special. So that was awesome.

Blake Howard:

Thanks everyone for joining. And hey, if you like these types of discussions, shameless plug for our podcast, A Change of Brand, where we tell some of the world's largest consumer change stories, consumer brands. So go check that out wherever you listen to podcasts, A Change of Brand. And thanks for joining and we hope to see you at a future one at some point. Thank you.

3 Keys to Leading a Successful Employer Brand Project

Tracy Clark — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 04:00:00 GMT

For HR directors, leading a successful employer brand project is crucial for attracting and retaining top talent. An initiative like this involves not just a change in visual identity, but a strategic transformation of how the company is perceived by current and potential employees.

This article outlines the key leadership behaviors, strategic problem-solving, and internal communication tactics needed to execute an effective employer branding project.

1. Ideal Leadership Behaviors

Planning on leading an employer branding project? Take a moment to reflect on the important behaviors necessary to lead the brand transformation and emerge with a higher level of personal influence.

Engagement: Leaders must fully commit to the branding initiative. This includes actively participating in defining the organization's employment identity and ensuring this vision is consistently applied across all touchpoints of the employee experience. It is going to take time and all the internal influence you have to see this through.
Facilitating Healthy Dialogue: Transparent and inclusive communication is essential, especially when it involves feedback from employees. Prepare now to share insights and opportunities gleaned from qualitative and quantitative research. Successful leaders foster an environment of trust through active listening and intentional responding.
Decisiveness: Leaders should efficiently synthesize feedback and make informed decisions assuring they align with the overarching goals of the project. Quick and clear feedback and decisions will be the number one factor in project success.

2. Solve the Right Problem

Identifying the core issues that an employer brand project needs to address is critical. This could involve enhancing the company's reputation as an employer, aligning the employer brand with the corporate brand, or addressing specific challenges in attracting and retaining talent. Aligning the project outcomes with the needs of key stakeholders can be accomplished through one-on-one meetings with operations, marketing, finance, and executive leaders. The HR Leaders' Employer Branding Toolkit has some helpful resources to prep for those meetings.

3. Brand from the Top to the Bottom and the Inside Out

One employer did a survey after a rebrand and reported “75% of employees felt more proud of their brand than they did before.” That kind of impact comes from maximizing the communication and launch of the new employer brand. First getting it launched well internally and then externally.

Internal launch starts with the leaders.

Executive Leadership: The CEO and accompanying C-suite must be fully on board and participating in the communication. Careful involvement throughout the process will give them a good understanding of the strategic reasons behind the initiative, making it easier to champion where they have influence.
HR and Recruiting Teams: These teams need a detailed understanding and training on the new employer brand. Workshops with your brand consultant are efficient ways to get the team educated and excited to ensure consistency in all their efforts. Teams will need updated recruitment materials, brand messaging guidelines, and reinforcing training sessions to align their efforts with the new brand strategy.
All Staff: Communication of the new employer brand to all employees is where the new brand comes to life. This can be facilitated through internal presentations, workshops, and branded swag that help employees feel connected to the new brand identity.

After completing brand work and launching it internally, one client shared this with Matchstic: “Employees are even paying their own money to have the logo on various items like shirts, vests, jackets etc. We’re proud of the results so far!”

Key Takeaways

For HR directors, leading an employer branding project is about much more than changing a logo or company colors. It’s about creating a renewed and compelling brand identity that resonates deeply with current and future employees. It can also be a stressful time in your career. Finding a partner to help you navigate the pitfalls and experience project efficiencies can make a transformative brand easier to obtain.

It’s time to take action.

Set aside 15 minutes to self-assess your strengths and weaknesses going into an employer rebrand process.
Write down what you personally want to achieve by successfully accomplishing a project like this.
Request a copy of your corporate brand guidelines, if you don’t already have it, and review.
Write a list of internal stakeholders from the CEO to the shipping coordinator. What knowledge or encouragement will each of them need to fully embrace a new and more meaningful employer brand?
Start a draft Request for Proposal (RFP) for finding a brand consultancy partner. Here is a generic RFP you can modify.

Looking to explore the conversation further?

What is an Employee Value Proposition

Tracy Clark — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 04:00:00 GMT

Effective employer branding is known to lower recruitment costs and improve the quality of hires.

By clearly articulating what makes the company a unique and valuable place to work, a compelling Employee Value Proposition (EVP) exists as a core element of an employer brand.

Powerful EVPs are...

Aligned with corporate goals
Differentiated from competitors

Building a powerful EVP takes time and expertise. You want all your employer branding work to have a valid return, and you want it to last.

Building an EVP and the surrounding employer brand will require HR leaders to:

Identify the right problem
Build buy-in
Maintain energy for the result
Manage the process
Champion the execution

The scope and timeline of an employer branding project can vary greatly depending on your situation. There are a few methods for moving an employer branding initiative forward.

Regardless of the method, start with research and discovery to get clarity on your current reality. This can be difficult to do from inside an organization, but is a crucial step in building your EVP.

The goal is to build an EVP that guides and inspires employees. Here is what it is made up of:

Parts of an Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

The Summary

Key Ideas: Concisely written, authentic, differentiated, catchy
Determining Factors: Employee research, company brand alignment

The Promises

Key Ideas: Aligned to key employee questions, genuine
Determining Factors: Employee research, operationally deliverable

The Values

Key Ideas: Aligned to needs, genuine, memorable language
Determining Factors: Truly core to company culture and embraced at the highest levels

The Mission

Key Ideas: Big job your company is doing, outcome of success
Determining Factors: Matches the product/service outcomes your company exists to deliver

The Vision

Key Ideas: Long term, inspiring
Determining Factors: Tied to overall company value proposition

Translating the EVP to making a difference…

Supporting the Employee Value Proposition (EVP) typically involves having clear and competitive answers to these employee value questions.

Is my compensation competitive?
Do the benefits meet my needs?
Is there a career development path for me?
Can I be productive in the work environment?
Do I align with the company culture?
Will my efforts be recognized?

Where does your EVP live?

A critical step in any employer brand project is assuring alignment and control of brand values, visuals, and verbals. That will often include:

Employee Handbooks
Company Websites and Career Pages
Onboarding Materials
Internal Communication Channels
Company Meetings
Recruitment Events and Job Fairs
Social Media and Digital Marketing
Performance and Review Discussions

Do these communication points leave new hires and employees with a powerful vision for what you do and how they benefit from joining in the effort?

In conclusion

A strong employer brand lowers recruiting costs and improves hire quality by building a clear, authentic Employee Value Proposition (EVP). A great EVP aligns with company goals, differentiates from competitors, and answers key employee needs, showing up consistently across internal and external communications. Most importantly, remember that a little heart in your EVP goes a long way.

It’s time to take action.

Put your company value proposition and the EVP next to each other. Do they align and support each other?
Explore ways to strengthen your EVP. Often brand consultants can provide broad guidance through webinars or intro calls.
Conduct qualitative and quantitative brand and satisfaction research with a core sampling of employees.
Gather together examples of everywhere your employer brand is communicated. Review and share with your employer brand team.
Get a snapshot of your employer brand health with the radically relevant assessment.

Looking to explore the conversation further?

A CMO's Guide to Preparing for a Rebrand

Blake Howard — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 15:55:49 GMT

Chief Marketing Officers have challenges. Brand shouldn't be one of them.

Three quarters of missed revenue expectations and a fresh new competitor.
Private equity-fueled growth and a set of new offerings that don’t really fit with your message.
Years of sales-focused efforts, leaving behind a neglected and stale brand.
Leads and qualified opportunities leaking left and right.
Comments from HR about lower-than-expected applicants.

And everyone is looking at the CMO for answers.

Some of these challenges demand a brand refresh, or possibly a full rebrand. More often than not, the CMO is the executive who carries the weight of that change as you steward the brand.

Successful brand evolutions are the crowning jewel on any CMO’s resume. More importantly, they can be a transformative process with a tremendous impact on the bottom-line results. However, before you start dreaming up those LinkedIn accolades or cool creative trophies, you first need a plan to get the project off the ground. You need alignment on the real problem to solve, managed expectations, political air cover, budget approval, and a plethora of social capital to pull this off.

You’ve got a lot to do, so let’s get started.

Define the real problem

Clearly state and align on the challenge to be solved.

Aligning on the challenge will help you get buy-in and traction for the resources required for the work ahead. Additionally, it will set you up for success on the back end when you’re the one accountable to show results. The key to measuring any success related to a brand refresh is getting clear on the problem to be solved.

Need help pinpointing the problem? Take our assessment and find out.

In the meantime, ask yourself and others inside the company:

How clearly do outsiders understand our brand’s personality, value, and offerings?
How different from our competitors do we sound, look, perform, and otherwise present ourselves to the market?
How consistent and recognizable is our brand in the market?
How efficient are our marketing and communication efforts? In other words, is Sam from Sales still using those bad stock photos? Is Haley from HR still using Comic Sans? Is Dan from Design wanting to “get creative with this one”?
Are ideal new customers drawn to our brand?
Are our existing customers excited to tell others about us?
How aligned are our internal teams on the positioning of the company? Do day-to-day decisions reinforce that positioning?

Document the answers to these questions and share the results back with the people you talked to. You can also share the brand assessment with others on your team to compare your results.

The strength of your brand will be tested by any of the challenges above, but homing in on the single most important problem to be solved is key to success. This will be the litmus test for budget approval, executive buy-in, and good decision-making once the work starts.

Build the right budget

The amount of change will drive the investment needed.

Once you have a clearer picture on the problem to be solved, you can better consider the funds required for the task. Brand changes can be evolutionary (retain key recognizable assets) or revolutionary (create new, distinct assets). The smaller the visual change, the smaller the budget needed to cover producing new materials, since evolutionary identities can co-exist in the market. However, if you decide to swing for the fences, you’ll want to replace brand materials as quickly as possible. Here are some key questions to consider:

Will your change be evolutionary or revolutionary?
Will you launch in association with a significant event?
What might be needed for a marketing splash on Day 1 of the launch?
What materials will need to be produced on Day 1, Day 30, Day 60 and beyond?
What materials can slowly be replaced as existing inventory runs out?

Secure air cover

Four ways to get C-suite buy-in.

Best case, the need for a rebrand is undeniable, and mandated by the board, the CEO, or a strategic plan. Worst case, you're swimming upstream to get funding and need to convince others of the ROI. Here are a few tips to build more momentum and to prove your point.

Connect brand efforts back to the current company focus or needs. Hint: It’s almost always the challenge your CEO is focused on right now.
- Revenue – winning and closing deals more often and more easily
- Hiring – attracting and retaining top talent
- Innovation – focusing effort more on new/innovative thinking
- Acquisitions – creating attraction for positive M&A activity
- Operational Improvement – creating clarity and unity internally to minimize confusion, bottlenecks, or going rogue

Visualize the problem in simple and powerful ways.
- Collect photos or examples that illustrate the main problem. If inconsistency or market confusion is the issue, consider collecting the disparate marketing materials and putting them on one slide to help the CEO feel the problem.
- Use a powerful stat. Many studies show the value of brand investment, but here are some of our favorites: According to McKinsey & Company, businesses that embrace design generate 32% more revenue and 56% more shareholder returns, on average. And presenting a brand consistently across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%.
- Show how other organizations or inspirational brands solved similar problems. Analogs help play-it-safe leaders feel comfortable and catch a vision of what’s possible.

Plant seeds and water (then keep watering).
- Depending on the dynamics of your leadership team, consider planting small seeds with those around the CEO. Socialize the idea of brand as a solution with some of your peers.
- See if you can make connections between their priorities and your desired brand improvements.

Share the radically relevant assessment with your C-suite and see where you align.
- If there is a gap between the scores, facilitate a discussion to build a shared understanding.
- Use an aggregate score to show strengths, opportunities, and industry benchmarking.

Still having trouble getting buy-in? We like Dan and Chip Heath’s advice in their book Switch on “shrinking the change.” Instead of getting a rebrand fully funded, start with a brand audit, internal brand survey, or external audience research. These smaller projects can get the ball rolling and make the challenge at hand clearer.

Manage timeline expectations

How long will this take, really?

You’re not going to like this, but successful brand changes take time. More time than you want. How much time? Well, it depends.

A comprehensive rebrand effort can take anywhere from 3 months to 3 years. Your precise timeline? Well, that comes down to these key areas:

The number of stakeholders giving feedback during the process.
The decisiveness of leadership.
The amount of effort needed to go-to market with the brand changes.

Here’s a list of possible phases of work related to a brand refresh. Similar to budgeting, the greater the problem, the greater the effort (and the longer the timeline).

Research – Qualitative or quantitative audience studies are the largest influence on timelines in this phase. Audits, assessments, internal focus groups and interviews are a lighter lift since they are easier to coordinate. Estimating 1-3 months for research is a fair assessment. Removing research effort saves time but leaves more guesswork in the latter stages of the project.

Brand Strategy – Clearly defining your ideal audience profile(s), determining radically relevant positioning and personality attributes will also take you 1-3 months. A smaller circle of stakeholder feedback paired with decisive leadership will help save time.

Naming – Typically 1-2 months, this process can stretch well beyond comfort or expectation. Similar to the strategy process, this duration is all about decision-making, feedback, and overall name criteria. International trademarks, dictionary or suggestive words, and dot com URL requirements make for a hard task and a long timeline. The decision-making process following the naming presentation can drag on for weeks, if not months. Planning ahead for any cultural, lingual, or consumer testing will help save your unexpected delays.

Visual and Verbal Identity – Considering logos, color, type, voice, messaging, and the overall look and feel should take 2-3 months. Similar to other phases, the amount of stakeholders and complexity of your organization will drive this timing up or down. Evolutionary changes notably reduce the effort, whereas revolutionary changes require a more thorough process.

Launch – From websites to integrated campaigns to celebratory events, consider this the Wild West. 1-6 months is an honest assessment. Simple roadshow reveals will be on the quicker side, with complex websites adding significant time (and budget). Even though this phase is highly customized, it might be the most important. To use a sports analogy, you don’t want to fumble on the one-yard line.

If you still have the need for speed, try:

Scheduling key meetings well in advance and getting leadership’s commitment to attend and make them a priority
Keeping the decision making team small (3-5 people)
Making quick decisions at key points in the brand project
Parallel pathing workstreams. For example, starting the website refresh project early. Kick off audits, content planning, wireframing, and UX alongside the brand refresh work. Layer in the UI once the brand initiative is finished.

Communicate like your career depends on it

Paving the way for agreement.

No matter how excellent the strategic and creative work is, you’ll need to do some selling once it comes to internal alignment. Marketing, creative, product, sales, and even HR will need to weigh in on the process. Their input is critical. Not because any one group has the right answer, but because brand prevails across all departments within your organization and you need key leaders to become key contributors to the process (and defenders of the outcome).

Planning your alignment and approval process ahead of time can save you, well, time. Heartache even more so.

There’s a difference between getting input and making decisions. Everyone can give you feedback, but you won’t be able to appease everyone or implement all of it (it's like they say, a horse designed by a committee is a camel). Set the stage up front for who will give feedback and who will make decisions.

We recommend having a core brand team (3-5 people max) that will be responsible for the decision-making. Additionally, you can have a larger group (10-12 people max) that will be highly involved in the process and will give feedback every step of the way. Outside of that group, consider getting feedback from additional stakeholders at the beginning of the project (to help them feel heard) and then keep them updated on the decisions made towards the end of the process.

If your culture is creative, curious, and passionate, using platforms like Loom and Slack to post video updates early and often helps employees feel in the loop. Just be mindful of the guaranteed barrage of opinions.

Ultimately, the decision must come down to you and your CEO, but knowing a larger group has your back can be a much needed source of comfort.

Find the right partner or roll your own

Obviously, we’re a bit biased on this one.

Several brands tackle brand challenges in-house. There are many pros for doing so. Those helping solve the problem(s) already know the brand more intimately than any outsider. You will have more control over the work as well. So if you have a specific vision or direction in mind, working directly with your team will likely save you time and money. However, most companies don't have the capacity in-house to add a brand project on top of an existing stack of work.

If you decide to find an agency partner who can provide a more outside and objective perspective, here are a few key questions to consider:

Are they specialized in branding, or is it just one more bullet on their long list of services?
Do they have experience in your industry?
Do you have mutual values and working styles?
Do you personally connect with the team you’d be working with? (You’ll be spending a lot of time together, after all.)
Would you trust them to lead you to the best answer for your business?
Do they have a process that gives you confidence in a good outcome?

In conclusion

Even though there is a lot at stake with a rebrand or refresh, many have gone before you and have successfully navigated the challenges ahead. You can as well, but it all starts with the right plan. Getting clear on the real problem, building the right budget, securing c-suite support and managing expectations are all critical steps along towards your rebrand glory.

Looking to explore the conversation further?

How We Find Harmony in Branding

Craig Johnson — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 18:39:32 GMT

The best brands sing. You know what I mean. When all the brand elements work together they can really create something special. The world’s most distinctive brands are harmonious—one with their audience, their market, and their employees.

The process to get there? Well, that’s a different story.

When we started Matchstic, we came up with three core values to guide us. Harmony was our secret ingredient for working together. From the moment we started, we knew we wanted people to like working at Matchstic. But after twenty years, harmony has become a lot more than that.

When we found harmony internally, we found out how to create harmony in the brands we help create.

Honor and Respect Everyone

We like to think we’re experts in branding, but it’s important to remember that our clients are experts in their business. So, we have to trust each other.

At first, harmony at Matchstic was mostly about showing respect for each other. As the years have gone on, though, we’ve noticed how important it is to share that same respect with our clients. After all, it’s important to remember that they’re the ones in a difficult situation. Their business is in our hands. If the project goes well, it’s good for their career. If the project goes poorly—well—let’s not think about that.

Show up, be open-minded, and have some empathy. That’s the name of the game. I like to remind everyone that at the end of the day, this is their flag that they get to fly. No matter how passionate we are about a certain symbol or tagline—the work is the relationship. Not just the product.

We are working with each other and for each other. If we want to respect each other and our contributions, we have to start by honoring and respecting the people trusting us with their business.

Assume the Best

There can often be a posture of distrust in agency-client relationships. In our experience, that distrust is where the problems start. Instead, we like to assume the best. Internally and out.

We hire experts and like to treat them like experts. When we work with clients, we focus on being transparent. The universal truth of branding is that every working relationship has challenges. We don’t ignore those challenges, but encourage everyone to go at them directly under the assumption that it will all work out.

When we assume quality work, honest intentions, and great results, we stay focused on solutions from the get-go. Conversations stay open, morale stays high, and we’re armed to navigate conflict.

The trick to harmony is that it's easier to maintain than it is to get back. That’s why we start by assuming the best. Starting from a foundation of trust leads to stronger work.

Strike a Balance

Courage and care. When we find both, we’re in our sweet spot. We have to respect everyone’s needs, limitations, and expectations—that’s care. But we also can’t just give them what they want without thinking about the problem they hired us to solve. We have to give them what they need—that’s courage.

Building brands requires constantly working with nuances. The answer is rarely yes or no. It’s almost always in-between. The right answer requires exploration—working with the unknowns. That means diving deeper, exploring further, and challenging the client’s expectations.

Striking a balance means fighting for what we believe, but also letting the client fight back, because they see things we don’t see, and we need to be all-in together.

Harmony leads to harmonious brands

When everyone feels aligned and is working towards the same goal—that’s when you get a great result. For us, that means honoring and respecting everyone, assuming the best, and striking a balance between courage and care.

When we first started thinking about values, harmony was our ringer. We thought it would make Matchstic a place where people wanted to work. Turns out, harmony is a big part of how we work, too.

The only way to build harmonious brands is to start with harmonious teams.

If a strategy-led approach is what your business needs, let’s talk.

3 Step Method for Calculating ROI of Employer Branding

Tracy Clark — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 11:00:00 GMT

As an HR executive, you know you have to bring the numbers. At your 1,000 employee company that means justifying resource requests. Resources for employee branding can be especially hard to come by. It will be easier if we do a little digging and a little math.

Here is a simplified* calculation for the return on investment (ROI) from improving your employer brand efforts. We'll focus on the potential costs and three main areas where you might see quantifiable benefits: reduced hiring costs, improved employee retention, and increased productivity.

Here's the 3 step basic approach:

Step 1: Pre-work

Clearly state the business goal. What is the most compelling improvement you think this could make for the business and can you measure it?
1. See a 5% decrease in the Costs per Hire by the end of next year.
2. Decrease the number of days lost to injury by 50% by the end of next year?
3. Decrease employee turnover by 2% by the end of next year.
Decide if you are going to calculate a 1- or 3-year ROI period. If you answer yes more than no to the following questions, go with a one year calculation.
1. Questions to ask:
  1. Are we hiring more than 10% of our employee base each year?
  2. Are we anticipating or experiencing significant company growth?
  3. Are we experiencing a merger, or other major business transformation?
  4. Are we under performing financially?

Looking for an easy way to set up this pre-work? Download our HR Leaders' Employer Branding Toolkit to access our Employer Branding ROI Calculator.

Step 2: Calculate the Factors

Factor 1: Reduced Hiring Costs

Average Cost per Hire (Before): This includes expenses related to recruiting, such as advertising job postings, recruiter fees, and interviewing time.
Average Cost per Hire (After): Typically, a strong employer brand reduces these costs because it attracts more candidates organically and speeds up the hiring process.
Annual Hiring Volume: How many people you hire per year.

Formula:

(Average Cost To Hire(Before) − Average Cost To Hire(After)) × Annual Hiring Volume = Reduced Hiring Costs

Factor 2: Estimate Improved Retention Savings

Annual Turnover Rate (Before): The percentage of employees leaving each year before improving the employer brand.
Annual Turnover Rate (After): Expected percentage after the improvement.
Cost to Replace an Employee: Usually calculated as a percentage of the employee's salary (often 50-250% depending on the role.)

Formula:

(Turnover Rate (Before) - Turnover Rate (After)) X Number of Employees X Cost to Replace an Employee = Estimated Retention Savings

Factor 3: Increased Productivity

Average Revenue Per Employee (Before): This can be derived from your total revenue divided by the number of employees or a calculated Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) you already have on hand.
Expected Increase in Productivity: This can be an estimated percentage increase due to higher engagement and better alignment with company goals. Be realistic and get input from your COO.

Formula:

Average Revenue Per Employee X Number of Employees X Expected Increase in Productivity = Increased Productivity

Factor 4: Employer Brand Costs

Employer Branding Costs: Creating or updating of an employer brand strategy and system can take several forms.
External Marketing: Only include the spend you plan beyond your existing budget.
Internal Marketing: Include additional spend on retention and internal communication activities.

Formula:

Employer Branding Costs + External Marketing + Internal Marketing = Employer Brand Costs

You can download our easy Employer Branding ROI Calculator to take care of this math for you.

Step 3: Total ROI Calculation

Formula:

Reduced Hiring Costs + Estimated Retention Savings + Increase in Productivity

Example Calculation

Let's assume:

Average Cost per Hire (Before): $5,000
Average Cost per Hire (After): $3,500
Annual Hiring Volume: 100
Annual Turnover Rate (Before): 10%
Annual Turnover Rate (After): 7%
Cost to Replace an Employee: 100% of annual salary
Average Salary: $50,000
Number of Employees: 500
Average Revenue Per Employee: $200,000
Expected Increase in Productivity: 3%
Employer Branding Costs: $250,000
External Marketing: $50,000
Internal Marketing: $50,000

(Take the time to adjust these formulas based on more precise data specific to your organization and industry.)

Now plug in the values:

Reduced Hiring Costs: ($5,000 - $3,500) X 100 = $150,000

Retention Savings: (10(10% - 7%) X 500 X $50,000 = $750,000

Increase in Productivity: $200,000 X 500 X 3% = $3,000,000

Employer Brand Costs: $250,000 + $50,000 + $50,000 = $350,000

Total ROI: ($150,000 + $750,000 + $3,000,000) - $350,000 = $3,550,000

This simple model gives a rough estimate of the financial benefits of improving your employer brand. And, should set you up for good conversations with your executive peers.

Skip the math

You can find a helpful Employer Branding ROI Calculator in the toolkit. Happy number crunching!

*Is the Return on Investment scrutiny a little more intense at your company? Do you feel like you need to look at a 3-year or longer ROI period? Ask your CFO for guidance on deeper analysis that may involve things like Internal Rate of Return (IRR), Net Present Value (NPV), and deeper analysis of the Payback Period.

Why Truth is a Process at Matchstic

Blake Howard — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 19:10:40 GMT

“Truth” certainly seems more subjective than ever. However, after 20 years of leading clients through rebrands, I’ve found it to be one of the few things to stand the test of time.

The trick is knowing what the truth is. It’s rarely just data, singular, or universal. It’s more complicated than that. Truth requires a process. It can mean identifying the real problem to solve, using strategy to inform the work, or knowing when and how to incorporate others into the creative process.

And the truth is even if you know the facts, you still might need to learn how to use them to get the best results.

Truth identifies a problem to solve

Branding needs to solve a problem. A new name or identity for the same ole’ business solves nothing.

Consider Paul Rand, aka the Michael Jordan of logos. Famous for creating iconic identities for brands like IBM, UPS, Yale, and Westinghouse. Those brand identities are iconic because they use graphic shapes in new ways to solve specific problems.

That was Rand’s strength—simple graphic answers to complex problems. Truth offers a clear case for change that helps leaders make better decisions and empowers stakeholders to accept and defend possible ideas.

Case in point: Paul Rand also created the brand identity for Enron—but no one celebrates that. It wasn’t true to Enron’s problems, which, frankly, weren’t a branding problem.

Truth informs the process

Many consider research inherently truthful, but it’s only part of the equation. For truth to be part of the decision-making process, research must be strategic, open-minded, and willing to ask hard questions.

Is the problem tangible, or is it just water cooler talk? Does a brand’s issues impact the intended audience, or does it only live like an urban legend through Slack?

I’ve worked on many projects where internal beliefs about the brand had become doctrine but were unfounded and not true for outsiders. To find the truth, brands need to first—holistically— understand where they are strong and where they can improve. Do they have existing equity? Are they attracting the right people? Are they aligned internally on what the brand stands for?

Discovering if your brand is helping or hurting is why we created the radically relevant assessment.

Because the truth is usable, it empowers our brand strategy to become an objective truth for creative decision-making. What’s the right look and feel? What is the right approach to color? What’s the right tone of voice? Which logo idea tells the right story? Strategy points us in the right direction.

Truth helps you navigate feedback

There’s a widespread belief in rebranding that more feedback is better. More sharing. More tests. More opinions.

The truth is you have to protect the process. Gathering input from every employee is great for getting internal buy-in, but gathering feedback every step of the way will cause more harm than good.

If you have an inclusive or tight-knit culture, get input on the front end of a brand process. Then, use those insights to fuel your strategy and help frame objectives. Opening the floodgates of feedback later in the process will cause delays and indecision.

Good stakeholder management allows socializing for feedback—not decision-making. The only thing everyone should decide on is where to go for lunch, not what the future of the brand should be.

In the rebranding process, everyone has a role. Some provide perspective, some feedback, and a select few make decisions. They’re the ones with the hard job of identifying what’s radical or relevant in the flurry of opinions. Good brand strategy, built on truths, is the only way they can do it.

One thing we’ve learned in the last 20 years is to never let the strategy disappear. Always present findings, feedback, concepts, and solutions with the truth there to guide it. That means filtering and highlighting what really matters.

Be generous in what you send out but strategic about what you take in.

Truth doesn’t work without trust

Rebranding is scary. It takes courage. People can make poor decisions and lose millions in equity and inefficiencies. Without strategy built on truths, poor decisions are not just possible—they’re more likely. That’s why we ask our clients to trust us.

Trust that truth is possible in the rebranding process.

If a strategy-led approach is what your business needs, let’s talk.

How Courage Defines Matchstic

Blake Howard — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 14:00:00 GMT

There's a lot to fear in rebranding.

Is this the right answer? Will it resonate with our audience? Will it help our business? Will the rest of the team agree?

When Matchstic first started, courage was how we learned. It was a reaction to the work. Craig joked back then, “We didn’t do things because they were easy, we did them because we thought they would be easy.”

Today, we know the right path for our clients is never easy.

In fact, after 20 years, I can confidently say it’s the opposite. The right path for our clients is unfamiliar. And unfamiliar is unknown, scary, and difficult.

Embrace the unfamiliar.

If a brand wants to stay distinct and relevant for the long haul, it needs to press the edges of what feels comfortable, today. Otherwise, if it plays it safe, the brand will feel dated in years and forgettable in months.

That’s where courage comes in.

It’s scary to make a decision for your brand’s future that—in your gut—feels unfamiliar. That unknown territory is yelling for you to choose the well-worn path.

But that’s exactly what makes brands irrelevant, and why decision-by-committee dilutes the potential of the creative process.

Standing out in the market means facing conflict and embracing the internal debates and litigations. It means inviting critique from other angles, perspectives, and backgrounds. And it means pushing to get better by trusting the process and being patient for the outcome.

Courage, therefore, isn’t just a trait but an approach. It’s having a process, relying on research, using objective methodologies, and workshopping design–type, color, layout, imagery, and language—that is true and distinct for your organization.

When we sit down with clients, the discomfort is how we know we’re headed in the right direction. We draw on our courage to arrive at answers.

So, yes, there’s a lot to fear in brand identity, that’s how we know it’s something to be proud of.

Taking a step into the unknown? Let's talk.

What’s Kept Matchstic Burning After 20 Years?

Craig Johnson — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 16:50:40 GMT

It’s hard to believe, but 2023 saw us reach the 20th anniversary of Matchstic.

From humble beginnings in the house at 797 Moreland, we've spent over two decades building incredible brands while hunched over our keyboards the way our doctors told us not to.

Back in 2003, we didn’t have a grand vision for Matchstic, but we were confident success was possible if we treated people well and did good work. It wasn’t until 2008 that we started searching for a greater purpose. Back then, books like "Good to Great" by Jim Collins and "Designing Brand Identity," by Alina Wheeler were transforming the way we thought about Matchstic.

That’s when brand identity became our focus.

Branding is so much more than logos. It’s an exercise in empathy, listening, and seeing our clients for who they are. It’s a dynamic fusion of research, strategy, visuals, and words that breathe life into companies. Great design can go far, but the thinking behind the design is what inspires others to carry it with them.

2008 was the year we decided our purpose was to help clients find their purpose—to raise flags they were proud to fly. But to do that, we knew we were going to have to do things differently.

Radically Relevant

Team collaborating, 2019

Today, we define that difference as being radical and relevant. A concept so important Blake wrote a book on it. Too often, brands grow insular and fail to evolve for the needs of their audience, thus becoming irrelevant. Other brands, meanwhile, shy away from distinctive and original ideas and turn invisible—losing their distinction.

For us, being radical and relevant is how brands come to life. It’s how companies use their identity, audience, and market position to succeed.

It’s the culmination of our 20-year practice and how we make a positive impact for our clients in a more effective, efficient, and—frankly—fun way.

The Difference is People

Camp Matchstic, Austin, TX, 2023

As we celebrate Matchstic's 20-year journey, we want to recognize the people who made it possible.

Every teammate has guided, supported, and inspired us to be who we are now. Without their trust, time, and passion, the impact on our clients wouldn’t be anything like it is today. Our team is what makes radically relevant somehow radically possible.

After 20 years, I'm constantly reminded of the impact our team makes and I love seeing our work out in the wild helping great organizations better project their identity into the world.

In many ways, Matchstic feels like an overnight success, but we have the fond memories and hard work to prove it was 20 years in the making. So, let’s raise our glasses and recognize the people who have taken us this far, and to many more years of creativity, collaboration, and kindness. We're thrilled to have you with us!

With gratitude,

Craig Johnson

Blake and Craig, 2008

5 Ways to Build an Employer Brand that Lasts

Tracy Clark — Mon, 01 May 2023 04:00:00 GMT

Ever wonder why some organizations seem more “put together” when their employees talk about them?

It’s likely a result of a good employer brand strategy. And while the process of building an employer brand can spark real transformation, there are some challenges we’ve seen derail it.

Before we get into those challenges and how to avoid them, let’s define two key terms:

Employer Brand is the reputation of a company as an employer; the reality owned by employees, the public, and the marketplace; intentionally or unintentionally shaped by the company.

Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is the concise and differentiated statement defining the promises mutually made between an organization and its employees. It is foundational to your employer brand, so it should guide the path for every effort put towards building your employer brand. Learn more about what goes into crafting a unique EVP.

So why does Employer Branding matter?

People

On average, a person spends about 90,000 hours at work during their lifetime.
Employees gravitate to employers who build environments where they can thrive.

Prosperity

For most businesses, labor costs account for most of the expenses.
Cost per hire averages between $5,000 and $10,000 per employee.
Training and reaching top proficiency can take up to a year or more depending on your industry.

Perception

A company’s broader reputation can be significantly impacted by their reputation as an employer.
When employees are engaged, they work more passionately towards the mission, vision, and purpose.
Top talent is more likely to work for (and stay at) an organization with a strong culture and employer brand.

If the above metrics matter to you, here are five pitfalls to avoid so that you can successfully craft (or upgrade) an employer brand that lasts:

1. Failure to get Leadership Buy-in

Failing to secure internal buy-in from leadership is like trying to build a fire without any kindling. Your employer brand is a shared identity, and if your most influential stakeholders don’t feel connected or committed, there will be friction, mistrust, and apathy from day one.

Sharing market insights can often reveal where competitors are outperforming in terms of hiring and reputation. Survey data, engagement scores and Glassdoor reviews are also very telling as far as gaps that employer brand can help fill over time. Be sure to link the investment to a healthy return on investment (ROI) by establishing baseline metrics that may currently be underperforming (cost per hire, turnover rate, hiring time, and talent pipeline). Lastly, recruit a leadership advocate who understands the potential impact (and the opportunity cost of doing nothing), so that they can build confidence and drive urgency.

2. Be Real

A brand that doesn’t genuinely reflect the culture and values of the company will quickly be sniffed out, leading to disappointment, distrust, and higher turnover rates. Prospective employees can sense when a company’s branding feels overly polished or disconnected from the real-world employee experience. That’s why it’s crucial to keep things authentic.

A shiny facade might spark initial interest, but it won’t create the lasting loyalty and engagement that comes from the deeper work: being transparent, providing development opportunities, creating a culture of balance and avoiding toxicity. It’s essential to base your employer branding efforts on what you really stand for—not just what you think will look and sound good. Listen to your employees, gather honest feedback, create action, and build a brand that aligns with your current realities and vision for your workforce.

3. Short Changing the Opportunity

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that employer branding is solely a recruitment tool for “new and shiny” employees, but there are many ways employer branding can create gains.

Retain top talent. On average it costs a company 6 to 9 months of an employee's salary to replace them.* This is especially critical in times of uncertainty or challenging labor reports
Enhance productivity. Research shows that companies with strong employer brands experience up to 20% higher productivity.**
Strengthen brand loyalty. Consumers often make buying decisions based on companies with values that align with theirs. How you treat employees can be the difference between someone who chooses your overall brand and someone who moves on.

Think of employer branding as a continuous loop. Your strategy should engage employees from their first interaction with your brand through the entirety of their career, through their exit interview, and when they think to refer you.

4. Being Stuck in the Sea of Sameness

One of the most important aspects of branding is differentiation. And with Covid providing a “great reset,” candidates are clearer about their unique wants and needs in their next role. Companies can’t afford to blend in. Here are some quick wins to find your differentiation that matters to your audience:

Ditch the clichés. "Innovative" and "service-oriented" are super tired.
Pitch the platitudes. "Our people make the difference" and "we care about our employees" are ubiquitous table stakes.
See what others are naming and claiming, and say something new (while also keeping #2 above in mind–keep it real.)
Be radical. Be relevant.

5. Stopping Short of a Strong Finish

Building an employer brand requires authenticity and ongoing, intentional effort. Once the process is complete, it’s important to continue to fan the flames to ensure a long-lasting return on investment

Conduct follow-up sentiment surveys with employees to see how they are living out the brand.
Prioritize unstructured and structured conversations between leadership, management and managed teams.
Lead employer brand guideline check-ins.
Provide ongoing support and guidance around asset creation beyond the big launch.

Conclusion

Employer branding can create a workplace that attracts and retains top talent and helps drive business success. By addressing common pitfalls leaders can ensure their employer brand resonates deeply with the employees, shareholders, and the public.

*The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)

**Bureau of Labor Statistics

It’s time to take action.

If employer branding is increasingly important to your success, get intentional.

1. Put an hour on your calendar to outline an employer brand initiative.
2. Download the Employer Brand Project Sample RFP.
3. Investigate the HR Leaders' Employer Branding Project Toolkit.

Looking to explore the conversation further?

Demystifying the Average Employer Branding Project Cost

Tracy Clark — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 04:00:00 GMT

Employer branding is essential for companies looking to attract and retain top talent, as well as establish a radically relevant presence in the market.

Understanding the cost of such projects is crucial for planning and getting the appropriate budget approved. Let’s explore the various factors that influence the cost of employer branding projects and provide a breakdown of typical expenses involved.

Factors Influencing Cost

Size of the Company: Larger companies may require more extensive branding efforts across multiple regions, business units, and job markets. If you are a larger or more diverse company, plan on increasing the cost for launch and implementation in your ROI calculation.
Scope of the Project: The complexity and breadth of the branding initiative, including the number of platforms and touchpoints, can vary, impacting the overall budget. Will you need help writing and executing internal communication? Is company branded swag for employees a big part of your culture? What other expressions of your employer brand may need unique attention? In environments where safety is especially important, employer brand work can lead to improvements. Safety programs can receive special care during the branding process.
Available Internal Labor: Companies with capable in-house teams may spend less on external services, but must consider the opportunity cost of diverting these resources from other projects.
Amount of Research Required: Thorough market and internal research are pivotal for a successful employer branding strategy, adding to the cost depending on the depth needed. A consultant, who's been through multiple employer brand projects, can help right-size the research for your situation.

3 Methods and Cost Ranges for Employer Branding Projects

Employer branding projects can vary widely in cost based on the chosen approach and resources. Here’s a breakdown of typical options and price ranges:

Using Internal Resources Only:
- Cost Range: Minimal to moderate, often under $50,000+.
- Included Expenses: Staff time, basic training materials, internal communication tools.
- Characteristics: Often internal costs balloon as project timelines creep and internal resources work on this new kind of task inefficiently. Costs get hidden making it difficult to calculate total cost.
- What’s missing?: Speed and expertise.
Using a Design Agency for Visual Work
- Cost Range: $20,000 to $150,000+.
- Included Expenses: Design of visual identity elements such as logos, color schemes, and marketing collateral.
- Characteristics: Often an hourly or retainer arrangement, that makes total cost hard to control. More difficult to get alignment across the strategic, visual, and messaging elements of the brand. Any supplemental vendor costs (e.g. research) must be arranged and managed.
- What’s missing?: Wholistic approach and tailoring to your specific needs.
Using a Brand Consultancy:
- Cost Range: $50,000 to $350,000+.
- Included Expenses: Comprehensive services including market research, strategy development, naming, visual identity system, messaging system, launch support, campaign execution, and measurement of effectiveness. Use an RFP to get a detailed consistent scope. Looking for inspiration? Get a sample RFP in our toolkit.
- Characteristics: Usually a fixed fee arrangement for an established scope, making it easy to control total cost and any expenses.
- What’s missing?: Nothing.

Key Takeaways

Deciding on a method often comes down to internal expertise, time, and how competitive your recruiting environment is. If employee recruitment and retention are key elements to company success you’ll want your employer brand to be radical in the marketplace and relevant to your team and community. Finding that strategic balance is best informed through experience.

It’s time to take action.

Adjust the costs in the examples above for your situation.
List all of the employer brand touchpoints you have and prioritize them. Start with this Google Spreadsheet. Looking for an Excel version? Try our toolkit.
Use this rough cost information to do a preliminary ROI study on transforming your employer brand. Get the Employer Brand Project ROI Spreadsheet.

How Healthy is Your Employer Brand?

Tracy Clark — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 16:15:00 GMT

Your core brand influences how people see your company—but your employer brand shapes how they feel about working there.

In today’s competitive hiring market, brand can be one of your greatest assets or your biggest risks. It reflects how your culture and workplace are perceived, and it directly affects your ability to attract and keep top talent. So, how do you know if it’s healthy?

Brand Health Indicators

Understanding the health of your employer brand starts with hard numbers and goes to human sentiment.

Employee Sentiment: Gauge internal morale and brand connection through anonymous surveys or informal feedback channels.
Review Sites (e.g., Glassdoor): External reviews provide a reality check. Assess whether your stated values align with employee experiences.
Retention & Turnover Rates: Are people sticking around, or leaving quickly? Turnover trends often point to deeper cultural dynamics.
Referral Rates: Do employees recommend your workplace to others?
Employee Social Engagement: Look for organic sharing of company content or workplace pride on social platforms.
Career Site Traffic: Measure how many prospective candidates are exploring your job opportunities.
Application & Acceptance Rates: If you’re attracting applicants but struggling to close offers, there might be a disconnect between perception and reality.
Time to Fill: Extended hiring timelines could indicate unclear brand positioning, low appeal, or reputation concerns.

How do you acquire this data? To get a clearer picture, consider a mix of methods such as conducting your own brand perception and engagement surveys, focus groups led by a third party, or taking a self assessment, like our radically relevant employer brand health assessment.

Improvement Strategies

Here’s the truth: You can’t “brand” your way out of a broken culture. No matter how polished your careers page is, it won’t land if your internal reality doesn’t reflect it. A strong employer brand starts with genuine care.

Lead with Authenticity: Own your values and live them out—transparently. What do you stand for? What makes your workplace tick?
Communicate Clearly and Consistently: From onboarding to exit interviews, your brand should be clear, intentional, and human.
Invest in Listening: Build feedback loops that empower employees to share and shape the culture.
Celebrate What’s Working: Highlight team wins, spotlight real voices, and elevate stories that reinforce your identity.

Key Takeaways

A healthy employer brand doesn’t happen by accident. Instead, it’s the result of intentional listening, clear communication, and a culture that lives up to its promises. By measuring the right indicators, tuning into employee and candidate experiences, and taking action where needed, you can build a radically relevant employer brand.

It’s time to take action.

Take the radically relevant employer brand health assessment.
Start collecting data regarding hiring and retention.
Check out your reviews on sites like Glassdoor.
Review internal and external survey data for insights.

Looking to explore the conversation further?

Radically Relevant Book

Matchstic Staff — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 20:12:00 GMT

Is your brand propelling you forward?

From Apple to Tesla, strong brands outperform their competitors across all industries. Businesses that embrace design generate 32% more revenue and 56% more shareholder returns, on average. And presenting a brand consistently across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%. Yada, yada.

But what’s the secret? If having a great brand were easy, more organizations would be doing it. Instead, most organizations — even brands that start out strong — struggle to scale their brand as they grow.

For 20 years, our co-founder and creative director Blake Howard has helped brands from Publix to Boys and Girls Clubs of America to Chick-fil-A launch, change, and evolve. During that time, he has found a simple answer for what makes great brands great: You’ve got to be radically relevant. Radical, in that you have a unique differentiation to offer the marketplace. And relevant, because what you offer is compelling to your audience.

In this book, he’ll break down the radically relevant brand into six unique characteristics. You’ll take an assessment to see how you’re performing in each of these six key areas — and how you stack up against similar brands. Then, you’ll get practical, achievable advice on how to improve. With clarity and confidence, you can break through the challenges facing your organization and become the radically relevant brand your audiences are waiting for.

Articles

Dolly Parton: Off The Charts

Ultimately genuine. Universally loved.

Your Brand Now Has a Second Audience: The AI Machines

Why LLM-friendly brand guidelines are becoming the difference between consistent brands and chaotic ones.

Inside

The scale of the second audience

87% of Marketers are using generative AI

The problem: brand drift

Translating brand knowledge into a format AI can read

The value of the markdown is not the format. The value is the translation.

Why LLMs punish gray areas and reward black-and-white brands

Getting consistent across platforms

Skills equip your marketers

What is an AI-powered brand system?

Where to start

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a Brand Intelligence file actually look like? Can I see an example?

Does this replace our existing brand guidelines or sit alongside them?

How long does this typically take to build?

How does the cost of building brand intelligence files payoff?

Who should own AI-readable brand guidelines? IT or marketing?

Sources

Manufacturing Asset: Brand

The case for treating brand like a business asset, not a marketing cost

The language gap between marketing and finance

Brand reduces risk in complex buying decisions

Sameness creates financial drag

Measurement changes the internal conversation

The takeaway

Time to take action

Manufacturers: Turn Your Brand Into a Measurable Business Asset

If you’re a leader championing growth and transformation in the industrial and manufacturing sector, this webinar will equip you with the insights, strategy, and perspective that turns the industry’s least utilized asset into a value-generating tool.

AI Analysis of the NASA brand

Claude's Response:

Brand Valuation Framework for Manufacturers

Reframing brand as a measurable asset, not a marketing initiative.

Inside

A disciplined way

The temptation:using the stock chart as proof

What “measurable” actually means

1. Financial performance

2. Market behavior

3. Brand strength and governance

Brand as a Growth and Risk Reduction Asset

A practical brand management model for CEOs

1. Build and maintain a radically relevant brand

2. Define the performance logic

3. Select enterprise metrics that should move if the brand strengthens

4. Govern for consistency

Board-Level Reporting: How to Present Brand Impact Credibly

The Leadership Implication

The Takeaway

Time to Take Action

What Questions Does This Article Answer?

AI-Ready Brand Guidelines Software: The 2026 Rankings

Not every brand guidelines platform is ready for the machine audience. Here is how the leading options stack up.

Inside

Before you buy: the guidelines come first

How we ranked the platforms

The rankings, from most to least AI-ready

1. Standards

2. Frontify

3. zeroheight

4. Bynder

5. Corebook

6. Brandfolder

7. Papirfly

8. Brandpad

The bottom line

Sources

Leading Change: How to Win Support for a Rebrand

A Webinar Conversation

Webinar: The Rebrand Price Tag

How to avoid underestimating the effort and overspending a branding project budget

Our Process

Branding Beneath the Surface

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): What Brand Leaders Need to Know

What Is GEO?

Why GEO Matters for Brand Leaders

The value of the markdown is not the format.

The value is the translation.

The temptation:
using the stock chart as proof