Your brand strategy is not a set-it-and-forget-it-document. There is a reason why many organizations do strategic planning every 3-5 years. A strategic plan helps define the direction your company will take and the actions that will help you achieve your goals.
Brand strategy is no different! In fact, strategic planning is the perfect time to revisit your brand guide. And a great way to do this is by engaging a trusted partner to offer an outside perspective.
Over the past 6 years, and two strategic planning cycles, I asked trusted partners to help Mercury apply our Method to bring even more clarity to our brand. In our situation, they challenged us. Challenged the way we were doing things, challenged our messaging. They evoked conversations that brought clarity on what makes us unique and the true value we bring to our clients.
That is why we do what we do. Mercury’s essential value is clarity + alignment. We uncover a brand’s true purpose, and we bring alignment to teams from the inside out. We grow brands from the inside out, with a consistent brand identity and communications.
But even as the experts, we too needed that outside perspective! Watch and listen to what I learned both times we brought in an outside perspective to help us.
Video Transcript
Cheri: One question that comes up is, how do you know you need a partner when you’re rebranding?
Justin: Well, that outside perspective is going to get you the furthest along in the process. We tried to do this twice on our own. Once was in 2015. Brought in an outside consultant, a trusted colleague of mine that I’ve worked with for many years, and I needed her to help drive that process with my team. That led to a name change. That led to really huge changes, which I didn’t even know would happen. And one of the best parts was seeing my team take a huge ownership role in the process. But also the name change and digging into my family’s origin and history and how that evolved into the name, into the identity and the expression of the brand.
So I walked away with having a team much more engaged and onboard, not like they weren’t before, but there was this element that it’s now more of theirs and seeing that process through and growing this organization that a couple of them have been part of with me for ten plus years.
So I can’t say enough about having an outside perspective because she challenged us, challenged the way we were doing things, challenged our messaging, and that just evoked conversations and clarity on really what makes us unique and how we’re helping our clients.
And fast forward to just recently, we’ve gone through that same process. It’s not a name change, everybody. We nailed that one, but our process has changed. Covid did kick up some things for us to rethink. We’re already a remote and distributed team, but we got to use different tools and different ways to work with our clients to solve their brand challenges. We evolved our method. We evolved our messaging and kind of found new clarity in what we stand for and for whom. And we couldn’t have done that without, again, another outside partner driving us through the process.
They used our method, but they were on the outside helping us answer those hard questions and come to alignment with what is that one thing? What is that one thing that we do?
Mercury is the partner that helps organizations answer the hard questions and find alignment around their brand.
