In service-led sectors like yours, it’s all too easy to underestimate how much you and your competitors look and sound alike in the eyes of prospective clients. A distinct and compelling brand (one with bite!) can be transformative. It makes it easier for clients to choose you as their next partner, helping you grow faster and charge what you’re truly worth.

Research backs this up. A study by Millward Brown found that organisations that invest in their brand see three times the sales growth as those that don’t. Kantar’s research went even further, revealing that these same organisations are able to charge a 38% price premium.

So, how do you evolve your brand from boresome to roarsome?

Step 1: Get crystal clear on your positioning—what is your service, and who is it for? Be clear about your niche and who your Ideal Customer Persona are. The tighter your focus, the easier it will be to create clear, compelling messaging and highly targeted marketing and business development activities.

Step 2: Unearth your customers’ core tension or aspiration - Start by hypothesising the tension that keeps your customer awake at night or the aspiration that lights them up. Tapping into a strong emotion, whether negative or positive, is a powerful mechanic and is known to trump logical messaging.

Step 3: Define your organisation’s superpowers - Look within to uncover your true superpowers, those distinctive qualities that go beyond the clichés of “trustworthy,” “quality service,” or “passionate.” Your superpowers should directly address your customers’ core tension, emotionally resonate and energise and motivate your own team.

Step 4: Develop a brand (and assets) that brings this to life—crisp messaging, a succinct, punchy strapline, a bold, distinctive visual identity, and brand assets that enable you to build top-of-mind resonance with your potential customers. Don’t be afraid to be bold. A study by IPSOS showed how sounds and characters have six times the recall of logos.

Step 5: Build trust through brand campaigns - The 95:5 rule of marketing suggests that 95% of potential buyers are not “in-market” at any given time, while only 5% are actively looking to buy. Therefore, effective strategies should focus on building awareness and trust with the 95% of out-of-market prospects, rather than solely chasing short-term sales from the 5%.

A Real Life Example

Indigo Tax & Accountancy, a Horsham accounting firm, had identified that it was becoming increasingly difficult to stand out and charge what it was worth in an increasingly competitive market that, like many service-based businesses, was facing a race to the bottom due to the proliferation of digital-only alternatives.

Step 1: Through our Unearth workshop (often described as “like therapy for my brand”), we helped the company regain clarity around their positioning, giving it the confidence to primarily target limited companies rather than sole traders and to focus on a niche that it had built over time, of customers within the music and entertainment industry.

Step 2: We collectively hypothesised that the core tension facing the majority of its customers was one of frustration. A need for someone to hold their hand through the complexity of tax and accounting, so they can spend more time concentrating on what they do best (eg, creating music!) and validated this through one-to-one interviews with their customers.

Step 3: Through a series of brainstorming exercises, including asking the team to discover their own animal personalities through our Animal Instincts brand quiz (growthanimals.com/brand-quiz), we discovered themes of care, compassion and empathy that ran throughout the team and were perfectly modelled by their founder, Teresa.

Step 4: Teresa’s animal personality —a panda —has superpowers of kindness, honesty, and citizenship, which are wholly in line with the company’s superpowers. We therefore leaned into this and evolved their brand, retaining their colours and name (literally Indigo) while adding a distinctive visual brand metaphor and a new brand character, “Indi” the panda.

Step 5: The Indigo team ran wholeheartedly with the new positioning and assets, putting Indi front and centre of its events, social media and marketing activities. The result? Indi has made a stir in the market, with current clients complimenting the fit with the brand and new customers highlighting how much it’s made them stand out.

Animal Growth Marketing

www.growthanimals.com