Our approach to strategy
The goal of every brand strategy is to determine a brand personality that is sustainable over the long term from the inside out, and also to structure market performance in the most promising way possible. From here we derive a stand-alone brand promise that helps to set the brand apart from the competition and raise awareness of the brand among stakeholders. A strong brand promise offers a relationship to a brand that creates strong rational and emotional value with all target groups.
Heads attaches particular importance to capturing what makes the target brand personality unique. The brand needs to be an integral part of a company’s corporate strategy, and must therefore be carefully compared with the management’s strategic aims. After all, strong brands contribute significantly to a company’s success.
We turn your brand into an authentic, relevant and differentiated brand personality.
Our methods
At Heads, we study human behavior closely. In order to understand a brand’s true personality, we do more than simply interrogating internal and external “witnesses”: we also analyze the effective brand behavior, explore trends and determine how the target groups react both rationally and emotionally to these patterns. Heads observes the situation from a variety of perspectives, uses different methods and systematically searches for the brand’s most promising relationship offer when it comes to the target groups.
With brand profiling, we lead you to astonishing findings about the unique nature and elasticity of your brand.
With the Heads Brand Profiler, we are able to efficiently capture the unique aspects of your brand’s personality as well as the expressions and directions of your brand’s elasticity and establish a solid, well-founded basis for brand management within a few weeks.
Just like leading criminal profilers, Heads takes an approach based on the following six principles:
1. Taking yourself out of the equation
Regardless of your experience, you must be completely impartial and unbiased when it comes to learn-ing new things in order to pick up on small yet meaningful signals – and these signals often lead us to the relevant, unique essence of the brand.
2. Change your perspective
Reality is more complicated than it seems in a snapshot. Diverse, interdisciplinary points of view are necessary in order to round out one’s perception into a relevant whole.
3. Observe people’s actions
Behavior is the key to reaching a brand’s core. Only by closely observing target groups and systematically recording their behavior can we understand what truly goes into a brand.
4. Networked thinking
A brand personality often initially manifests itself as a combination of all the available information. We must link all of the results and impressions in order to demonstrate differences and make precise statements on what is at the heart of the brand.
5. Differentiating between cause and effect
Results are often simply results, and tell us nothing about the cause. When we’re looking for brand personalities, facts and figures are vital. Correctly interpreting those facts and figures, however, is even more important.
6. Focusing on the needs
We are primarily interested in determining the needs which underly the assigned tasks. As Albert Ein-stein famously said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask.”
References and blog posts on brand strategy
Corporate culture
Behavior shapes the perception of brands and companies
Strengthening and profiling a brand has a lot to do with the creation of consciousness, relevance, orientation and identification. For service providers in particular, external perception is strongly shaped by employee behavior. This fact makes a deep internal understanding of the brand indispensable. The more that employees identify with the brand, the more successfully, convincingly and consistently the brand can be managed and experienced across the entire value chain.
We make sure that your employees are truly motivated to fulfill your brand promise.
Motivating and empowering employees
Targeted measures in the area of corporate culture motivate and empower your employees to fulfill the brand promise in their daily work and, once the company’s targets have been reached, to even surpass themselves. This also improves employee retention: highly educated, talented employees expect to be fulfilled by their work. A major aspect of this fulfillment is that they contribute to the company’s position-ing and can pursue ambitious goals. Since 2005, Heads has been involved in projects to design and implement cultural change and behavioral branding programs for renowned Swiss companies such as AMAG Automobil und Motoren AG, Axpo or Swiss Re.
References and blog posts on corporate culture
Brand design
Consistent communication of your brand identity
Through unmistakable design derived from the brand’s strategy, Heads helps companies and institutions to establish a homogeneous brand image. This design allows for the consistent communication of your brand identity. It runs through your logo, typography, colors, imagery and other design elements of your brand and, with special attention to systematic usage, is visible in your printed corporate materials, la-bels, markings, publications, websites and in the configuration of all other corporate applications. As part of creating a brand design, Heads is constantly on the lookout for new and unique solutions that offer a solid basis for further conceptual implementations.
Our design consistently delivers your brand promise across all of your brand touchpoints.
References and blog posts on brand design
Brand communication
Establishing trust
Communication significantly shapes the perception of a company as well as its reputation. For this reason, all forms of corporate communication must be a consistent expression of the company’s brand identity. The more efficiently a company communicates its brand, the more it benefits from a large degree of contextual and formal brand recognition. A consistently communicated promise establishes trust in a company.
We create communication strategies that focus on the main areas of value that your brand offers your target groups.
Winning heads and hearts
Heads offers advice and develops communication strategies on the basis of brand strategies. These communication strategies are derived directly based on the needs of and benefits for the target groups. It is important to win over the target groups both in terms of heads and hearts.
References and blog posts on brand communication
Digital branding
The principle of fast and slow brand management
In order for a brand to be strong, it must be possible to experience the brand identically at every virtual touchpoint. What is unique about digital communication is that it is not linear and it cannot be monitored using certain control mechanisms. Information can be dispersed, called up and reproduced any time, anywhere. For that reason, we define digital branding as the combination of fast and slow brand management: if you want to achieve results for a brand, you must communicate quickly, automatically, emotionally and purposefully in the digital arena. This is what we call “fast brand management”, and nowadays there is no other alternative. But “slow brand management” is an important component as well. Slow brand management prepares a brand for the fast pace of the digital world and includes the development and continuous improvement of a truly coherent brand personality. The combination of both fast and slow brand management guarantees systematic brand management in the digital era.
We bring speed and precision to brand management in the digital sphere.
