Girvin | Strategic Branding Research:
Brand, personality, testing and global marketing initiatives
What is the line that moves to the psychic space of a person? How do you find the heart of a relationship? Brand to person? Person as brand to community?
During the course of Girvin’s strategic design and consulting practice, over the passage of the last three decades, a focus on deepening relationships to community understanding and marketing has been an ongoing experiment. It doesn’t stop. Learnings continuously emerge. From early work in exploring interceptions with single people — to groups: building in-store testing models for Procter & Gamble, to in-home, consumer brand strategy and learning sessions — focused studies and organized group programs, the methods are continuously customized and crafted .
But the idea of getting closer, getting to a space that might seem an even more intimate is an emerging postulate. What method of narrative exploration could added for consideration?
Sebastian Professional | Consumer Team personality profiling
Working with the marketing and testing team of P&G’s haircare group, Girvin created a series of modeling and interception programs for not only analyzing the brands in competitive play, but as well imagery building sessions and brand expression explorations — the personality of the brand being built for, and aligned with, the consumer.
This analyses was built on P&G’s group development programming, working closely with consumers in sorting and building brand framing and personality, literally customized and created on the premise — and the promise — of brand relationships, not only with “beauty junkies”, but stylists and salon owners, given the professional positioning of the product.
Studying new ideations and personality with working sessions and interceptions, in-market interviews with Heublein|Grand Metropolitan Smirnoff — what legacy, moving forward?
Listening to consumers, examining the surge in trend — exploring Faith Popcorn’s Brain Reserve consulting strategic shifts of population trending — and measuring brand legacy and consumer resonance. Smirnoff — post-October Revolution, introduced in the US in the 30s by the Heublein family, evolved, tested and redesigned by Girvin’s teams. But that goes on — the consumer relationships continue to shift.
Archetypal perceptions: a person, a human brand – an approach in working with a single human being is about building a brand strategy that is nearly genetic — finding the heart of the person, brand visioning, understanding the DNA of their propositioning to market. What circle springs round them? What radiant strategy emerges?
Working with Marta Montenegro, the founder, editor-in-chief of SOBeFiT Magazine, and the building of a brand around her relationship to the magazine, as well as formulating added dimensionality, we explored the essential characteristics of her leadership and the personality sorting and textual profiling to deepen the impressions of Marta’s spirit and foundational characteristics.
Overview of the archetype, the positioning of the brand, and the persona of visioning. Presuming the power of the leadership at the center of the brand, exploring personal links even reaching to psychic space is compelling. And frequently defined as a reality in alignment — what the soul knows, the psyche portends, personality reveals, leadership contains, teams resonate, relationships absorb.
That ranged from explorations that ranged from the psychic, deep personal metaphors and revelations, as well as her own writing and her team stakeholders.
Branding people is something that links to the very heart of Girvin work. Brands are made by people.
Is it possible that the research might reach to spaces that could be identified as more psychic in character — the holding point of memory and perception? We’ve been there — that process is exploratory, evolving, newly treading. Understanding the audience is about creating new experimental prototypes for market trending, focus testing — virtual environments, immersions, live-in testing — and most crucially, listening.
This range of study and consideration of the person, in relation to the brand has varying touchpoints to relevance.
• Brands are inherently relationships that are either solely functional — commodity-based (like pricing alone) — or emotionally founded. Intimacy will relate to the emotional link — not the positioning of pricing. Pricing relationships are inherently soluble — they will dissolve, as other pricing breaks the mold of relationship.
• The concept of community in connection to enterprise requires a reach into some level of reactive understanding. What is the way in which a guest, user, consumer, community member psychically connects with a proposition of value?
• What is the method by which these relationships could be expressed? Textual exploration? Imagery? Metaphorical examinations?
More:
In examining the hidden subconscious and mythic dimensionality of experience, the person that could be the heart-full persona of the brand itself, we used that archetypal mapping as a forum in finding — within the leadership committee of the client relationship — the spirit that drives the essential characteristic of the enterprise.
Working for CEO Steve Ritchey and the leadership / creative team at Unionbay — a northwest-founded clothing group, selling nationally and in play for decades. To emotionally connect with its current, newly emerging audience, Unionbay underwent a brand metamorphosis and renewal. The Girvin team led the transformation that far superseded the usual pursuit of merely changing a thematic look and delved deeper by exploring the emotional connection between the brand and its audience.
As myth-finders, the very mystery of Unionbay’s brand psyche was probed. The result: Unionbay gets a new look a new feel a new psyche and a new home http://www.unionbay.com. The creation of the new Unionbay website utilized an analysis of Jungian archetypes to show Unionbay’s distinct place among other apparel brands . Girvin incorporated the work of the renowned Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung into their BrandQuest® process during strategic sessions that helped Unionbay further its commitment to being a dominant player in the marketplace as a teenage brand. That exploration, the proprietary brandstorming process of BrandQuest® in strategic sessions, and the outcomes of the genetic threading of the BrandCode® in its text and visualizations, to create the new website. These processes involved a Jungian study of all of the basic characters that are essential to the human psyche and linked them to new ways of thinking about the Unionbay brand personality.
The concept of examining the archetype as a modeling for reaching to the psychic place of brand registry is merely one exploration for relationship and context discovery. Another path relates to the pursuit of finding the global persistent persona of international brands.
Would it be possible to engineer a global testing paradigm, and use this approach as a way to understand the conditioning of world [brand] minds?
Working in the Jungian construct of Myers Briggs | Keirsey Bates prototypical personality profiling, we (The Fluke Brand Evolutions Team) explored a global testing of users of Fluke technology. The idea behind this positioning was to ascertain a sense of alignment in characteristics of users. The profiling is based on Jungian precepts of analyzing deeply the psyche of people that utilized the tools, and certain patterns emerged, for two types of users that represented two paths of technology.
The testing could be summarized in one categorical review, for hand held measurement devices, the testing created a result in the nature of the Artisan. An exemplar, can-do attitude might be positioned in a quotation like: “Let’s light this candle.“Alan Shepard (Crafter Artisan) [Just before his liftoff into space] The other, to more sophisticated equipment testing tools is the Rational. A focus on resolution of outcomes through knowledge, is exemplified in the positioning of “Error of opinion maybe tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” Thomas Jefferson (Architect Rational). The positioning of these elements, particularly in the framing of the larger audience lead to a entire worldwide visualization effort, working with dozens of countries. Bright colors, bold illustration of action, striking visualizations, powerful simple text and messaging — a “no instruction kit” kind of mentality, get it done kind of approach.
The other systems of messaging and collateral, for the more scientifically persuaded personality profiles were cooler palettes, more complex messaging and illustratively detailed renderings of hardware and workers in action — bent to a persuasion of accomplishment in more complex resolution of testing challenges. Psychic branding, might be the positioning, from the analyses — a deeper reach — into the character of brand, the enterprise and the community it serves.
There are other forms of placement, in connecting with consumer relationships. Aside from home meetings, and other connections in nearly domestic or working circumstances. In our explorations of brand experience design, for the branded creation of spa product innovations and new product development, that focus has lent anything from built testing and interception environments:
Or even examining a kind of combined “walk-through” shopping experience, as envisioned in this digital three-dimensional digital environment for exploration and examination of consumer attention — as well as marketing intention — in a computer graphics retail sense of sales place, shown below:
Alternate examinations the notions of exploring digital mockups of merchandising presentations that relate to concepts of, in this instance, adding increased feminization of sales constructs:
The summary might be that there are many levels of testing, brands, stories, propositions, but the premise for Girvin’s exploration — the nature of our engagements and BrandQuest® — is about what lies beneath, the deeper metaphors of experience, memory, sensuality and sentient embracement.
We go there.
tsg
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Brands | love | humans
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