We are in the midst of a brand revolution. In the next 5 to 10 years those with a better understanding of brand are going to rapidly outperform competitors. It’s already begun. Once thought of as soft and subjective, brand is anything but. Yet the world is still in the infancy of understanding the scientific underpinnings that produce its immense value. Prismonde is leading that charge. If most companies handle brand like astrology, our scholarly understanding of brand is more like astronomy, and we’re launching moon missions.
Recognizing this trend in 2013, we’ve spent the last decade diving deep into the science, reverse engineering a suite of tools to harness its power. Prismonde is a brand innovation lab that captures hard-to-reach business objectives by applying cognitive science to leverage the power of brand. To understand how we create uncommon value for organizations, we need you to understand our core discipline, Brand Innovation. To understand Brand Innovation, we need to understand both brand and innovation.
What is Brand?
The term brand can be used in several ways, but all definitions fall into three categories: Identification, Perception, and Identity. Brand Identification is a way of identifying one person’s product, service, or company from another, dating back over 5000 years to managing livestock. Brand Perception is about shaping the impression of a company in the mind of consumers, dating back to the 1950s with the “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue. Brand Identity represents the essence of a company—its collective spirit—and arose through management consulting and its focus on a company’s intangible factors.
Brand Identity is the focus of the world’s most powerful brands. They understand that approaching brand this way creates a deep relationship with their audience that grants them [extraordinary/unparalleled] influence. Identity is how we understand ourselves and create tribal bonds. When companies have well-formed identities, they are invited into our homes as integral parts of our communities and our lives. Just as a business model organizes and describes the way value flows through an organization, proper brand strategy is the relational model of a business, organizing and describing the way human connection flows through an organization.
What is Innovation?
Innovation can be a similarly nebulous buzzword, but generally refers to one of three types: Product Innovation, Process Innovation, and Business Model Innovation. Product Innovation is concerned with the products or services being sold and focuses on value creation through new or improved product or service qualities, features, or approaches to solving end-user problems. Process Innovation deals with how products are created or services are performed and focuses on value capture through the implementation of new or improved production methods, transaction mechanisms, or delivery to the end-user. Business Model Innovation optimizes how products or services are sold and focuses on value delivery or exchange through choice of target market, value proposition, or revenue model.
While these three are most common, Larry Keeley, co-founder and former president of innovation strategy firm Doblin Inc., named 10 types of innovation–largely defined by which functional area your innovation efforts will be impacting. Ultimately, regardless of types and definitions, innovation is an inquisitive and iterative process. Whether improving how we make money, develop products, or exchange value, it’s about continually experimenting with ways to positively impact business objectives.
What is Brand Innovation?
Larry Keeley’s book, Ten Types of Innovation, defines Brand Innovations as those which “help to ensure that customers recognize, remember, and prefer your offerings to those of competitors or substitutes.” This insight, brilliantly expressed, gave us a great starting point from which to launch the focus of our business. However the scope of brand has since expanded significantly. Brands—and, by consequence, Brand Innovation efforts—now regularly influence employees, vendors, collaborators, media, and more in addition to simply customers.
The expression of brand, like the expression of ourselves, has an impact on every person exposed to it. Optimizing those touchpoints to positively impact business objectives is the work of brand innovation. Like self-expression, the expression of brand has an impact on every person exposed to it. Optimizing those touchpoints to positively impact business objectives is the work of brand innovation.
So, if brand is leveraging relational factors, and innovation is experimenting with ways to positively impact business objectives, then brand innovation is experimenting with ways to leverage relational factors to positively impact business objectives. Prismonde is a brand innovation lab where we specialize in defining complex organizational identities, designing those identities into movements people can rally behind, and delivering those campaigns through innovative vehicles that leverage relational factors to out-maneuver and win.By applying cognitive science to innovation strategy we can move any brand from an unknown to a challenger, from a challenger to a major player, and from a major player to a cultural touchstone.
We’ve honed this process with leading brands, designing offices for LinkedIn, experiences for Adobe, merchandise for Tesla, and branding hundreds of other companies in support of projects with top-tier global partners like Andreesen-Horowitz, the UN, and Singularity University.
The only question is, what could brand innovation do for your company?
Why is Brand Innovation right for you?
You’re an Innovator
And as such your product and business occupy a unique space with unique challenges. You have special technical or industry understanding, which is why your product is so innovative. The downside is that the more innovative you are, the harder it is for others to understand, causing you to run into three likely all-too-familiar obstacles:
- Defensiveness as it upsets old paradigms.
- Higher customer education barriers due to customer knowledge gaps.
- Entrenched beliefs about the way things work or should work.
Everyone’s Zigging and you need to Zag
There are benefits to your brand itself being innovative. Our branding efforts should be just as innovative as the rest of your venture. Just as you have cutting-edge knowledge of your industry or space, we have special knowledge in the application of cognitive science to brand strategy.
- Deep technical expertise in getting innovative strategies adopted.
- Particular skill in telling stories of innovation that people rally behind.
- Ability to make the latest in cognitive science relevant to business strategy.
At Prismonde, we get it, we are innovators too, and we’ve chosen to work with those like us for the past ten years. Whether it’s a 3D printer up on the International Space Station, or redesigning the future of the workplace, we’ve confronted these issues with our clients and with ourselves and developed winning strategies to get you through.
Our deep experience in innovation means we can write and understand from a first person perspective. We’re not writing about a place we’ve never been. Innovation is our forte, brand is our specialty, and you are our next success story.
