The entire game has changed. Dynamic Branding helps the new world make sense.

Brand-making is more like creating a guitar solo than building a house. Unlike a house, a fixed blueprint means death for a brand. Rather, a brand relationship is based on knowledge, expertise, and experience applied in the changing moment — responding to events, listening and reacting, looking and leading, and always in collaboration.

Be a pluralist, not an anarchist. Brands are collaborations. Neither rigid nor chaotic, great brand strategy inspires and attracts an enduring and engaged community comprising your users, audiences, employees, and partners.

Brand strategy is emergent. It is built on foundational ideas that live on and morph into many forms. The days of top-down, in-out strategy are over. And the new era of strategy has begun. It’s about mapping, not positioning.

Great brands are dynamic. Dynamic Brands can shift constantly and respond resiliently  to the fluid nature of consumer relationships. And only Dynamic Essence™ discovers the core, action-oriented and enduring yet evolving energy that all brands, audiences, users, communities, cultures, and companies make real. Static essence is a lie and a trap. But Dynamic Essence helps business live from its own core while navigating in a sea of change. It is essence, but it’s dynamic.

All business is brand. No brand, no business. A brand is more than a promise, perception, or product. The brand is the central idea and identity of the business. So brand is the driver of business strategy, action and success. Moreover, a brand must inspire more than repeat purchase; it must inspire ongoing relationship.

Dynamic Brands define, realize, express and satisfy Desire. Needs are too few. And wants are too many, and too subject to change. So we introduce Brand Desire™ as a profoundly more powerful and efficient way to map brand opportunity and relationships. There are only six fundamental desires:  meaning, purpose, value, resilience, connection, and transcendence (defined broadly). All human longing and all action fit into these six, but how they play out with each audience is unique.

Tactics will not save you. Caught between old school strategy and the digital unknown, too many brands are relying on ad hoc tactical efforts, hoping something will stick or go viral. This is a costly mistake, and it invites the solutions that Dynamic Brand strategy provides.

Big ideas don't make money if they are wasted on poor integration and poor alignment. Strategy is not adding value if it simply trades in insight and ideas that fail to deliver outside a recommendation. So specific capabilities in driving integration and alignment are more important than ever, but until now they have been outside brand managers, consultants and agencies brief and capability. We change that.

Alignment is mandatory. In a digital age of perfect and not so perfect information moving at nearly limitless speed, Dynamic Brands must drive alignment of corporate, consumer, and cultural behavior, values and expectations, even as these shift. The alternative is just too costly. We have expertise in comparative culture and corporate responsibility as well as a suite of game-changing new tools to make this real.

Integration is mandatory. And it's decades overdue, based on a history of false promises. Lack of integration of action and communication at every touch point is squandering opportunity and wasting resources. We say, "Enough." The strategy belongs with and to the client, and must not be dispersed to an assortment of agencies, partners and vendors with little incentive or ability to speak to one another or work together. As consultant CBO’s and brand strategists, we live to make those days history.

Models in the last century were insufficient in the last century, and are deadly now. Differentiation, loyalty and demand are outdated. Combined with outdated and limited models of rational, emotional, and behavioral branding, they are responsible for enormous wasted resources because they fail to build resilient and enduring relationships with digital-enabled consumers. In the new brand world, the story is about Dynamic Brands adding value and built upon Relation, Resilience, and Desire in an ocean of Contact, Connection, Conversation and Change.

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