Create Your Agency’s Branding Blueprint

Are you ready to start thinking seriously about your agency’s brand? The first step is to identify the strengths and opportunities within your agency’s current brand and determine its distinguishing factors. You can then begin to position the brand for your agency’s future objectives. What attributes define the brand? What makes a connection with the most important customers and clients?

Next, identify any weaknesses and ask how your brand and agency are perceived in the overall marketplace and how you differ from your competitors. Talk to key stakeholders and leadership about internal agency perceptions, and talk to current, prospective and former clients to help determine why they choose one agency over another.

Armed with this information, form a strategic plan for moving forward and identify the best brand positioning and the distinguishing attributes to highlight, as well as the weaknesses you need to insulate against. You must also identify where it will be possible (and cost efficient) to change your audience’s perception and what (if any) policy or practice changes to make. The outcomes of this process will provide a blueprint for making decisions about advertising and promotion, developing messages that will resonate with audiences and how best to continue building the brand.

The process will also help you develop a succinct message in the form of a tagline. A tagline serves as a rallying point for your agency’s brand. It should be transportable, both verbally and visually, and it should offer a consistent exclamation point for the perceptions the brand needs to create with key audiences. Further, it should provide either a strong reminder of what the brand represents or a supportive call to action for audiences to take in each of the company’s communication vehicles. In addition to the tagline, an agency might also consider creating a new brand name, a revised visual identification or logo that captures the brand more accurately.

In the end, strong brands are effective shorthands for customers in a busy marketplace. Rather than do hours of research on the best product or service, clients and customers often simply pick a brand they trust and are most familiar with—the brand possessing the highest degree of equity. This is why, increasingly, brands themselves are so valuable.

You’ve seen the annual lists that rank the top global brands and present the value of each in the tens of billions of dollars. Most of these are household names and are highly recognizable. Looking at the most popular brand names, the basic message behind each brand is very clear. While most small companies—including agencies—do not conduct this degree of research, ultimately, you need to convey positive attributes and clearly distinguish yourself from the competition so audiences remember what you represent and recall your agency when it’s time to make a decision that involves your brand.

Zach Schwartz (zach.schwartz@widmeyer.com) is a marketing specialist at Windmeyer Communications.

Adding Trusted Choice® to Your Blueprint

Viewers tuning into the Fox News Channel this month will learn about the benefits the nearly 7,000 participating Trusted Choice® agencies can offer—choice, advocacy and customization—at every consumer life stage. Many agents are taking advantage of the new national commercial by creating tag-able ads to air in their local markets.

While showing consumers purchasing a home, opening a business, entering retirement and other life milestones, the new ad explains that “The Trusted Choice® agent in your community works with you so you can choose the insurance that fits your life—no matter how it changes.” The ad then
points viewers to www.TrustedChoice.com to find a local agent.

In February, Fox News Channel viewers will receive the Trusted Choice® message on “Fox & Friends,” “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” “The O’Reilly Factor” and “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.”

Continuing the advertising strategy that began last September, Trusted Choice® is running ads for two weeks every month through August on different cable stations, including CNN, the Travel Channel, the
Weather Channel, Fox News and other popular cable outlets. In addition, many Trusted Choice® agents are extending the reach of the advertising by airing tag-able versions of the commercial in their local market. This strategy increases consumer exposure as well as positions these agents as the local Trusted Choice® contact for consumers.

“With agents using tag-able versions of the ad in their local communities, we’re maximizing the value of this ad buy,” says Trusted Choice® Executive Director Dave Evans. “There is no better way than a local ad for consumers to find their nearest Trusted Choice® agent.”

—Katie Butler