Brand Strategy plays a paramount role in the development and growth of every business, gnostic of maturity. Discerning your product from competition requires a well-planned brand strategy that capitalizes on opportunities and barriers identified in the consumer journey— the progressive touchpoints and actions a brand makes with a target audience driven by the positioning, messaging, and marketing of the brand. Branding influences the phycological and emotional responses that encircle a product, and effective Brand Strategy reinforces the instinct to purchase or re-purchase through strategic calibration of the brand’s key equities and positioning to its target audience.
CHALLENGE:
The Paleo Diet® initially approached the Valen Group through our Strategic Brand Licensing Practice looking to scale existing brand equity through partnerships that would manufacture and distribute licensed products within the CPG category. After a discovery workshop with TPD®, the primary objective resulted in brand and positioning strategy that would transition into operating as the universal authority for brands looking to align their products with the benefits of a Paleolithic diet within the consumer-packaged goods market.
Challenged by the complexities of a brand architecture implementation with distinct, certification trademarks arising from the new product innovation scope, the Valen Team relied on collaborative data and insights garnered through Valen Group’s Fusion Methodology™ qualitative research program. Intel from the iterative research provided the answers to ascertain The Paleo Diet® differentiators which would effectively distinguish the brand from competition. The new Visual Identity System (VisID)– the collection of a new brandmark, new certification marks, and a vibrant color pallet, situated the brand to position themselves as a universal standard of excellence in the CPG space.
APPROACH:
Valen established a strategic glide-path that mapped the actionable processes derived from a self-discovery exercise via a brand architecture session. Performing a brand exploratory fueled by Fusion Methodology™, allowed the collaborative teams to comprehensively assess perceptions of the brand as a consumer as well as an internal team, which uncovered opportunities to better posture themselves within the competitive set.
With Valen conducting and mining consumer insights through the discovery process, The Paleo Diet® team was able to tease out the equities they deemed critical and make decisions surrounding the equities they wanted to emphasize with their target consumers. By aligning TPD®’s values with that of their strategic consumer target, TPD® was able to refine their marketing messaging that would their brand forward through strategic fortification of their brand equity pyramid as a foundational brand-building tool.
Leveraging qualitative consumer research with our Fusion Methodology™ framework, invested consumers educated the teams:
- how they initially heard of The Paleo Diet®
- how they researched The Paleo Diet® to learn more about it
- how they followed the diet and
- what results they saw relative to their health while being on the diet
This process gave the team a fundamental understanding of how consumers perceived their experiences with The Paleo Diet® while confirming specific impediments that could result in adjacent product innovation opportunities aligned to their growth objectives.
The iterative, consumer learnings garnered from research uncovered breakthrough insights, mobilized the Valen Group to make decisions that strategically piloted the new innovation and subsequent brand and marketing efforts and related Jobs To Be Done (JBTD).
RESULT:
Valen Group furnished three brandmarks to be validated against the new brand equities in a quick, custom, quant study. All three brandmarks performed significantly better when compared to their current brandmark, providing The Paleo Diet® team with three, validated options to move forward.
The Valen Group delivered a winning brand strategy including:
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“You are setting us up to move forward with a much stronger design and presence. We have been getting nothing but compliments for the new logo. You’ve really set us on a much better path with the image of this business.”
Trevor Connor, CEO and Owner of The Paleo Diet®
- a new brand mark to consistently grow brand awareness as the brand migrates into the CPG category,
- a brand guide to build consistent content, messaging, and marketing across consumer touchpoints,
- a New Visual Identity System to serve as inspiration for unifying consumer-facing assets including social media and website,
- a Go-To-Market Strategy and sales playbook for communication of the new business.
Because The Paleo Diet® team leveraged iterative consumer insights to guide the scope of their new product innovation, the resulting innovation organically centralized The Paleo Diet® brand as an industry standard, enabling them to secure licensing deals while concurrently scaling their brand and, thus, growth, more effectively.
HOW WE HELP
How Valen Can Help:
- Brand Architecture Workshops
- Brand Strategy
- Design Strategy
- Equity Building Choice Wheels
- Equity Pyramids
- Brand Building Assets
- Visual Identity Workshops & Visual Identity Systems
- Brand Guidelines
- Brandmark Creation & Strategy
- Brand Aesthetics and Color Pallets
- Sales Collateral Design
- Packaging Design & Artwork
- Create an IDT (Inspirational Design Target)
