A brand is an established reputation with a customer. It is an asset in three ways: customers are willing to pay more for a brand compared to an unidentified product, customers are more willing to stick with their favourite brands even in the face of innovative products from competitors, and customers are more willing to try innovative products from a favoured brand.

Mary Shelman, Harvard Business School

Building strong brands isn’t getting any easier. The world is awash with products all vying for the consumer’s attention. It’s also awash with as many ways for those products to talk with consumers. The Internet, product placement in movies, traditional advertising, mobile phone screens, the back of a bus, a billboard, a footy game,media and magazine and celebrity endorsement are all part of a limitless list of communication methods. Unfortunately, the list of low hanging fruit isn’t as limitless. It’s all been picked. These days you can’t just add a magic ingredient to a product, place a few adverts and then stand back and yell voila! No, thinking smarter about how you build and position your brand is what’s required.

Spotting trends, careful market analysis, insight, getting rid of guesswork and being very surgical and precise about how you go about developing and building brands is the way of the future.

What is the message you really want to imprint on your customers?  How can your brand be heard? How do you want consumers to think and feel about your brand? How do you get in front of them? How do you stand out from the crowd?

There is no shortage of questions. At Troika, we’ll help you answer them.