A corporate brand is a company’s most valuable asset – it engages an organization’s full range of stakeholders in a relationship that drives growth. But a corporate brand can also be difficult to manage – the challenge is to manage the brand to its fullest potential.

ROIMM builds and strengthens brands, always with the aim of helping organizations achieve their business strategies. For each initiative, we work with clients to establish a set of desired results and then build brand and communications programs designed to deliver.

One important goal is to raise the positive impact and feeling about the brand with critical audiences such as:

• Shareholders and the investment community
• The media and, by extension, the broader business community
• Opinion leaders, business partners and academic advisors who can influence corporate reputation
• Potential and Current consumers

Understanding and Defining the Brand

The key to successful branding is having a full understanding of what defines a company’s distinctive character and sets it apart from competitors.

To gain that understanding, ROIMM uses a holistic methodology that combines academic insight with real-world experience across numerous industries and product categories. We begin with an analysis of the competition and the equities upon which the brand will be built. We evaluate how a company is perceived by different audiences and recommend strategies that will improve or enhance these perceptions. Based on these findings, we then help our clients achieve differentiation that resonates with stakeholders and sets them apart from their peers.

Our process of uncovering a company’s unique equities delivers a strategic brand model, which has, at its core, a differentiated brand essence. This essence, embodied in a construct and statement, provides the basis for articulating the brand’s functionality, differentiation, personality/image and sources of authority. The defining of the brand then enables ROIMM to formulate an architectural model for optimally delivering the corporate brand (as well as individual product/service and subsidiary brands) to market.

Communicating the Brand

Once defined, we advance the brand’s unique positioning platform by combining it with a strategic communications campaign. Such a campaign consists of branded content messaging as well as the means of distribution.

We start by determining the “outside-in” elements – the brand strategies and positioning that maximize opportunity in the marketplace. Messaging in support of the brand might include any of the following:

• CEO and Executive Positioning
• Media Relations including blogs and web sites and web links
• Internal Organizational Communications
• Financial Communications
• Corporate Citizenship, Sponsorships and Community Service
• Crisis Preparedness and Response

Such offerings are strengthened by ROIMM’s experience and ability to integrate all phases of conceptualizing, planning and execution in partnership with our clients. The result is a well-defined, clearly expressed, highly effective brand positioning program that supports a company’s business mission, improves its standing with core constituencies and creates a base of strategic advocacy allies, all of which ultimately builds ROI.