The BrandCracker Process is a tool that helps us make sense of the client organisation’s past, take stock of its present and envision and energise its future.
This reliable and time-tested process includes interviews with various stakeholders, research and workshops. These help us identify and bring together the multiple strands of uniqueness that make a client organisation’s brand standout. This differentiation is then put across as a meta-story, and goes on to become the brand narrative for the organisation.
Although an integral part of how we function, the process is also one of the most underappreciated aspects of our work. Often, what is remembered and celebrated of our engagements with clients are the visible outputs or the inspirational workshops that help clients discover and live the brand personality on a moment-to-moment basis.
But like the glue that holds together the different aspects of a well-crafted element, the process too holds together our client engagement in a flawless and unobtrusive manner.
Below are the multiple agendas that the BrandCracker process has been designed to serve.
The process, in addition to being a transparent and collaborative effort, delivers benefits which are FOUNDATIONAL. This is especially true for SERVICE BRANDS.
In product-led organisations, strategy is viewed as the big secret which, save for a few people at the top, no one knows about. This shrouds the organisation’s future course of action in a cloak of secrecy.
Service brands, however, are just the opposite.
The process not only inducts the client into a shared sense of discovery, but the many radiating benefits it results in, help clients better understand the problems they are facing and take informed decisions, guided by strategy.
It is for this reason that we demand the participation of senior level decision makers in the process. This ensures that everyone on the team is not only aware of the organisation’s strategy, but also of their role and decision-making criteria in it.
With service brands, the insights gained during the process translate into changes in policy or organisation behaviour that are immediately implementable.
The immersive experience also ensures that when a non-routine situation comes up, the client organisation is able to respond to it with agility and in keeping with the brand’s unique style, thereby using the situation as a brand-building opportunity.
The process seeks individual and group inputs at various stages, to overcome any partial blindness that we can all be vulnerable to.
The co-creation workshops seek sound arguments and engagement from everyone. Ideas and opinions are validated through research and an informed decision, that is less susceptible to personal power and charisma, gets taken.
The success of our engagements with clients, therefore, comes from three important design aspects of the BrandCracker process:
1. Awareness and education on the role of the brand as a preference creating mechanism, with emphasis on the various aspects that contribute to its building. Irrespective of their core function, everyone is a brand builder and must therefore be fluent in the language of brands. This includes employees across the board, right from your frontoffice person to the lady in the accounts department who clears an invoice on time. An employee’s every act and action contributes to how the brand is perceived.
2. Alignment of multiple internal players, across different levels, whose combined efforts are required to ensure a smooth customer experience. This reinforces the point that the brand is guided by a shared narrative.
3. Ensuring that every individual has ownership of the brand by taking into consideration everyone’s inputs and opinions.
To borrow a metaphor from Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Khoobsurat, the process is the fertiliser that works its magic in an invisible way, but it is the plant that gets all the credit for the dazzling flower.