“OUR BUSINESS CREATES IDEAS. OUR IDEAS CREATE BUSINESS.” Our agency moniker guides our work everyday. In thirty years, much in marketing has both changed and remained the same. In the end, we know that unless we are providing Ideas to our clients that positively impact their business, we’re simply not doing our jobs. Today, our Full Circle Branding approach gives clients their best opportunity to maximize their marketing communications. We lead clients through the new media landscape, helping them to prioritize myriad media opportunities for maximum performance.

But our product isn’t a process, and it sometimes doesn’t even resemble traditional “marketing” or “advertising.” It’s become more like “matchmaking.” What we do is connect people with brands by creating trusted, one-on-one, emotional relationships. For all the technology, and all the new media, developing brands and the market share that comes with them has become more human than ever.

FOUR TENETS THAT WE LIVE BY

BRANDING IS A CONTROLLED CONVERSATION. Creating brands, by way of marketing communications, is much of what we do here every day. But it’s no easy task because it’s almost an exercise in opposites: While brands are heavily managed − in their icons, messages and the context in which those messages are seen − brands today are also organic and “user generated.” Brand development used to be a one-sided development process (organization to consumer); it is now, in some regards, a collaboration that gives consumers the tools, direction and framework to engage and evolve brands together.

Knowing that there is much you cannot control about image and perception, we help clients create a blueprint and process for controlling all that they can. Identity, brand icons and messaging cues are extremely influential in defining consumer perception and can have immediate impact. Our systems for brand development, from Pole Vault, our strategic market planning process, to the iterative manner in which we roll out communications, give clients structure and the “reason why” to make adoption within the organization easy. We will, in fact, take special care to create transparent infrastructure that will allow your team members and partners the greatest exposure to our methodologies so they understand how and why it works. Achieving adoption within an organization and its extended family is the first step for accelerated awareness, understanding and ultimately the desired “action” when the time comes for true consumer engagement.

BRANDING IS STILL LOVE. As much as the old rules don’t apply because of our fragmented communications culture, the one thing that has never changed is that brands are still − in fact, more than ever − emotional relationships. They are love connections, humor connections, connections that provide comfort, moments that bring joy, defaults that bring security. When life (and the assault of messaging) is chaotic, people rely on brands as their anchors. When we dissect this all by process, we are really doing the intellectual equivalent of dissecting how the human body works. Complicated? Yes. But somehow, some way, people are born, live and breathe, laugh and smile, and beget the next generation to do the same. Depending on how you look at it, it’s simple, too.

THE POWER OF “WOW.” The importance of great creative cannot be understated, especially in its visual representation. Because the communications world sets new records every day for fragmentation and chaos, great creative, more than ever, is the element of advertising that can most directly affect “value.” People don’t stand around a water cooler anymore and talk; they actually pass cool advertising along to their friends via email, post it on their Facebook pages, and even sign up to represent brands they love on lemonade.com. While the whole industry is talking about metrics-based accountability and cross-platform integration, the emotional love connections being established with brand advertising via great creative have never been hotter.

INTEGRATION. Today, more than ever, “the medium is the message.” When we create messaging and icons that define brands, it is our Full Circle Branding approach that maximizes awareness, understanding and action. The point of view is consumer-centric and media-agnostic. For us, it’s not a creative idea. A PR idea. Or a media, production partnership or viral idea. It’s just not. It’s an idea. Ideas, then, can manifest themselves in TV or radio. Online or mobile app. Outdoor board or bumper sticker. As a PR campaign, partnership program or shelf talker or something that nobody has ever seen before. That’s how brands live.