Brand stories that engage your audiences and drive performance.
Ensure your brand is perfectly positioned with brand stories that hit KPIs and meet marketing objectives. Our digital-first team based in our Cambridge office will research, position and activate your brand in perfect alignment with your goals and audiences. Creating a new brand, or rebranding, can be overwhelming, but we aim to make the process straightforward and exciting for you.
If you’re passionate about changing the world, we’re the people who can help you unleash your potential and multiply the impact of your brand.
KISS were pivotal in the brand articulation, planning for and showcasing of Cambridge&.
Harriet Fear MBE
Director, Cambridge&
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Research and insights
We kick off with a discovery phase - an immersion in your work and the B2B landscape in which you operate to fully understand your current brand, positioning, strengths and challenges. Getting to a point of clarity with brand articulation gives us a solid foundation to build your strategy, as well as a thorough understanding of your brand, marketplace and competitors.
An independent review of your marketplace helps identify key trends, potential threats and opportunities from a marcomms perspective that exist within the marketplace. Understanding the competitive landscape and competitor positioning helps us to identify opportunities, and this forms the basis of all your marcomms work with us.
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Brand and messaging audit
A desktop audit of your existing messaging - how you currently express yourself across all existing touchpoints, including your vision, mission and values on your website, social media and more - ensures we kick off the project with a clear view of how the brand exists currently, and potential opportunities or challenges.
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Stakeholder interviews
We interview members of your core team, and potentially key clients, to understand individual perspectives on the company proposition, what it stands for, opportunities, obstacles and what project success looks like for your clients. This helps us build a rich picture of what your company represents to your key audiences.
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Brand articulation workshop
We often host workshops to refine brand proposition, brand personality and overarching messages for each of your key target audiences. We work with your team to develop a compelling, high-level and benefit-led brand proposition that can be brought to life consistently and cohesively in any future communications and campaigns.
This is a highly collaborative process to understand the detailed technical messages that need to be conveyed, whilst also providing challenge to ensure the proposition is as engaging and inspirational as possible. In short, we want to reach a point of powerful simplicity that is underpinned by rigour and fact – this will unlock success in your marketing efforts.
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Messaging
We will discuss and agree your key audiences and then develop a ‘message house’ with targeted messages – making the brand proposition relevant to their needs, pains and expectations. The message house provides a framework for the development of your marketing strategy and subsequent activity plan and is meant to be a document for you to refer to whenever you need clarity and direction.
Translating insights, brand proposition and messaging into an identity
We’re experts at creating and evolving brand identities, especially within the world of B2B. We’ll help you articulate your vision – this goes far beyond just a logo and includes balancing all the elements that make your brand unique including its name, logo, strapline, tone of voice and design elements such as fonts, colours and core styling. B2B brand identity does not, and should not, be boring!
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Naming
Creating a distinctive name for your business is a key brand identity component. We have a well-established process for developing brand or product names to ensure that they’re aligned to your brand’s values and mission, reflecting its positioning and letting your personality shine through.
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Brand narrative
Our content creators will develop a brand narrative using key outputs from brand workshops and stakeholder interviews. Our copywriters work to distil the essence of your brand into a distinctive and shareable statement – a headline paragraph which summarises what makes your brand unique. This narrative is used as a cornerstone to evaluate all future marketing and communications against to ensure consistency.
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Visual and verbal identity
We will explore how your new brand expression influences your brand language, look-and-feel and tone of voice. Taking the brand narrative and personality as our starting point, our creative team will develop options for bringing the brand to life. From a visual perspective we'll explore logos, colours, use of iconography and photographic styles to create a clear and coherent visual identity to help you stand out from the competition. Alongside the visual development, we will craft your tone of voice - what your brand sounds and feels like.
Coherent and consistent brand activation
Successfully activating a brand requires consistency, ensuring it flexes as intended across various applications and scenarios.
We often act as a brand guardian for our clients, playing a consultative role, or delivering specific projects. We provide brand tools to support client teams to roll out collateral, both internally and externally.
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Brand guidelines
Guidelines introduce your brand strategy and provide additional information and guidance. We create comprehensive brand guidelines, setting out core rules for implementation of your brand. This could cover tone of voice, example messaging, logo application, colour palettes, typography, example photography & iconography and examples of typical applications - all of the elements which bring your brand to life. These can be created as interactive PDFs but can also be delivered in alternative formats.
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Templates and collateral
Bringing your brand elements together in a way that suits each platform is a fine art. Incorporating what makes your brand unique, while maintaining authenticity is our goal - and we can create a suite of templates that will simplify the process of creating branded content for your B2B organisation. This might include social media templates for relevant platforms, PowerPoint and Word documents, corporate stationery, HTML email signatures or event collateral.
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Additional branding projects
As part of a brand launch, we can support with website and social platform updates as dedicated campaigns or social media & PR projects that we can run in conjunction to ensure maximum impact when released.