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How businesses can profit from a ‘brand purpose’

Reprinted from South Florida Business Journal

Today’s businesses and consumer companies are discovering that connecting brands to a higher purpose than profits can impress their customer base and deliver significant financial results.

Marketers who have promoted “cause marketing” in order to demonstrate corporate responsibility might say they’ve been doing that for years. But the requirement of purpose-based marketing is more than cutting a check to a worthy charity. It is defining how your company and your employees help make a difference to your industry, customer base and community. It entails making a long-term commitment to align business, corporate culture and marketing under a higher purpose. What does your brand and your company stand for? Why does it exist in the first place? What is its mission? The answers lead to a journey – not just one print ad or television spot, or a check.

Recent research has shown marketers that buyers under 30 are leading the way in proving their willingness to buy from companies that “have a point of view and stand for something.”

The power of purpose

In fact, the Association of National Advertisers named “brand purpose” the ANA 2018 Marketing Word of the Year. And this year, CampaignUS gave out the inaugural Power of Purpose Awards. As an example, one of the winners was “Mastercard brings ‘Start Something Priceless to Life’ leading into the 60th Grammy Awards,” which showed a young musician following his dream incorporating Mastercard’s “Priceless” campaign. This video shifts the focus from selling to engaging with purpose.

Among the corporate leaders embracing purpose-based marketing are two top companies that consult with many other corporations – SAP and KPMG. Both have incorporated purpose into the fabric of the operations. KPMG has developed a user-friendly design program, inviting employees to create posters answering the question “What do you do at KPMG?” in an effort to capture the passion that connects to the organization’s purpose. “Inspire confidence. Empower change.” is the ever-present poster tagline.

Square, a growing tech company, states its purpose not as credit card processing, but as economic empowerment by helping entrepreneurs to start, run and grow a business.

Defining your higher purpose

How can your business change with a more energized and inspired workforce? Employees are the foundation of a company’s purpose, and their buy-in is a critical step in creating a purpose-based organization and culture.

Why is your company successful, and how does that relate to improving the lives of employees and customers? Many companies that have worked to identify their purpose often find it in the original vision of their founders, and articulating it can energize employees, as well as provide a point of view and purpose that upcoming generations demand.

What are proof points underpinning the company’s purpose, and how can you communicate and enhance them in the future? The purpose of a company needs to be timeless. The ability to continue to align the business, culture, community and marketing for the long term is the critical assignment of a company’s chosen purpose.

Aligning purpose with community

There are many opportunities to align your company’s purpose to the community. South Florida’s major universities have meaningful research relating to industries that can help connect what you do to enhancing, sustaining and improving lives. An example is the Marine Research Hub’s support of collaboration with universities and business to commercialize solutions for sustainability of oceans and reefs.

Businesses that haven’t embraced a higher purpose are missing out on the insights offered by a younger generation that will soon become the majority customer base. And, as more companies get onboard with purpose-based marketing, their businesses will benefit, as well. Brand purpose is definitely a competitive advantage.

How to Make a Brand From Scratch

The five-star experience of Nickelodeon™ Hotels & Resorts Punta Cana includes the Gourmet Inclusive^® Village, a diverse hub of 10 delicious culinary and beverage venues. But before any venue could start serving, each needed an individual brand identity to represent its personality and offerings.

Creativity with a Side of Collaboration

Since Gourmet Inclusive Village is shared with Karisma’s neighboring Sensatori resort, Starmark partnered closely with teams in Food & Beverage, Interior Design and at Viacom — the worldwide media company behind the Nickelodeon network — to present identities that would work for resort guests coming together at this collection of hotspots.

We designed each brand mark to shine across a diverse array of uses: exterior and interior spaces, signage, menus, uniforms, cocktail napkins and more.

From the floating, fork-carrying astronaut for Spacewalker Interstellar Cuisine to the stylized espresso basket for Doppio Coffee and Tea, the creative backstory and appeal of each distinctive venue visually came to life.

Designing the Food Truck Experience at BRGRS.PH

In branding BRGRS.PH, we took inspiration from the Sensatori color palette as well as the singular deliciousness of its namesake food.

The “PH” looks as if it is written in ketchup. The food truck seems to be splattered with ketchup and his buddy mustard. And with burger choices this enticing, why hide them inside the menu? “The Dominican,” “The Oxtail” and other burger names line the top of the food truck.

10 Logos with Flavor

From concept to fine tuning to final vector, creating the restaurant brands for Nickelodeon Hotels & Resorts Punta Cana was an exciting collaborative process, and we could never play favorites. But which one is yours?

Brand value is hidden gem in MMA research

Reprinted from South Florida Business Journal

Well-known brands’ mobile ads deliver more than twice the motivation to take action within the first second of viewing, according to the Mobile Marketing Association’s recently released neuroscience research study.

This may seem to be an unfair advantage since well-known brands can potentially deliver twice the results for the same mobile ad placement costs as their lesser-known counterparts.

The good news is that any brand can build this kind of recognition with their select audiences. You don’t have to become known throughout the world like Coca-Cola in order to get the cognitive benefits of brand recognition. You just need to be known and understood by your key audiences.

The study, thought to be the largest of its kind, shows “the brain is faster on branding.” So the efforts and investments to become a well-known brand among key audiences pay off in the first second of display in a mobile ad. And this type of immediate reaction on a small, scrolling screen must have broader significance in other advertising, as well.

Develop a first-second strategy

These findings excite branding experts who have noted a preponderance of companies’ emphasis on the results of online platforms versus their brand’s impact on those platforms.

However, even if your brand is well-known and, of course, also well-liked, there are additional creative considerations that can support its performance in the first second.

Creative that gets attention, emotion

Mobile ads with complex, interesting angles and contrasting colors stimulate emotions well – as long as the mobile platform on which they appear is not also complex and competing for attention. Since programmatic buying means the ad may run in many different environments, ad creators may need to walk the line on this one.

This neuroscience study also showed that the brain responds quickly to human faces, whether looking directly at the viewer in a demanding way or looking toward a featured product picture.

And then, as most advertisers are already aware, motion drives emotion. But they may not realize how fast. This means video ads achieve high emotional responses within the first second, often faster than static ads. And here the study points out that a faster emotional response cuts both ways. It’s great for a brand with a positive perception, but it also may mean ads simply fail quickly if viewers hold a negative perception of the brand.

Test for the best, save time and money

While the study focused on the first 3 seconds an ad is viewed for attention, cognition and motivation stages, your pretesting should go beyond the motivation to response and action. There are many professional service organizations that offer timed-exposure testing to measure ad effectiveness to make sure that what you put out in the market is tailored for success.

Another consideration is to possibly adjust your media buy, especially video, to the number of seconds you need, versus what you may have been buying.

Brand value builds business value

Building brand value offers two other important business advantages. When you have built a strong brand among key audiences, expanding product or service offerings should take advantage of that brand. Creating brand line extensions versus different names for these product or service additions leverages the strong brand perception your company has already built.

As your brand value grows, brand equity becomes an important factor in the value of your business. Strong brands can command increased margins and negotiating power. As witnessed in this study, a strong brand has demonstrable benefits for faster recognition and cognition.

This study proves that an investment in brand equity will pay dividends for years, both in your mobile advertising and all other media you might consider – definitely a competitive advantage.

Capture more attention with augmented reality social posts

Using augmented reality (AR) in social media is a great way to get social audiences to spend more time with your brand. Facebook and Instagram have AR built into their platforms, and we want to make sure your campaigns are making the most of it.

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How to celebrate progress while changing traveler behavior

As 100,000 people and thousands of vehicles navigate the airport on any given day, pedestrian safety among the congestion became a major concern. Infrastructure updates and a communication plan were needed to change people’s behavior, in order to support years of future airport growth to come.

FLL and Starmark have launched a comprehensive new communications campaign, along with upgraded airport brand identity, to spread the word throughout South Florida about major safety upgrades every visitor will experience on their next visit. (more…)

Starmark’s Agile approach featured in the Wall Street Journal

According the the 4As (American Association of Advertising Agencies), there are roughly 13,000 integrated marketing agencies in the U.S. Starmark is one of 1,000 or fewer who are Agile. Today, one of those agencies was featured in The Wall Street Journal. Hint: it’s Starmark.

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A university brand makeover the community can rally behind

Starmark helped NSU Florida (Nova Southeastern University) take their new brand to market and increase their national reputation among prospective undergrad, graduate and professional students.

Starmark met the challenge of updating a 50-year-old brand head on. From capturing the fundamentals of what it means to be a NSU Shark to guiding the digital rollout to various schools within the university, Starmark successfully introduced The NSU Edge to the world, rallying students, faculty and alumni behind the brand.

Brand Essence Video

Starmark captured the essence of NSU in a video that brought the new brand to life for prospective undergraduate and graduate students. The music and VO-driven video follows an NSU student from her freshman year all the way to her successful career.

As the camera moves through these situations, viewers catch glimpses of her “inner Shark” by her side every step of the way. In addition to their site, the video was used for social media and other promotional tactics as part of a bigger arsenal of storytelling pieces. Starmark also created other stories versioned for different audiences. For the first time, NSU has a moving, living embodiment of the spirit of their school, and the Starmark team is proud to have been a part of it.

It couldn’t have happened without being Agile

An important part of the challenge for NSU and Starmark was using Agile Methodology to break down a massive branding assignment into a series of roadmap phases that could be vetted with students, faculty and prospects throughout the process. The work also needed to be sequenced to create some early wins to keep momentum up over the length of the 18-month project.

'At Starmark, we like to say that any large, successful project is made up of a series of small, successful projects. Those small projects are what we deliver each sprint so that we stay flexible, aligned with our clients and open to change.' - Brett Circe, Chief Interactive Officer

The Starmark team created multiple mini roadmaps covering all aspects of the assignment. This allowed us to start the foundational digital work and brand guidelines much sooner. At the same time, we were able to begin the concepting, planning and pre-production work for the brand essence video.

Later in the project, we were able to use that foundational brand guidelines and digital work to guide the time-intensive but less time-sensitive rollout to microsites for each key school within the university system.

New Homepage and Landing Page

To make a big impact sooner, part of the roadmap was creating a quick turnover of the NSU homepage and web presence. Starmark created a temporary landing page that informed the public about the rebrand, hyping them up for the big transformation.

At the same time the landing page was being constructed, the team was hard at work modernizing the layout and functionality of the homepage. The result was a clean, new homepage, complete with new copy and a shark fin header design. Starmark made the page modular, allowing all aspects of the design system to be repurposed throughout the NSU site over time for consistency and efficiency.

Digital Brand Guidelines

Internal PR communications, academic departments, apparel vendors and student organizations all touch the NSU brand in some capacity. With so many moving pieces and players involved, it was important for everyone to be on the same page. Starmark created an online brand guidelines site to assist each player in knowing how to accurately convey and communicate the brand. NSU now has a new way to tell the NSU story, complete with a brand promise and directions to execute tone of voice, wordmarks, photography/video, editorial copy and more. Easily accessible and convenient, the guidelines ensured the brand will live on.

College Microsites

Since recruiting and increasing international and domestic nationwide applicants is at the core of NSU’s growth plans, Starmark developed a series of 4 college microsites that addressed and appealed to prospective students.

Each microsite implemented the new brand’s tone of voice into concise copy that entices and empowers users to apply. The microsites included new downloadable information, success stories, course curricula, faculty pages, degree descriptions and more. Students seeking degrees from the Ron and Kathy Assaf College of Nursing, H. Wayne Huizenga College of Business and Entrepreneurship, Fischler College of Education, and the NSU College of Engineering and Computing were able to find all relevant information in a simple way.

Moving NSU into the big leagues

The rebranding effort is already paying dividends. Both faculty and student groups are praising the new campaign as it rolls out.

There’s no way we’d be this far along without a roadmap that allowed us to tackle several different initiatives at the same time. We stayed flexible and stayed in touch with all our stakeholders from the various departments and colleges. We were able to keep everyone aligned and excited, while still giving ourselves room to account for change. – Brandon Hensler, Executive Director, Public Relations and Marketing Communications for NSU Florida

Phase two is coming soon, focusing on work that will up the game of NSU’s athletic department.

How to start small in AR, VR and 360 video

Reprinted from South Florida Business Journal

When Apple’s ARkit hit the market a couple of years ago, the excuse that AR had no audience would, seemingly, have disappeared. Expensive goggles were no longer needed. Now smartphone owners everywhere became augmented reality (AR) enabled. And, while some industries have found applications and become early adopters, marketers’ budgets and applications have grown much slower than anticipated. (more…)

Facilitate Fundraising by Speaking Theater-Lovers’ Language (The Plot Thickens!)

On the evening of February 6, 1967, Parker Playhouse opened its doors and raised the curtain on its first production, Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. Fifty years later, the iconic Fort Lauderdale venue needed to be restored and renovated for the 21st century. The Broward Center called upon a partner that was completely in sync with its goal to build community through the arts. (more…)

The top 4 things you aren’t tracking – and why you really should be

If you feel like you’re drowning in marketing data with no direction, this is the article for you. Let’s put the science back in data science together with this Starmark guide to the top 4 things you aren’t tracking — and why you really should be. (more…)

AI assistants will disrupt the marketplace in 2019

Reprinted from South Florida Business Journal

We used to call them voice or virtual assistants (VAs). Now scientists call them AI assistants (AIs). If your business depends on search or repetitive ordering, you must prepare to protect your customer base. Amazon.com has sold more than 100 million Alexa-enabled devices. And Apple and Google are catching up. Some of the reason for the rapid rise of these AIs is the novelty. But the main reason is their ability to save users time and energy by making a simple, intuitive voice request, rather than fumbling with a phone or some other device. (more…)

Engage a specific type of U.S. traveler when re-introducing a Caribbean hotel brand to the U.S. market

The Idea

What is an experientialist? If you’ve seen any of the new ads Starmark created for Elegant Hotels Group, then you have some idea. Experientialists are those who live to explore different landscapes, cultures, flavors, sights, and sounds. They seek escapes that become deeper journeys, and that desire leads them to Elegant Hotels — because when you stay at an Elegant Hotel, the experience stays with you. (more…)

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