Collaboration is key: The Conway School, Gravity Switch, and Bidwell ID join forces to blitz build The Conway School website. September 2011.

Experience. Hard Work. Results.

Branding and marketing are complex and getting more so by the minute. Our clients are awash in marketing options and data. Meanwhile, they need results. They need to know that their branding and marketing are paying off.

Marketing used to rely on Mad Men and gurus, big personalities that demanded faith from their clients. Not anymore. Trusted advisors are vital—experts in research, strategy, creation, management, and assessment. Experts demand data, not faith.

Our credo is simple: be as results-driven as our clients.

Research

The best brands and plans come from insights, which in turn come from a perceptive understanding of client and market. Collectively, Bidwell ID has in excess of 75 years of marketing experience, including study of the nascent field of neuromarketing, which offers a new understanding of why consumers do what they do.

Market and Audience Research: We are geeks about research because it gets to the heart of a brand, and the heart is where our clients find the greatest brand value. We pinpoint the gaps in how your brand is perceived. We distill your most relevant and unique brand attributes.

Touchpoints and Life Cycle: We audit your communications and analyze specifically how your audiences interact with your brand. Then we identify opportunities to improve every point of brand contact throughout their relationship with you.

Brand Voices: We conduct tailored workshops, internal meetings, and interviews that get at the heart of your brand from the inside, and that uncover ways to best promote your brand.

Planning

Brand expression and goals must be different for different audiences, both external and internal. This next level of branding is tailored and detailed for specific audiences.

Marketing Communications Plan: This working document spells out 1) the who, what, when, and where of your targeted marketing efforts and 2) how best to reach your audience or audiences. The plan is integrated—showing how your brand plays out across all channels—and agile. Processes for both long- and short-term goals are built in.

Launc Plan: We put together your brand rollout (fast or slow) and integration strategy. Your launch is an opportunity to build internal support and create external brand excitement.

Public Relations Plan: The care and fostering of your brand requires constant awareness of potential opportunities, creation of new opportunities, and the occasional surprise. We not only put a public relations plan in place, but can also manage it.

Brand Creation

The insights from brand discovery are crafted into high-level plans that spell out the strategies and tactics needed to achieve branding goals.

Brand Platform/Messaging: With the brand platform, we clearly articulate your overarching brand premise (some say promise), your brand attributes, and your core messaging.

Naming: Your name is arguably the most important brand decision you will make. It must be unique, easy to recall, and speak to your brand. Developing a strong name requires both clean methodology and cleverness.

Architecture: Every organization is unique and demands a clear brand architecture that explains how the brand works across different departments, programs, services, and products. This clarifies internal decision making and external understanding of your structure.

Brand Expression

This is all your brand ideas made manifest. It is how and where the world touches your brand, through positioning, messaging, and design. Our creative team is expert at converting strategy into unique and compelling touchpoints.

Creative: Our creative gets a lot of attention for good reason. Our writing sounds good, our design looks good, and more important, they get results for our clients. That’s because it’s all grounded in good strategy and a collaborative approach. All done on budget and on time.

Brand Flagships: Some communications have more impact than others, such as your website, whose creation also requires a unique set of skills. For a school, it can also be the alumni magazine and admissions pieces. For a hospital, it can be a capital or service campaign. These projects require extra attention, because they set the tone of the brand and represent the most important brand touchpoints.

Brand Management

A brand is an extension of your organization’s personality, a living entity. As such, it needs ongoing care involving tracking, measuring, monitoring, and refining.

Rolling Analytics: You have invested a lot in your brand, so be sure to protect it. That means monitoring touchpoints on a scheduled basis using the right metrics.

Standards/Guidelines: Explicit standards and guidelines are essential for maintaining brand consistency over time, with vendors and across different venues. At a minimum they cover logo use, messaging, colors, and fonts. They can also incorporate specific templates across different media and define the workings of the brand hierarchy.