“The trade channel, getting feedback from the stores, is a great way to gather consumer insights. They interact with customers every day and firsthand get to hear what consumers say about your and your competitors’ products.

This is especially valuable because consumers ask them questions about your product, so they can tell you exactly what the consumers’ concerns and doubts are..”

“Clarify Internal Brand Values
The best way to be consistent is to know what you stand for. If there is clarity internally on what you stand for—for us, it’s trends and foresight, which we amplify everywhere—it is tempting to talk about insights and research, which are all related, but we stick to trends and foresight for action so we know we are attracting the right target audience.

The same is true for brands in B2C; you cannot be healthy and tasty—choose one, so in every communication, that’s the point that stands out.”

“Emotional Benefits Through Storytelling
For a soft-furnishing brand, which had very functional needs, we used storytelling to communicate its emotional benefits to the customer. We were struggling to communicate everything to the customer in our collaterals, and then we used storytelling as a format to tell the brand’s story. We started with the status quo—things as they were—and then explained how using our product would help resolve the ‘functional’ problem and made the emotional benefit of using our products (coasters based on color therapy) the ‘hero’ of the story. It helped us to align the message internally and externally and make our brand story consistent in front of all stakeholders.”