by Phil Black

What Are Your Marketable Truths?

If a brand is the soul of a business, then a brand should be more than just salient points and elegant visuals. It must be a living, breathing, recognizable entity that inspires trust and builds relationships by defining and sticking to its most marketable truths.

Case in point: Everybody’s into Apple right now. Without hopping all the way into the cart, I will single out a great example of a brand that captured its audience by refusing to alter its truth.

Back in the 90s, Apple wasn’t very popular. Rather, it was perceived as an obscure niche of computers geared only for “creative” and “educational” types.

But rather than change or apologize, Apple aimed itself at the “creative” and “educational” type in everyone. In time, this incited those who wanted to see themselves as smart, creative and capable of using tools that empowered their passions. They embraced the brand and became almost religious in their fervor.

And as we know, Apple flooded the mainstream, where it remains buoyant today.

Like Apple, to achieve success, business stakeholders must know and be faithful to whom they really are (and aren’t) and whom they truly want as customers.

At TripleSpoke, we apply brand intelligence and design expertise to clarify and demonstrate clients’ marketable truths so their customers can identify and believe them distinctly.

We’ve also begun refining our company vocabulary to emphasize our own marketable truths, a phrase you’ll now see attached to us often.

What are yours? Let’s connect sometime soon—we’d surely love to hear or help you find out!

• If you’re not talking to your customers in the slow economy, somebody else certainly is

• Converse with customers now while competitors are cutting back on marketing to save money

• Blogs and e-mail newsletters are a low-cost and effective way to open lines of communication

In times of economic woe, many businesses are tempted to kill the lights to save on electricity. The inherent peril is that if your business operates in the dark, your customers will not see you or, worse yet, forget about you.

The advantage then falls squarely on the one business that remains aglow for those who still want and need to spend money. Times are tough, but remember that many of the greatest companies fought to the top by staying visible and accessible during economic slowdowns. Their competitors, meanwhile, sank with reactionary measures and self-fulfilling prophecies.

So how can you keep the lights on without draining scarce funds? The answer lies in the one resource that’s always inexpensive to share: your expertise as a product or service provider.

Making customers more aware of your abilities creates interest in new sales and upgrades. It also reinforces you as trusted resource in your market when the competition has fallen silent.

To generate interest and maintain an audible voice at a low cost, one of TripleSpoke’s clients, The Big Picture (also our featured brand), recently launched a new blog and e-mail newsletter.

Entitled State of Integration, it reaches out to clients by featuring the owner’s insights into current industry trends in a blog’s warming, conversational tone.

For the meager cost of an e-mail marketing client such as Constant Contact and the upgrades to the website, The Big Picture has opened an exciting and informative dialog with its clients.

The website’s blog has also been rejuvenated with a simple but powerful element: the current date. And within a culture of uncertainty, perhaps nothing does more than that to say, “That’s right, I’m here—and my lights are still ablaze.”

Recently TripleSpoke collaborated with 37signals to give user testimonials for one of their newest product offerings, HighRise. Filmed over the course of a morning, Phil, Clint and Liz spoke about how HighRise helps keep the team on track by allowing us to record critical client information. A Rolodex on steroids, HighRise keeps us up to date on more than just addresses and phone numbers; with it, we can track anything from communications and histories to a client’s favorite cookie brand and birthday.

To manage projects, we use 37signals’ flagship product, Basecamp. As the name implies, it’s a base of operations for project oversight. It gives everyone collaborating on a project the ability to view a calendar of milestones, broadcast messages, upload files and assign tasks.

Both products combine to give us the ability to be up-to-date and transparent with our clients, keeping both sides in-sync and satisfied.

Watch the video now!

“ABC Partners”
Type: Flash Animation
Polished and snappy, it brings the company into focus | view it here

ICe Bar
Type: Identity
An identity as cool as the clientele | view it here

The Montrose Room
Type: Identity
Recalling an earlier era for some night club ambiance | view it here

S Notes
Type: Identity System
A multi-faceted system for internally branding a new company vision | view it here

Pipeline Diagram
Type: Illustration
A complex business idea is made crystal clear | view it here

Based on a provided script and production notes requesting elements from the world of photography, we created this Flash-based animation to open and close a presentation of the company’s capabilities in the world of internal branding. Snappy and sharp, this animation casts the company’s vision to prospective viewers in an exciting way with visuals that enhance and support the message of a world brought into focus through branding.

To aid this effort, the name S Notes was developed to sum up the four S’s of the key brand differentiators (Scale, Scope, Systems, Service). A parent logo was designed along with four sub-logos to represent each extension of the system and integrated into booklets, posters and a website. Together, this family creates a rallying point that the entire company can gather around, reinforcing the company’s internal brand culture and by extension, the way in which it presents itself to the outside world.

This logo is seen in the bar just beyond ICe Bar, located within the InterContinental Hotel. View that logo here>