BY BRINGING A HIGHER LEVEL OF VISUAL DESIGN, MESSAGING STRATEGY, AND COPYWRITING TO OUR CLIENTS’ INVESTOR-FACING MATERIALS, WE HOPE TO SHORTEN THE LENGTH OF CAPITAL RAISE PERIODS, ALLOWING KEY TEAM MEMBERS TO GET BACK TO MAKING TRANSACTIONS AND CREATING VALUE IN PORTFOLIO INVESTMENTS.
methods (often imperfect ones) to reach efficient decisions in the absence of full information. These concepts are directly applicable in considering how brand might affect not just what cereal or detergent to buy, but also larger decisions, such as which bank to select to manage a large account. Research shows that within contemporary market conditions, a strong and widely-recognized brand correlates strongly with long-term financial success.4 What decisionmakers know about a brand and how they feel toward that brand are relevant and do factor into their ultimate choices. A distinguishable brand can lead customers toward lower price sensitivity, greater candor, and more leniency, all valuable considerations that factor into acquisition and profitability of current and prospective clients.5 Furthermore, within sectors where there exist many substitutable and credible competitors, a well-developed and -articulated brand can serve as a key differentiator. As industries mature and individual companies’ performance metrics trend convergently, such as in the investment management field, a firm’s story, culture, and philosophy become ever more critical for key constituents choosing with whom to engage.
Advisory - Ittner Good Communication Matters
1. Wired 2. Deloitte 3. Emotion and Decision Making. 2014. 4. Brand Impact on the Company’s Financial Performance. 2016. 5. Marketo
CSQ SPRING 2018
At Darien Group, we provide branding and communications services to private equity and real estate investment firms, entrants in industries that shunned press and branding almost altogether as recently as ten to fifteen years ago. With increased competition for investor dollars and target assets, we’re seeing a remarkable sea change in the willingness of investment managers to consider their communications as a means of separation from the herd in the eyes of their audiences. Investor presentations and private placement memorandum, once only functional and legal requisites for going to market, are increasingly seized as opportunities to advance brand narrative. Digital presences have gone from nonexistent to robust and attractive, with space reserved for content on portfolio value creation, sometimes including video. By bringing a higher level of visual design, messaging strategy, and copywriting to our clients’ investor-facing materials, we hope to shorten the length of capital raise periods, allowing team members to get back to creating value in portfolio investments. On certain occasions, we reduce the need for our clients to employ costly placement agents to raise capital. These integrations of brand and communications resources can advance strategic imperatives and effect real and significant business outcomes.
Discovering Your Brand’s Value
More recently, we’ve found interesting peripheral applications for our capabilities. Among our current assignments: a rebrand and materials development for a boutique accounting firm; investor pitch materials for a film development and production fund; and a website and white paper for a cannabis-focused Initial Coin Offering (ICO). In each of these cases, we’ve taken our traditional processes and applied them to industries or business models that are, in part or in whole, new to us. The three central phases to any thoughtful branding work are: 1. Discovery, to understand as much as possible about a business, its history, model, personality, and goals 2. Development, using the groundwork of the Discovery process to tease out messaging themes and visual brand worlds that strengthen and grow in collaboration with the client 3. Production , in which the Development roadmap is realized into concrete deliverables by creative and technical experts with requisite acumen and training. These three steps are applicable to practically any business. And whether or not you have resources available to contribute to your brand, you can still work through your own Discovery and Development processes just by considering strengths and weaknesses and your key constituents’ experience with your company. Twenty years ago, most people would be skeptical as to why an accounting firm should care about its clients’ user and brand experience. Today, we assume user experience to be important in the majority of our purchase decisions. Why exclude business-to-business and professional services applications? Psychology and behavior have proven that the quality of a company’s brand and communications platform is critical within every industry and to each client relationship. end
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