How Branding is Essential in Business Strategy
By Mansour AlShamsi
Since 2008, Shannon Riordan has been the co-founder and partner at Global Brand Works, a brand strategy agency that infuses new life into technology and financial services brands. She is a brand evangelist with over 20 years of experience in marketing and a passion for brand strategy, product innovation and design companies ranging from B2B start-ups to top global consumer brands. Shannon’s co-founder Caroline McNally has held executives positions at companies such as American Express, Visa and Mastercard. If anyone needs to launch, recharge, redesign, or completely reinvent a brand, the experienced leadership from Shannon Riordan and Caroline McNally will get you there. Current clients of Global Brand Works include SFMOMA, PayPal, The Big Play, Bank of the West, Visa and American Express
Shannon and Caroline gave us a very valuable workshop on branding and how brands are very essential in the business strategy. Brands are not just logos or names or even products, brands are actually reputation and identity, brands are the experiences delivered, and brands are keeping promises. Shannon highlighted why strong brands are important and how they can lead to having an efficient product expansion, having better business results and receiving a superior return on marketing investment. By providing us with a Brand Strategy Workbook, and using a Blackbox which projects imaginary holograms, each group was given a criteria sheet and was requested to come up with a full brand, including name, logo, mission and product.
In conclusion, Shannon and Caroline’s workshop was one of a kind. It gave a deep insight on the essentials and attributes of branding. We are now able to ask a few questions to ourselves when branding a company, such as what are the functional attributes, what are the emotional benefits as well as what is the brand personality and positioning.
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