Propaganda

A brand is more than a name, logo, and tagline. It represents the relationship a product or a service has with its audience.

Enhancing that relationship at every touch point to ensure a consistent brand experience is pertinent in an increasingly consumer-conscious market, not just to differentiate in the market, but even from a business’s bottom line standpoint.

But today’s consumers are inundated with content and messaging of all kinds, and it’s increasingly difficult to be heard above the din. For marketers, it means stepping away from the siloed myopic branding ways and approaching marketing strategies and its creative delivery in a more unified and powerful way. It must trigger the right emotional drivers that create unhinged bonds.

Propaganda makes it happen by helping brands strike the right chord with their consumers.

Propaganda’s expertise lies in offering fully integrated branding solutions to CPG, restaurant, retail, beauty, food, and hospitality brands. From strategy development to market research and design services, there are many moving parts in a branding journey that ultimately affect the brand and the way the customer experiences it. By putting strategy at the core of everything, Propaganda helps brands identify new, more effective, less expected ways to reach people in a more integrated, meaningful way.

“We believe that the success of a brand is rooted in their guest experience. Our aim is to build a complete brand management package that helps companies deliver that strong emotional branding quotient coherently across their brand journey,” Flint Finlinson, co-founder and CEO of Propaganda.

Driving Success through a ‘True Branding’ Process

True Branding is Propaganda’s proprietary process for a fully integrated brand transformation that is aligned with the customers’ desires. By identifying the true essence of the brand that connects it with the consumers, True Branding creates a strategy that positions the brands in the right market, among the right audience, in the most suitable way.

It dives into the bedrock of the organizations and helps them speak from a place of authenticity. Propaganda does this through a strategic approach that incorporates the founding story and the inspiration that drove the initial success of the company, as familiarity with a brand and its story is a key driver of brand authenticity. Genuineness goes a long way in turning prospective buyers into loyal customers and that’s exactly what Propaganda helps brands achieve.

This is done through a variety of qualitative and quantitative research on the management, operations, and the full DNA of a company to understand the key elements that resonate the most with the customers.

Data-driven research and analytic capabilities help Propaganda gather consumer insights for creating strategies that effectively position the brands and bring value to the clients. Identifying the core audience is essential for maximizing this value and Propaganda employs demographic and psychographic segmentation to know the right customer population. The research also throws light on key emotional drivers that set the brands apart from their competitors. Understanding the core pillars of the brand that resonate with the core audience is central to the organizational, marketing, and cultural success, which helps the brands better cater to the consumers and grow sustainably. This also helps build customer loyalty, which is the most valuable asset a brand can have.

These pillars are then aligned with the clients’ business model through tailored branding strategies to create a singular purpose for the brand, which aids in the effective delivery of the brand promise so that the brand is better reflected among its consumers.

Once the brand strategies are established, Propaganda brings in a creative and communication strategy to articulate the brand voice to the consumers. This includes a variety of services ranging from creative direction to digital development and from video production to promotion.

Hitting the Right Target with Authentic Brand Positioning

Propaganda is adept at positioning the brands to create the market differentiation.

Mature brands often struggle to keep with the times due to their outdated strategies. Relying on age-old strategies prevent these brands from evolving with the customer needs. Propaganda’s brand positioning helps these brands find their relevance for the younger generation. Propaganda also enables the up-and-coming brands to find their “it” factor, align it to suitable marketing strategies, and position them in the right spot in the consumers’ minds.

A case in point is Velvet Taco, the Dallas-based taco chain, which specializes in the global fusion of tacos. Propaganda gave a new direction to this inventive concept using the right marketing and communication strategy aligned with their business model that enabled the brand to boost their trajectory. From a handful of locations, Velvet Taco acquired huge investments and massive growth in no time.

Expanding the Network with Internal and External Branding

“One of our key differentiators of is that it creates strategies for the internal team as much as we do for the external stakeholders; the consumers of the brands. We make this possible by internally retooling our client organizations, focusing on company culture and values, so that that the brands are equipped with the right internal team to ensure the best guest experience,” says Finlinson.

The tailored branding strategies help engage, motivate, and inspire the internal consumer as they are the primary audience who determine a brand’s success. Having an excellent internal branding strategy results in the employees becoming the best advocates for the brand and deliver on the brand promise to the consumers, through their own social circles. It automatically expands the brands’ market reach as the employees, on average, have a collective network that is 10x bigger than the company’s consumer base.

Brand Marketing through Creative Communication Services

The brand insights gathered from research is utilized to build a comprehensive creative and communication strategy with a unique point of view that speaks the consumer’s language. Creative language is what connects brands to the customers and Propaganda understands this better than anyone else. Right from the color palette to patterns on the packaging cover, a strong visual appeal is created to entice the audience. Along with the visual language, Propaganda creates engaging content that speaks to the consumers in the most creative way.

The creative services help bring Propaganda’s marketing strategy to life. Having the in-house marketing operations make the branding process easier for the organizations. This way, brands can save substantial cost, effort, and energy by not spending it on another service provider; Propaganda takes care of it.

Brand marketing is optimized with the help of digital media placement, social media influencers, in-store merchandising, and store concept and design. It conveys clear and strong brand messaging, establishes the brand values, and enables the brands to communicate with customers and prospects. Propaganda has an activation team that brings the marketing campaigns and the fully integrated communications alive, helping the clients connect to their audience across all digital channels.

Propaganda also collaborates with the client organizations for effective brand management from account planning to social media management, ensuring a holistic branding experience.

Transforming the Restaurant Brands

Propaganda is particularly passionate about the restaurant industry. The integrated branding solution employs a detailed strategy that permeates each and every constituent that makes up the restaurant ecosystem. For example, the decor, the little amenities at the table, the kind of music the restaurant plays in the background, and the way customers are greeted. By aligning the restaurant ambience, products, and services with the brand voice, Propaganda ensures a unique guest experience that doesn’t compromise on quality. It transforms restaurants from a place that caters food to a place that delivers a memorable dining experience. This holistic approach drives more traffic to the restaurants and helps them create a standard for themselves.

Accelerating Brand Growth with End Consumer Insights

Along with creating and delivering an array of branding essentials, Propaganda also partakes in assessing and measuring the progress of its clients. Propaganda begins by looking into the internal team, as soon as a client is assigned.

After gaining an understanding of the internal team, the workings, and the history of the company, Propaganda carries out a variety of qualitative and quantitative research to learn the consumer response and the growth trajectory of the brand.

As a result of this full-fledged research studies, Propaganda arrives at an excellent understanding of the status of the brands from its target consumer base. It throws light on how the brands are performing from a value perception standpoint, which helps Propaganda in positioning the brands more effectively in the right market through active marketing campaigns.

Stepping Ahead with Team-led Branding

Ability to think beyond one’s skillset is the prerequisite for becoming a part of Propaganda’s stellar team. Propaganda has built a solid work culture, which is based on the idea that everyone is a contributor, regardless of their specific expertise. Having a hands-on team enables Propaganda to develop services backed by a well-balanced and grounded strategy. Professionals like creative directors, consumer researchers, writers, and graphic designers work in tandem to develop creative strategies together from a 360 viewpoint of the project. Propaganda attributes its success to this collaborative and productive work culture.

Branding strategies need to evolve with the spirit of the times and Propaganda envisions making this process easier. With over two decades of branding experience in the restaurant industry, Propaganda continues to help position brands for maximum appeal to their core audience and elevate meaningful brand experiences. While embracing the new tools and tactics of the social-media oriented brand building space, Propaganda underlines that all branding techniques essentially boil down to connecting with consumers. Helping brands find the sweet spot to emotionally connect with their consumers makes propaganda a true branding partner for the brands