Menu Close
Our Services
 

Vision

IDEA FIRST. Teaming directly with company leaders, we uncover the mechanics of your vision and your Big, Own-able Idea at the beginning of the project, rather than a ‘surprise’ at the end (which may not be correct). We can make this promise after decades of practice, hundreds of cases and writing award-winning books.

ALL ELSE SECOND. With the Idea at the center, we focus on the most critical element for success: the installation of the #1 strategy within the company. That includes Naming, Taglines, Brand Story and Micro-Scripts designed to keep the Website, Sales Pitch and Messages from from veering off the road. Nothing is more crucial to your brand than achieving this alignment during the first few months.

Category & Branding

Every brand has an entitlement: to be positioned as #1 in a Category. Your Dominant Selling Idea (DSI) is your positioning sharpened to its most penetrating, effective point.

Research & Discovery

Our process starts with R&D that answers what we call the 3 W’s: What is it? Why do I need it and Why should I buy it from you? To answer, we must know about your competition, how they are positioned, and more. R&D for us is a common sense practice that relies on in-person interviews. We only use paid research when requested by our clients.

Brand Positioning

Your Position is the one unique, important, ownable idea that you will stand for — the big difference that sets you apart. It’s as important for your employees as it is for your customers.

Current Category. Step one defines your current “base” Category: the context in which customers place you. Before a customer can choose your brand, they look for a basic Category that fills a need. This step identifies the business bucket you’re perceived to be in, and where you fit compared to competition.

The Category You Will Be #1 In. The next Step attaches the one most important attribute you can own to your base category (safest car, most durable watch). This either sets you apart in your category or creates a whole new Category for you to own.

Dominant Selling Idea. Step three distills your Big Idea into a specific set of words that describe your Category’s value proposition in a two-part statement which says: Here’s the Unique Benefit we offer and the Unique Reason to Believe us.

Selling Strategy

Selling effectiveness is at the heart of everything we do. The Dominant Selling Idea is by definition the core of any brand’s “value proposition”. In finding and wording the DSI, we examine the way the company “goes to market” — particularly the language of sales people in the field and the logic and sequence of pitches and presentations. Salespeople as well as Marketing People must be in total sync with the Dominant Selling Idea that sets your brand apart.

Naming

No branding element is more important than your name. We create distinctive, memorable names for companies, products, services, technology platforms and proprietary processes.

Every name created at BrandTeamSix must stand up to the following criteria. It must be:

  • A direct statement or highly supportive of your Dominant Selling Idea. Its object is to launch your DSI instantly in the customer’s mind.
  • Descriptive, evocative or colorful.
  • Ownable by you.
  • Easy or pleasing to say.

When necessary in the process, we will also conduct…

  • Qualitative/Quantitative Research
  • Trademark/legal search
  • Web domain search

Micro-Scripts

The DSI Tagline (Selling On Sight)

Each Tagline is designed to be a precision selling tool--the catalyst for your Dominant Selling Idea. We call them DSI Taglines because they turn any place they appear into an instant selling opportunity.

Every BrandTeamSix Tag:

  • Must directly state, or specifically support the DSI
  • Must be ownable — another product couldn’t substitute their name for yours and say the same Tagline
  • Must be evocative, colorful or phonetically memorable.

Micro-Scripts. The Phrases People Love to Remember and Repeat. It’s not what people hear, it’s what people want to repeat, after they’ve heard it! A Micro-Script is the creative verbalization of your Dominant Selling Idea--an “instant message” that people like to repeat, word-for-word. It’s short as a word or phrase – custom designed for Word of Mouth.

A Micro-Script is much more than a standard sound bite or an empty slogan. It’s a Story bite. It triggers a whole story or a key piece of one in the mind of the listener.

Graphic Identity

We bring your brand to life via distinctive logos, key visuals, graphic design and graphic standards for a consistent, distinctive look and feel. We treat these graphics as the physical incarnation of your DSI – the “pictures that say a thousand words.”

With world-class graphic designers, we can work across all mediums:

  • Websites
  • Marketing Collateral
  • Sales Materials
  • Cards and Stationary

Real Brand Stories

Brand Story & The One-Floor Elevator Pitch

The Brand Story is narrative brief that consolidates all your key themes and language onto a single page. It is the blueprint for all your communication going forward. Written in problem/solution story form, it contains the language that becomes your first Micro-Scripts as well as your “elevator pitch.” It is a primary alignment tool for your brand.

Click Here for an Example:
Rackspace: NYSE RAX

Rackspace: NYSE RAX

The #1 Managed Cloud Company

Around 2003, Amazon built what became a computing revolution: the first, general-purpose, Public Cloud. API driven, virtualized, instantly provisioned, billed like a utility--it was a game changer for early users who could suddenly access immense computing resources on demand.

But as businesses needed to scale on these commodity-like Clouds, big problems appeared. The Clouds were incomplete because:

  • General-purpose, commodity Cloud companies just provide raw infrastructure, built on thousands of low reliability, “disposable” servers. It lets them offer raw computing at what appear to be low unit prices--but only covers a fraction of the Cloud’s real costs. Because…
  • These Cloud companies don’t manage or support the complex tools and technologies you need to make their fragile infrastructure reliable and efficient for your critical apps.
  • The Cloud has to be managed by someone to build reliability and efficiency back in.

It means that you are responsible for engineering your software and systems to manage their fragile infrastructure. You have to hire people and become the Cloud expert. Otherwise, you suffer the pain of degraded performance, frequent downtime and all the extra costs that go with it.

But at Rackspace, we knew it didn’t have to be this way. We knew businesses would demand a choice: the ability to hire a company of specialists to manage all this complexity for them, so they could spend their resources elsewhere.

So we decided to offer that choice--a new category of Cloud that’s delivered as a unique integration of Cloud infrastructure and Cloud experts for every customer--so you have everything you need to design it, run it and scale it on day one. A new category we call Managed Cloud.

Here’s what we did:

  • We made our cloud professional grade--built reliability into the infrastructure, so you don’t have to engineer it later on
  • We began creating specialized Clouds to run services like Mongo DB, DevOps; and whole practice areas like SharePoint and Digital Commerce
  • We developed a unique Hybrid approach to make multiple platforms work as one
  • We wrapped it all in our legendary Fanatical Support—teams of cloud engineers and application specialists on call 24x7x365 to make your hardest problems simple.

And here’s what thousands of customers around the world are now getting:

  • Cloud computing that takes out more real costs, more risk and more inefficiency than any commodity Cloud can. Value far beyond low unit prices.
  • A Cloud that comes with all the experts you need to run it, so you can run your business. A different model: They sell units of computing. We sell units of Managed Cloud.

For these customers, the best Cloud is Managed Cloud. It’s why they’ve made us #1 in DevOps automation, #1 in services like MongoDB, #1 in Sharepoint, #1 in hosted private OpenStack Cloud, #1 in Digital Commerce and that’s just the beginning.

Rackspace. The #1 Managed Cloud Company