PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

If you’ve ever been in a position of running a large piece of business, you’re often called upon to put together a marketing plan and a letter of agreement, often to cover an entire year’s worth of activities. Having just drafted one over this weekend, with the help of colleagues on background during the week and a walk down Ogunquit Beach yesterday to put my thoughts in order, it’s gratifying how all the pieces sometimes come together. Whether or not the client signs on for the whole letter, it felt good to believe, based on three years’ experience together, that the plan this letter contains is really what this client should be doing. They should be listening to their research and giving every employee what they need to know about the company’s future. They should be making their brand more of a conversation and less of a monologue. They should be using social media, even if it amounts to the dipping of a few toes into that stream. They should create a lot of fanfare (and more importantly, a lot of consistency) around the new mission that they share.

We’ll see what happens in the days to come with this letter. It has a significant price tag and it will be scrutinized carefully. But having written it, and looking back over it, there is an art to how it all hangs together. Wasn’t it Warhol who said that the most beautiful art is business? Funny, too, how we call these marketing letters ‘letters of agreement.’ It’s good to feel some level of concord with the world in this way. Then again, we’re still two hours from opening our virtual doors for business for the week of January 8, 2007. It’s always fun to see how much ground we cover, week by week, as we push our letters of agreement to agree with reality.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 5:45 am and is filed under Advertising, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.