While agencies – us included – would love nothing more than to play an active role on a daily basis with designing and implementing any number of brand touchpoints and campaigns, we know that’s not always sustainable from a budget standpoint. Further, curating and cultivating your brand happens from the inside out, so it’s important that clients have the tools to help their organizations live the brand.This can only happen from a place of authenticity. Working with clients, we start with people first – not the problem, not the product, not the deadline. People who are stakeholders – internally and externally – are vital to establishing the foundation for a brand.
While we’ll save the details of what a brand platform entails for a future article, what we’d like to focus on [in this post/today/here] is a great example from State Farm demonstrating how a brand platform helps organizations make their brand actionable and assures that those actions are a natural, authentic extension and expression of the brand.State Farm recently decided to sponsor music festivals. At first blush, you might think that is an egregious mismatch in culture and values. But what they did with this partnership was brilliant.Their campaign tagline has always been “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” That campaign was built upon the brand platform of “Here to help life go right.” If you as a State Farm employee are at a festival and are truly living the brand, how would you behave as a “good neighbor?” How would you “help life go right?”