Process: How We Do It
We take a channel-agnostic, idea-centric approach to branding, advertising and marketing.
Insights define the customer. The customer inspires the strategy. The strategy shapes the creative idea. The creative idea is supported by the channels. The channels are defined by the insights.
Our approach is defined around this chain of events. All our capabilities exist only to deliver against this simple, but powerful approach.
- Insights
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The best work begins with a single relevant consumer insight.
Stone Ward's Insight Process starts by defining the customer and understanding how your business and brand objectives align to fit his or her needs.
We ask these questions: Is your brand acquiring a new customer? If so, what kind of new customer? What does she believe in? How does she live? How does he perceive the brand? Or maybe, your consumer isn't a customer at all. Maybe he's your employee. What are the insights that will improve employee morale and commitment? All are critical questions.
Our approach to gathering these insights is unbiased, qualitative and quantitative. It touches everything from lifestyle to media habits, including traditional and emerging media. And once we've identified these insights, we transform them into practical strategies upon which all communications are built.
- Strategy
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Insights don't sit on a shelf. They make money and build brands by becoming active strategies.
Just as the Insight Process defined the target, this process works to answer important strategic questions. Our multi-disciplinary team asks: "What does the target need to hear? What's relevant and differentiating?" and the clincher: "How do we know we are right?" Once we have the answers to these questions, we use these ingredients to cook up the strategies.
These strategies should be relevant and distinctive. They should take advantage of your competitor's weakness. They should be surprising in a category filled with expected (and boring) conventions. And most of all, they should be on-budget, with measurement plans that define your ROI.
Stone Ward concentrates your resources on the strategies with the greatest opportunities to increase sales and sustain a competitive advantage. As these key elements unite, marketing and communication strategies emerge which will fuel great creative thinking.
- Ideas
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The strategy drives the creative idea.
Your business problem and the strategy to overcome it will become our creative inspiration. Whether it's a television spot that tugs at your heart strings, or a "Dad and Grads" newspaper ad meant to drive short-term sales, we don't see the difference. Because regardless of what the idea is, Stone Ward always asks four tough questions about our creative:
- Is it relevant?
- Is it new?
- Is it honest?
- Does it cause action?
If we believe our ideas don't fire on these four cylinders, we go back and work on them until they do.
- Channels
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The idea is supported through the channels.
Stone Ward makes sure to create concepts first and then select the channels. Our ideas come to life through both the traditional and the new, emerging media channels.
In the past, media messages went out to the masses through the traditional channels like television, print, radio and outdoor-but today, given the internet and new technologies that allow consumers to tune out a message-it's become a new world order. The idea must be translated across whatever combination of the traditional and emerging channels that will reach the right target.
Stone Ward's approach to media buying and planning is research oriented, innovative and flexible. It shifts and evolves with consumers and new technologies. Where specific channel expertise is needed, we have alliances with expert media partners such as: Carat Worldwilde, Corinthian Media, and Fuor Digital. Because the best ideas will only be successful when placed in the right channels, this kind of approach to media buying is crucial.
- Measurement
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Great ideas can't be great if they don't deliver. Period.
At Stone Ward, it's our job to provide you with a variety of metrics and diagnostic tools to measure your results. We can provide a standard suite of return-on-investment dashboard reports, and are also happy to design and provide customized measurement reporting.
We never simply pass along results. Instead, we track, we test concepts, and we evaluate those results to provide optimization strategies and tactics that allow the ideas to work.