About - Starfish

OUR SERVICES

Everything we do, regardless of whether it is a full brand strategy, an ad campaign or an isolated activation, is created through the lens of the brand experience, and it is why our suite of services includes everything needed to build, deliver, and maintain a world-class brand experience.

Branding

We believe a well-crafted brand strategy is the foundation of any successful brand and related external and internal marketing program. Our approach is based upon the belief that a brand is informed by its stakeholders’ POV, its customers’ needs and perspectives, and its competitive set.

Naming is an art unto itself. Our holistic and rigorous brand naming process ensures that your brand, product, service, and/or program aligns with your brand strategy and the resulting brand name communicates simply and effectively.

Any good naming structure includes a well-formulated naming convention that guides the development of future names at the product, service, or feature levels. When done properly, it helps customers navigate, understand, and choose what is right for them.

Everyone can agree that a brand name, the name “on the door,” is one of the most important elements of any brand.

Our expertise in naming is rooted in an ironclad, methodical, and thorough process that ensures our names are strategically sound, creative, and unique. Learn More

Every brand has a story to tell, and your new brand’s story is waiting to be told. Rooted in the brand strategy, we'll craft language that resonates both internally and externally.

Also referred to as a narrative, the brand story will communicate a feeling that elicits an emotional response from the target. Do you want them to feel inspired? Do you want them to take action? Do you want them to feel joy? The brand story will deliver your brand to the world.
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With a differentiated brand strategy and a new brand name in hand, we'll bring your brand to life with design. Our design process explores typography, logo marks, color, iconography, and imagery, and it will push your brand into the future. Learn More

An organization’s brand strategy is a set of words and phrases that together formally articulate the core essence of your brand. It should be inclusive of your history and your future, your products and your services, your customers and your prospects, the attributes of your brand, your place in the marketplace, and, importantly, how you bring it all together uniquely.

In order to capture and articulate this all succinctly, we must dig in. Deeply and thoroughly. Internally and externally. As a brand strategy agency, we take this process seriously because this type of rigor is required to yield the most authentic brand strategy. And this is the only kind of brand strategy we deliver.

We’ll deliver all of the formal brand strategy components including the value proposition, positioning statement, brand idea, and brand story. But also, as part of our brand strategy services, we include brand architecture. From our perspective, brand architecture is a bit of a lost art – an afterthought. When Learn More

Experience

We believe that the brand experience is the brand—that a brand is the sum total of all the interactions a customer has with that brand. We built our company around the concept of the brand experience, and today it’s the lens that we look through for all assignments.

Brand experience can best be described as the feelings that result from brand interactions that ultimately create perceptions that deliver against the customer’s needs and drive behavior.
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Actively managing, analyzing, optimizing, measuring, and branding your customer journey can strengthen your customers’ bond with your brand. We'll help you to map, analyze, optimize, and brand your customer journey to create a more consistent, differentiated, and powerful brand experience. Learn More

Once a brand is defined, the next step is to define the experience you want your customers to have when they engage with your brand. We refer to this discipline as Brand Experience Design (BXD), and it can be approached in a variety of ways, including (1) to solve a problem, (2) to drive specific usage and behaviors, and (3) to elicit a particular emotional response. Learn More

Once a brand experience is defined, the next step is to inspire the organization to embrace and deliver the brand. Whether a company has 10 or 10,000 employees, they need to provide the people who directly or indirectly interact with customers the tools and guidance needed to deliver the desired brand experience.
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While experience playbooks are detailed documents, nothing replaces actual training sessions, especially in the highly nuanced world of brand experience. Therefore, we offer clients brand experience training sessions. These can be instituted with cross-functional team leaders or with specific departments. The training sessions provide an opportunity for employees to ask questions, role play, and offer suggestions on how to enhance the delivery of the defined and desired brand experience.

Activation

In the end, all successful branding initiatives require activation—both internally and externally. This is where we develop a strategic plan detailing which channels to leverage for communicating to each of our identified segments—internally and externally. This will help us define which assets we will need in order to successfully execute the activation stage across a variety of channels and through different mediums.

What do you want the target to do? How do you want them to feel? When, along their journey, is it most important to reach them? A strong brand, product, or service is merely the starting point. It takes an actionable, integrated, and well-vetted marketing strategy to bring your brand to market impactfully and effectively. Learn More

Advertising today is as much a science as it is an art—it can raise broad awareness or drive purchase. But whether online or offline, advertising development begins with a sound brand strategy and an understanding of the intended target. A deliberate messaging strategy is essential to the development of effective advertising and is based upon a deep understanding of your target segments and their unique needs and attitudes. Finally, a thoughtful media plan ensures that we reach our target with the right message, at the right time, in a compelling way.

We live in a digital world, and the expansion of digital channels is exponential. While some find this overwhelming, we see it as an opportunity, especially when the customer journey is used to identify the most impactful moments of interaction.

Every brand has a website. And while online metrics—like SEO—can drive your website’s content within your category or your business, you still have to differentiate from competitors. How will you translate your brand into a compelling digital experience? How will your website quickly communicate that this is no ordinary brand? We work hard to ensure that your website communicates like no other. Learn More

Whether B2C or B2B, your digital footprint is tantamount to your success. And with new technology emerging regularly, we can help you separate the good from the bad—the necessary from the “faddy.” From social media management to email campaigns, we’ll work with you to develop a comprehensive digital platform that will deliver the business results you need and provide the creative output that will be sure to be seen. Learn More

Culture

Corporate culture is complex as it is formed over the life span of an organization and needs to be nurtured and informed. A company’s culture has a direct impact on the entirety of the employment experience. It can also be defined as a company's reputation from a potential employee's perspective as well as the values the company imparts to its employees.

Companies invest thousands—even millions—of dollars in advertising and marketing in order to build their brands. But they often forget their most important asset: their employees.

Aligning employees to the brand is crucial for ensuring employee satisfaction as well the company’s ability to impart a consistent and authentic brand experience for customers across all brand touchpoints. Engaged employees take the experience one step further by becoming built-in brand advocates. Learn More

Employer brand is the branding and marketing of the entirety of the employment experience. It is central to the employee value proposition and essentially what the organization communicates as its identity to both potential and current employees. It encompasses an organization’s mission, values, culture, and personality. A positive employer brand communicates that the organization is a good employer and a great place to work. Employer brand affects recruitment of new employees, retention and engagement of current employees, and the overall perception of the organization in the market.

An employee value proposition (EVP) is the central component of an employer’s branding strategy that represents the unique set of benefits that it has to offer its employees. An EVP can also be seen as the essence of a company—how it is unique and what it stands for. It encompasses the central reasons that people are proud and motivated to be part of, such as a powerful purpose or distinct competitive advantage.

Employee engagement is an employee's satisfaction with their work and pride in their employer, to the extent to which people enjoy and believe in what they do and have the perception that their employer values them and their contributions

Our employee engagement service takes a multistep approach that starts with a deep understanding of a company’s culture and employee satisfaction. From there, we identify the aspects of the company’s offerings and culture that resonate with the employees as well as the ones that are deficient. Once mapped, we build programs and communications that anchor to the brand and amplify the prideful components of the employee experience.

Employee communications is key to developing a strong employee experience, making the workplace more enjoyable, and supporting organizational well-being. Like with any communications, you should start with a good strategy as it will set guidelines for effectively sharing information and enhancing your company culture via dedicated communication channels.

Additionally, a core premise of brand experience is ensuring that a customer’s impression of a brand created through advertising and communications is delivered when that customer engages with the brand. And since all employees, regardless of how directly they interact with customers, are ambassadors of your brand, they must understand the brand and how to live it. We’ve found that when people care about and believe in the brand, they’re motivated to work harder and their loyalty to the company increases. Employees are unified and inspired by a common sense of purpose and identity.