Indigo Thinking Immersions 

Immersions are multi-day collaborative sessions with your team, preceded by our review of your existing market and consumer knowledge and, as appropriate, your existing marketing and communication efforts. We lead structured discussions/exercises, using templates that reflect best practices. These sessions are designed to generate strong hypotheses -- based on a combination of existing knowledge, reasonable hypotheses where knowledge is lacking and informed intuition about the dynamics of the consumer and the category -- that leads to break-through ideas and solution hypotheses to your toughest marketing problems.
 
Brand Exploration

We focus on your Brand, to whom does => should it speak, what does =>should it say to them, how is => should it be organized to reflect different targets and different product lines, ultimately what are its core strengths and weaknesses in functional and emotional meaning.  
Consumer Exploration
We explore the diversity of consumers of your category, both those you have relationships with and those you should, understanding them both in terms of who they are -- demographically, psychographically, emotionally, behaviorally --  and the functional benefits sought, together with the emotional/psychological needs and wants that drive their decision-making. An output is a prioritization of segments marketing opportunities. 

Marketing Strategy
We identify the central challenges to the profitable growth of your business(es), from your product mix -- its scope and organization, the products' relevance and differentiation to its target audience(s) -- to the possibilities of growth within your existing customer base and from new users, with consideration of the barriers to growth, e.g. distribution, pricing, competitive pressures, including opportunities for geographical expansion.

Product Line Strategy
We array your offerings within your existing Brand structure against the diversity of the consumers in your category and determine whether you are achieving appropriate and complete coverage of the selling opportunities, identifying potential gaps where your offerings and consumer segments do not intersect. We also review and suggest ways of optimizing your Brand architecture to help consumers find the products most meaningful to them.

Communications Strategy
We assess what consumers think and feel about your Brand and its offerings -- are they aware, do they understand, are they intrigued, do they believe -- in contrast to what we think they should think and feel, and construct a sequence of message elements that create a persuasive storyline to motivate behavior. This process includes a thorough evaluation of existing product positionings and possible revisions.

Indigo Thinking Engagements

Engagements are typically multi-month projects where identify break-through ideas and solution hypotheses to your toughest marketing problems. We lead the work and go all the way to solution set outputs, preparing your team to drive execute and, optionally, participate in the execution ourselves. We create a detailed action plan and an implementation roadmap with defined mileposts and can provide supervision and guidance to your team and, if appropriate, external agencies through the implementation and execution process. If the engagement has been preceded by Immersion sessions, needless to say, we exploit those outputs. 


Brand Exploration and Evolution
We create (1) an understanding of the composition of the consumers in your category -- demographically, psychographically, behaviorally --  and the functional benefits sought, together with the emotional/psychological needs and wants that drive their decision-making and (2) an inventory of your Brand's equities, its core strengths and weaknesses in functional and emotional content and meaning to its target audience(s). Based on these consumer and Brand assessments, we develop a vision of what the Brand should mean to the market as a whole and to distinct sub-markets -- a Brand architecture and positionings of individual products -- and a brand story that creates a pathway for these audiences to a new, refreshed understanding of the Brand and its offerings.

Marketing Strategy & Product Line Development
We identify the central opportunities for profitable growth that derive from (1) targeting and segmentation, e.g. enhanced existing customer loyalty and expansion opportunities to new consumer groups, (2) product redeployment, product tweaking  and new product development (3) responses to identifiable barriers in distribution, pricing and competitive activities, including opportunities for geographical expansion. These together yield a Brand-wide product line strategy that insures that there is a profitable intersection of consumer needs and wants with the Brand, its Sub-Brands (if appropriate), and your array of existing and new product offerings. Based on these identified opportunities, we create an action plan that capitalizes on these insights, providing explicit checkpoints, that insures that your market is profitably covered, including the development of new product offerings.

Communications Strategy and Execution
We assess what consumers currently think and feel about your Brand and its offerings -- are they aware, do they understand, are they intrigued, do they believe -- in contrast to what we think they should think and feel, and construct a sequence of message elements that create a persuasive storyline to motivate behavior. We take this storyline and determine how best to allow consumers to hear it and to understand it, e.g. break it into chunks that consumers can absorb. We create communications briefs for either the entire storyline or individual message chunks, briefs that instruct agency creatives about what the consumer thinks now, what we need her to think to motivate behavior, and what are the message elements that will effect that change. We can, if appropriate, directly stimulate, guide and supervise your agency's creative development to our brief.