In Fact, Strategy, Branding, Differentiating, Experience Engineering and Communications!

We create connection between our clients and their stakeholders. We believe in the bigger umbrella of branding – which begins with organizational culture and ends up on display in your customer service, detail aids, your brochures, your e-books and on your website. We’re channel agnostic, yet obsess about integrated campaigns and materials. We listen, we think, we plan (find out more about our proprietary Two Page Marketing Plan™ and Two Page Sales Plan®), we create, we connect, and we engage. We believe in problems – finding them, creating urgency to address them, and most importantly, showing how they can be resolved. We change attitudes, and even more importantly, we change behavior. We help you attract customers and keep them.

Marketing communications today is a game for thinkers and idea generators who are comfortable across a range of technologies and channels. Channel and solution marketing are critical elements of the new marketing landscape.

Guiding Star Communications and Consulting is a marketing communications agency with a “chorus of champions” who work with us to get best results in technical expertise realms such as graphic design, audio, video, and digital solution development.

Here are “areas of expertise” in marketing communications in which we can be of help:

Brand Strategy

Our team has that rigorous “marketing planning” training and experience to help you craft validated and ambitious marketing plans. But as channels have changed and buying behaviours have changed, we’ve kept up – and so now, we add to the conventional approaches of marketing planning considerations about “the zero moment of truth”, social marketing, customer journey/experience mapping, and channel strategizing so that we can create a big picture. What’s perhaps most remarkable – we’ve developed toolsets that allow an expression of marketing plans in two pages. Shouldn’t you throw away the blah-blah-blah that sits in the filing cabinet and gain the power that comes from acting on a succinct marketing plan?

Brand Identity

Brand identity can mean logos and wordmarks and slogans, or it can mean something much broader, addressing your culture, your values, and the buying factors (or brand keys) that are in play at moments of purchase decisions. Brand identities rely on ideas-oriented strategists, careful researchers and brilliant graphic designers – and through our team and extended “chorus”, we’ve got you covered.

Brand Marketing

Here is the heart of marketing communications – the tactical execution of the marketing plan, the consistent living of the brand identity and values. Our team has extensive experience with print, audio, video, public relations, web/digital and “memento” marketing tactics; you identify the challenge, we can do it or source it. (Yes, sometimes claims like that seem overblown; but ask us to tell you about sourcing medication trays and coolers from machine shops and medical device suppliers, and you’ll become a believer.)

Brand Distinctiveness

A lot of brands and businesses struggle with their ability to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Many are as “emperors without clothes” – they just don’t realize that saying things like “we have better customer service” or “our quality is better than all others” really aren’t differentiating, that they require solid proof points. In today’s business climate, you’ve got to have great customer service and high quality solutions as a price of entry, not as a point of differentiation. Our team will help you find or create your niche. We’ll help you identify real points of difference vs your competitors. Or we will help you market discontinuous innovations that place you in blue oceans without competition. That’s where you’ll find yourself cruising to victory.

Brand Ease

Successful brands are effortless – they are easy to do business with, but non-obtrusive. We are intrigued with this realization – that you don’t necessarily have to create “wow”, you just need to create “easy”. Our efforts in marketing communications strive to create tactics that do just that – that make it easy for company representatives to use, and easy for clients to do business with you.

Brand Equity

Brand equity is a funny expression that has been kicked around a lot without good clear definition. Those with less sophisticated viewpoints seem to think that brand equity is tied up in all of the marketing communications pieces, messages, and campaigns that are undertaken to woo purchasers or to change behaviour. We believe that brand equity is a bond, created over time through a variety of experiences with a brand, that ensures future purchase. So, what part of your communications toolbox is doing that for you? We can help you find out and build a better way forward.

 We do work for clients in all kinds of categories and verticals, including healthcare, high technology, retail, government, automotive and not-for-profit, to name a few. Marketing communications efforts by our team boil down to something really simple. Insight. Gained. Shared.