The beginning of the process is the Communication Audit. This is the tool we use to interrogate your brand until it confesses to its strengths. Each Communication Audit is customized for the client. But they generally include interviews with key people in your company. Sometimes we do customer interviews. And sometimes we do focus group or web-based research with employees, vendors, and/or customers.

We review your strategic documents. We look at all of the marketing materials for your company and your competitors. We use all of this and a Y-shaped stick to discover your differential advantage (just kidding about the stick).

As we define it, your differential advantage is the benefit bundle:

• that is relevant to a significant portion of the market
• that you can deliver routinely and profitably within your normal operation, and
• that your collective competitors cannot deliver as routinely or as profitably within their normal operations.

In other words, if you can get the market thinking in your terms, you force your competitors to imitate your approach. Differential advantage is where branding starts to pay.