Intelligent Business Demands
INTELLIGENT BRANDS
Brand Strategy and Design for Intelligent Brands
Whether launching or relaunching products, business units, or whole business categories, there’s a protocol for doing it intelligently. Intelligent brands are built to work hard and we work hard to build intelligent brands. That means brands that fill gaps, answer tough questions, inspire innovation, and intrigue skeptics with verbal and visual systems that clarify as they amplify.
IP is full-stack counsel for brand examination, construction, activation, and endurance. Our work is defined by business strategy and designed to engage talent and customers with timely, relevant experiences that fit.
Our Services
How We Collaborate to Transform
Brand building takes experience and grace — after all, your employees and customers are busy doing their own work, why should they be distracted by yours? Intelligent brands are designed to add value to each audience, not just inform them.
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Data-centric insight gathering, purpose built to optimize further brand investments. Crack competition, read customers, and forecast categories with deep dive analysis and reporting.
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Position your organization to pursue a big Vision while tightly tracking against a tangible Mission. Use Values to translate brand beliefs into human behaviors, and Personality and Messaging to complete the story. Round out the system with Brand Architecture and Naming to imprint the brand on assets and in environments.
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Humans are visual creatures. Develop graphics, imagery, typography, and iconography to create a strategic identity and visual system that underscores your brand’s personality and brings it to life for customers across channels.
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Leverage the brand system to elevate the whole organization. Punch-up pitch presentations, turn on tradeshow experiences, supercharge executive dialogues, and empower staff to actuate the brand through Brand Guidelines, Brand Alignment & Training, and Brand Templates.
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Give the brand space to move with Motion Graphics, Video, and Visual Experiences that add color while they captivate. From short-form assets that pop to long-form clips tuned to tell big stories, animate and activate your brand with cinematic video. Keep your audiences engaged for the long haul with content, visual experiences, and features that meaningfully connect to their daily lives.
Our Work
Protocols, Innovated
At IP, brand strategy is about everything from a brand’s personality, to visual expression, to fundamental transformation. We approach brand and business challenges with rigor, focus, and curiosity. We revise, rethink, and reconceptualize. We love to ask, “What if we looked at this in a completely different way?” We help clients to define and own a distinct and powerful brand, aligning with business goals, inspiring audiences, and shaping industries.
Learn more about how we’ve delivered innovative and impactful solutions to some of today’s most complex brand challenges.
See Our WorkOur Clients
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- Traditionally a payroll company with 60% of the market, aggressive customers and market demand for additional services put the ADP brand in a critical position: be more to our audiences or risk category leadership.
- By pulling together, repositioning, and storytelling all the added-value services available across ADP’s five business units, we helped launch and brand an entirely new sixth business unit, ADP SmartCompliance. From brand architecture to sales enablement, it became the darling of ADP’s innovation portfolio, and an ultimately came to account for $1B in revenue.
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- Mind-bending data was published for Google’s largest customers worldwide and scheduled to be presented at their TED-like event: Think with Google. Despite the power of the data, disinterested responses compromised the value of the insights and risked crashing the event.
- In 30 days, we dug into the data, rethought implications, wrote a narrative, and then represented the dataset as the keynote speaker at 12 Google Think events around the world – becoming the highest rated content in the history of Google conferences.
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- The undisputed world leader in executive recruiting and RPO needed to carefully integrate key acquisitions to diversify its services and take the leadership position in Talent Consulting.
- By de-branding, repackaging, and integrating acquisitions ranging from professional skill assessments to original research, we helped Korn Ferry unify and simplify its global solutions from six independent brands to one Korn Ferry – and continue to keynote their global sales conferences more than a decade later.
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- Acquisitions and innovations cluttered the PayPal customer and developer experience, creating confusion across products that ranged from browser plugins to bank accounts.
- Over 10 years of consulting, we reorganized offerings companywide – from credit products, to Magento and Venmo, integrated unnecessarily sub-branded features, and created a brand architecture that defines the PayPal experience online, instore, and in-app.
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- Brilliant marketers that stay for decades know their business inside and out – but new data and consumer behavior warranted an outside perspective.
- By meeting with each business unit, assessing key data from strategic partners, and evaluating novel-yet-distracting entertainment solutions, we keynoted LEGO’s conference for global marketing leadership twice, and facilitated offsites for LEGOLAND’s executive team to keep both brands proactive and relevant.
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- Health science so innovative even the business unit down the hall needs help understanding what you do and how you do it.
- We helped enable the six business units and the enterprise solutions that support them understand their unique part in the Amgen business by helping them each explain their role in under 5 minutes via mini-videos and PowerPoints designed to kickoff any cross-business unit meetings, guarantying collaboration would continue without confusion.
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- K-12 education in the United States had been pursued by the world’s largest enterprise software companies for decades – after all, 330,000 schools is a large potential market for business solutions. Not one of them broke through, and private equity decided it was their turn to make the market real
- Our work integrated more than 20 acquisitions via brand architecture, repositioned the Masterbrand for market specificity, constructed an inclusive visual system, built sales and talent training modules, and launched a thought leadership platform that set the category standard – helping Frontline Education hit unicorn status in under three years.
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- Fierce competition and a laser focus on major rides preoccupied property leadership and distracted communications teams across amusements, hospitality, retail, and marketing, warranting a brand strategy assessment and plan.
- Our research revealed the real competition – not Disneyland like everyone thought, but local shopping centers and city sites, helping us reposition the property as a place to spend quality time with family and friends emersed in experiences that inspire and entertain, instead of as a resource for roller-coaster recreation.
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- A leader in online food ordering and delivery – up against an ever-growing landscape of other platforms competing not only for customer business but for that of restaurants (as partners) and delivery drivers or “Dashers” (a necessary component of their gig economy-based business model).
- Through extensive research, including interviews with Dashers all over the country and employees throughout the company, IP helped shape a differentiated and sustainable Dasher brand; this counsel supported DoorDash’s strategic investment in communications and activations to attract and retain drivers who not only fulfilled their roles (delivering food) but served as ambassadors for the DoorDash brand overall.
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- An undisputed champion in academics, sports, and faith – mired in inconsistency, legacy, and fiefdoms… the Notre Dame brand didn’t look the same anywhere… not on the field, in the classroom, or in church.
- Through a calculated, comprehensive, campuswide effort, we redesigned the Notre Dame identity, trained leaders from every team, and helped the university relaunch its brand for its next 170 years.
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- One of the oldest, largest, and most prestigious universities in Southern California employed tens of thousands of educators and staff but wasn’t helping them get access to employee services and innovation solutions that were built just for them.
- We helped the office of employee services rearchitect its solutions and outreach methods to bridge the gap between employees and the services they deserved.
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- Once seen as a resource for socialites to refine their repertoire of ranting, Toastmasters became the world leader in professional development through intentional verbal communication. With 300,000 global members and clubs on every continent, the brand became highly fragmented and localized and no longer looked like the category pioneer and leader.
- We repositioned the brand to leadership training instead of public speaking, built an all-new brand platform, brand architecture framework, and visual system, and then trained global membership to help the 80-year-old icon achieve record global growth.
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- You’ve got an NXP chip in your phone and likely in your car, but you just wouldn’t know it. Leadership realized that being secret but everywhere wasn’t good for business.
- By unifying the global sales team around a common story, branding NXP’s leadership in innovation, and strategically refining marketing voice and investments, we’re helping NXP earn the recognition it deserves and continue leading the Internet of Things revolution.
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- Having a vast portfolio of consumer brands makes marketing and sales relationships with key distributors and retailers challenging.
- We produced a three-day summit for North American marketing leadership, realigning the teams on strategic priorities, key brand opportunities, and team collaboration occasions where less could be more, and brand efforts could focus on long-term equities instead of ceaseless monthly sales campaigns that compromised prices and shelf space.
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- Traditionally a B2D (business to doctor) organization, the rise of the internet-informed patient and their expectations of patient-first marketing from across care categories warranted a new approach to serving patients with diabetes in the United States.
- By focusing entirely on the customer journey, we helped rescript and prioritize the sales team’s go-to-market approach, changing the perception of Medtronic from a distant medical device company to MY partner in diabetic health.
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- The original travel currency resource has created a network of billion-dollar travel agencies that define global travel for businesspeople and the elite worldwide. With so many other organizations targeting those key customer groups, AMEX needed to realign with its top 20 travel partners, fast.
- We produced an exclusive summit in the penthouse conference room for the largest travel agencies in the world to extract their needs, reconnect them with AMEX’s solutions, and redefine how AMEX would serve them going forward.
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- The original warehouse retailer knew that online shopping was important but wrongly assumed that simply selling what’s in stock on a website was the answer.
- By carefully evaluating revenue origins, consumer feedback, competitive actions, shipping costs and growth goals, we repositioned the brand online from just another digital retailer to a massive membership benefit – completely changing how Sam’s Club goes to market online.
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- The number one source for B2B accounting solutions in the world, troubled by an expansive portfolio, cloud upgrades, acquisitions, and huge board goals.
- A global brand architecture and naming strategy, boosted by a new brand platform, website strategy, and visual system upgrade, helped redefine the board’s objectives, more accurately target key customer segments, and refine the portfolio for easy comprehension and advocacy.
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- A massive global suite of multi-unit residences that serve the working professional, the ongoing acquisition of new properties left some sites underserved and unknown, compromising the perceived quality and desirability of the premier property portfolio.
- Through brand architecture, Masterbrand repositioning, and leadership unification workshops, Oakwood’s portfolio has been refined and synchronized, directing equities at a durable brand that stands for class-leading residential solutions for professionals.
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- When one of the largest and oldest religions in the world decides that its 1.3 million members in Orange County California are instrumental to its global future, you call in the brand strategists.
- We worked with 64 parishes, hundreds of priests, nuns, and lay leaders to rebrand the Catholic Church and create a vision for the next 50 years. From a massive new messaging and visual system to staff training and website, we completely rebuilt the aging brand into what the Los Angeles Times called “The Future of the Catholic Church in the United States.”