We’ve been banging on for years about the need to approach B2B marketing with the same verve and creative energy displayed by the best practitioners of B2C. We believe that just because someone is at work, doesn’t mean they stop being human. Or stop having the same emotional responses to thoughtful, well-targeted, intelligent brand communication as they do at home.
It’s time to unveil our refreshed positioning as an agency. Focus7 is now officially The Brand-led Business Growth Agency. It’s something that’s always been part of our DNA, but a recent internal brand workshop activity has enabled us to really focus on what makes us special and different.
It’s Mental Health Awareness Week right now (May 13-19) and we at Focus7 have been putting our heads together to think up ways of marking it appropriately. The conversations have been fascinating, and we’ve shared lots of insights that have both surprised us; and inspired us to support each other more fully in the weeks and months ahead.
It’s a fundamental truth that businesses that don’t move forwards go backwards rather than stand still. Balance sheet reality insists that you simply have to keep growing – your customer base, product and service portfolios, sales lines, margins, profits, and, most precious of all, your brand reputation.
We’re big fans of International Women’s Day here at Focus7, highlighting as it does the continual struggle to ensure that all people of the world benefit from a more equitable gender balance. Organisers will use the big day, March 9, as the springboard for a year of activity around the theme #BalanceforBetter.
Love is in the air, everywhere we look around. Harangued hubbies are discovering that all the restaurants are already fully booked, supermarkets are selling limp red roses flown in on lumbering freight liners from Kenya’s Great Rift Valley (yes, really) and marketers are going all gooey with their copycat social media posts.
We’ve been celebrating National Storytelling Week here at Focus7, gathering around the agency hearth to swap tales of the good old days when marketing was easy; when all a brand needed was a single-minded proposition and a reasonable above-the-line spend.
It’s a perennial problem for creative and strategic agencies everywhere. We’re always busy honing essence, personality, differentiation and the like for our clients. The challenge can be to recognise when it’s time to look inwards to discover whether our own brand needs an injection of fresh thinking.
The second the clock strikes midnight, and the tipsy voices singing Auld Lang Syne have quieted, the cries of ‘New Year, new me!’ and declarations of resolutions begin. It’s very tempting as a brand to take it as an opportunity to tear out the old and bring in the new, but (even though we’re a brand agency so you’d be forgiven for thinking we’d recommend it) it’s not time to throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet.