Small businesses and start-ups can get big benefits from brand growth coaching. However, such business owners struggle to make time for a full brandgym project, being so busy running their companies. In addition, many lack a marketing team and creative agency to draw on for ideas. Our new suite of brandgym.ai tools is helping address these issues, producing potent “idea fuel” at the speed small business owners need, as covered in our recent research paper here.
A recent example is a brandgym project with Dr Peter Lovatt, aka Doctor Dance, a world leading expert in the transformative power of dance. He wanted to sharpen and refresh the Doctor Dance brand to help grow the keynote speaking business he runs with his wife Lindsey. In this post, we look at the learning from this lovely project that blended AI and human collaboration. This allowed us to do a total brand re-launch in a couple of months, from insight to brand strategy to visual identity and then designing a whole new website
1. Harnessing AI helps early in a project
The Doctor Dance project was a great example of how AI can help accelerate the early insight and idea generation stages of a brand strategy project, as highlighted in our brandgym research.
For example, for the core customer profile, Peter sent me some rough, longhand “pen portraits” of several clients. brandgym.ai then used these plus a web search to create the CORE TARGET tool to capture their attitudes, needs and passion points. We also fed in the Core Target profile plus other inputs, such as the copy from Peter’s promotional material, into brandgym.ai to develop BRAND POSITIONING ideas.
Another challenge for small businesses is attempting to target multiple customer groups. This can lead to mixed messaging and dilution of the brand positioning. In the case of Doctor Dance, customer groups included the core target of HR and Events Teams commissioning conference speakers. But there were also secondary targets, such as individual people interested in training programs. Our brandgym.ai SWEETSPOT tool helped analyse different customer profiles provided by Peter and highlight the shared needs common to these different targets. This in turn allowed us to create a single-minded brand positioning.
2. Strategy still needs expert advice and collaboration
The project also showed how more strategic questions can simply not be solved by AI alone. Let’s look at a couple of examples.
Product portfolio focus
Small businesses often offer a wide range of products or services, hoping this will maximise the chances of a customer buying something. However, this risks diluting your brand positioning and fragmenting your messaging. Deciding where to focus is a big call and one where expert advice and lively debate still play a key role.
In the case of Doctor Dance, Peter & Lindsey were spreading effort across a range of different offers, each of which they were passionate about. In addition to keynote speaking these included a training program (with its own brand, Movement in Practice), selling dances videos, promoting Peter’s book and running monthly live dance sessions near their home. These were focused mainly in individual people not keynote buyers in big companies.
As their brand coach, I was able to be objective and help Peter & Lindsey “follow the money”. This showed clearly that keynote speaking was by far the biggest source of income and future growth. We agreed to focus on this as the core business. Other offers including the training and book would be used to help drive the core, rather than being managed as separate activities (see below). This created real clarity, allowing Doctor Dance’s scarce and valuable resources, both time and money, to be concentrated on the core.
Brand positioning
Selecting the big band idea at the heart of the brand positioning is another area where human input is essential. This brand idea defines the whole direction you will take, inspiring and guiding every bit of the mix. For theDoctor Dance, we did evaluate positioning ideas using an AI “persona” built on the Core Target buyer. However, Peter and Lindsey’s emotional reaction and gut feel played a key role.
The new positioning idea selected was Moving Bodies to Move Minds. This captured the idea that a Doctor Dance Keynote Experience gets people moving in ways they never expected. This in turn changes the way they think, feel and act. For example, Peter recently worked with a client working to drive an internal change program. Using dance helped free up peoples’ bodies and also liberate creative thinking to imagine new ways of working together.
This new brand idea was also much more focused on the benefit of Doctor Dance, compared to the previous positioning, From Science to Stage, which was more about the “reason to believe” of expertise.
3. Creative magic helps bring the brand to life
There are plenty of AI tools that can help generate ideas for logos and websites. However, this project confirmed for me that a small, agile creative team brings a depth of brand understanding and creative nuance that is, for now, hard for AI to match.
The visual identity brief was to evolve the identity Peter had been using for several years. This featured a likeness of Peter’s distinctive look, including his glasses and hair (below left). However, we wanted to better communicate expertise and authority, something the graffiti style of typeface struggled to deliver. The light blue colour also has a bit of an NHS feel about it, lacking warmth.
The updated purple vignette colour and new typeface created by agency Red Fox captured beautifully the blend of scientifc expertise (“Doctor”) and joyful energy (“Dance”). In addition, a new version of the logo with the wordmark only helped simplify visual communication when Peter was already featured.
For the website we were after revolution, not evolution! The old website (below left) didn’t do justice to the amazing and transformative Keynote Experiences Peter delivers. He has, for example, shared the stage with iconic figures such as Barack Obama, Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey (“Obama was good”, said one conference attendee. “But Doctor Dance was great!”). Here, Notch Design did a great job of really capturing and bringing to life the positioning and also the Doctor Dance brand personality: “an energising, entertaining expert” (below right). The brand positioning helped craft and sharpen the key messages and copy. The visual identity guided the look and feel.
The product portfolio focus strategy drove a much simpler navigation menu (see below), with a clear focus on the Keynote Speaking experience and a new page specifically for event planners
In conclusion, the Doctor Dance project shows how a combination of AI and human collaboration can help speed up brand strategy projects. It also helps make this sort of project more accessible to small businesses and start-ups, allowing them to get the big benefits that brand strategy can bring.
For more information on how a Doctor Dance Keynote Experience can help you Move Bodies to Move Minds, head to the new website here.
