What makes our brand activation work, work?

I’d love to find that enigmatic magic bullet for brand activation work. You know the one. The ‘thing’ that can change fortunes has all the answers, the holy grail of solutions. It would be especially handy right now, as the world around us spins faster and seems to make increasingly less sense.

Despite hunting high and low, I think we all know there is no bullet. So, in a climate of challenge and uncertainty, without the easy or familiar answers, how do we achieve and maintain the success and consistent results from our brand activation work?

Luckily, we have a tried and tested brand activation toolkit that we delve into when we’re presented with a campaign brief. This toolkit helps us address pressing business challenges or needs. Be it to persuade people to take the train rather than the car, to stay safe or to be more sustainable.

And the best thing about this toolkit – it’s full of great things that AI can’t yet replace, like judgement, vision and craft.

So, what’s in the brand activation toolkit, you ask?

Ease is top of the pile.

Cognitive load is a very real and increasing issue for most audiences. People can only process so much, getting attention is hard, creating action even harder. So, we need to make our ask or offer easy for them to understand, and easy to engage with. Our consistently successful work with Gas Safe Register is a great example of this in action, informed by behavioural science along with all our other campaign work. Easy to mentally process, easy to remember, easy to act.

Distinctiveness goes hand in hand with this.

Easy often equates to simplicity, but that certainly doesn’t have to mean bland. Campaigns need appeal, to stand out and persuade. Take our successful Southeastern Summer leisure campaign as an example. Beautifully shot, simple promise, easy action – the holy trinity.

Or our work for Govia Thameslink nudging passengers towards certain behaviours, helping to make travel by train safer, more comfortable, and enjoyable.

Sustainability has been at the heart of our work too.

Ensuring what we do and who we do it for is pro people and planet, and helping our clients tell their story in this space too. From our work back in the 90’s, unifying the NHS under a single simple brand entity.

To more recent work with organisations like the Field Studies Council, Arcadis, and Trees for Cities.

It has all enabled us to successfully champion social and environmental sustainability on a national and international scale. We believe our industry must play its part in creating a cleaner, fairer future, and we hold ourselves to high standards-working closely with suppliers and clients to drive meaningful change.

Last but by no means least, insight.

Developing a data-led psychological understanding of our audiences powers our work. Using our own proprietary data plus other sources, combined with critical thinking and behavioural science, we can create unique, evidence-based insights that drive smarter decisions and improved outcomes for our brand activation clients.

But don’t take our word for it, the results of our work speak for themselves.