Vox pop: How to defend brand image in a world of values

Ryan Kutscher

By Chris Sutcliffe, Published on November 11, 2019

Ryan Kutscher was featured recently in The Drum sharing insights on brand image. Here is the section of the article that Ryan is featured in if you missed it:

“This is a big topic of conversation with our brand partners. Probably the biggest example that comes to mind in recent years has been Pride. Nearly every brand has a pride message ready to go now. My take is that on the flip side is that you can risk looking like an opportunist or bandwagon jumper. Success here is about brands and agencies partnering on a deeper level that goes beyond advertising and into strategic narrative.

For us, that's the process of identifying and mapping our business partners' core values and those of their customers to find the overlap. It's a combination of cultural research, consumer intel, social listening and tracking, brand sentiment analysis, and so on to develop that deep sense of the brand identity.

When you do that, the cultural moments sort themselves out, because we've been proactive about knowing what conversations we might ever want to be a part of. You're not wondering if an issue is something we should have a perspective on. It's baked in, in a sense. Executionally, it's also about having all of our team on the same page to take advantage of these moments quickly with speedy production. Which is why we're always on slack, or texting our clients. "Hey, did you see this? Hey, this just happened, what if we did this?"

You probably get a few hours, not a few days. So it's a combination of being proactive about our brand and reactive when the opportunity knocks. Also, you don't have to try so hard on every opportunity. With more and more brands jumping in, there's a sense that you have to be involved. You want to make sure you don't pull a muscle trying to win the internet on a given day.”