brand matrix

You’ve got a new brand campaign. Perhaps it’s even a brand new brand. Great. In order for your organization to “live the brand,” they need tools to help them understand their role within this mighty new metaphor. One of our favorite ways to do this is with a brand matrix. Across the top are a few (please, no more than five) characteristics of your new brand. Down the side are a list of your products, services, features, departments, etc. You want to have at least one way of focusing each of your brand attributes on every one of those items.

Let’s do a short example. Suppose you have just decided on a brand position of “friendly” for your lawn care company, Greener Pastures. You’ve got friendly ads, friendly collateral, friendly billing formats, friendly postcards and friendly bumper-stickers out the wazoo. Now you need your people to internalize the brand, or they won’t be effective ambassadors of it to your customers, the marketplace and the world.

You’ve identified the following brand attributes as important to your friendly campaign:

• Easy to do business with
• Pleasant to be around
• Prompt

Those are all fine examples of friendly behavior. We don’t like our friends to be complicated, unpleasant and late, so those are good, relevant attributes. Let’s match them up with the following products, services and activities:

• FertileFreedom - your premium, “we do it all” service
• WeatherWatcherz - your branded weather emails that alert customers as to lawn and garden opportunities based on local weather information
• SpringSave - customers get 10% off when they pay their entire summer bill before April 1
• Gardener On Call (GOC) - free, live help line provided to premium customers

In your company, there might be dozens of items on the list. But Greener Pastures is a fictional company, and so we’ve decided they’ll be happy with four. Here goes the brand matrix:

	Easy	Pleasant	Prompt
FertileFreedom	You never worry about your lawn. What could be easier?	The lawn that’s good enough to lay down on. Go ahead - give it a try!	If it rains within 24 hours of a major fertilizing, we’ll be back to redo it.
WeatherWatcherz	Sign up once and you’ll never worry about missing the essentials of seasonal gardeing.	All emails are written in easy-to-understand language, with diagrams where necessary.	Same day advice based on your local weather.
SpringSave	One check or credit card payment, and you’re done for the summer!	If you like, we’ll take the 10% you save and use it to plant trees in our sponsored neighborhood playgrounds.	Billing problems will all be resolved with one phone call.
G.O.C.	No question to basic, no question to hard. Call our GOC hotline and we’ll get you the info... pronto!	The GOC will also offer tips and hints in areas related to your question.	If you’re on-hold with GOC for more than 1 minute, we’ll give you a free T-shirt

You’ll notice that not all the points are ones you’d necessarily promote externally. They may be guidelines for internal alignment with the brand. You may also find that there are several good points to be made about each intersection of brand attributes and company issues -- that’s great! The more your people can harmonize the brand with what they do, the more effective the brand will become.

You’ll also find that the exercise of putting together a brand matrix will give you ideas for ads, merchandising, internal campaigns and spiffs, talking points and collateral. You may also identify some products or procedures that are, in the final analysis, incompatible with your brand. If that’s the case, you need to consider the wisdom of their continued existence. You may be able to engineer the process to fit in with the brand. If not, it’s probably something you don’t want to be doing in the long run.

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