Develop strategic messaging to best communicate for your organization.

By investing in this research and strategy framework, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of your brand, buyers, and competitors. This foundation will better position you to appeal to your audience’s needs and differentiate your organization from others.

First, you’ll answer three simple questions about your organization:

1. What are one to three of your top business issues?
2. Who are one to three of your ideal customers?
3. Who are your top three direct or aspirational competitors?

Equipped with this initial information about your organization, we’ll begin our research.

Brand Insight

Inquire: What is your brand? How do stakeholders view it? What is your market position?

Identify your organization’s tone, positioning, current and past marketing, mission, vision, and perception relative to your competition.

Investigate advertising, websites, news releases, annual reports, analyst reports, investor relations, company research, industry news sites, publications, industry and financial analysts, industry associations, industry trade media, and industry research from Bain & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Dun & Bradstreet, Forrester, Gartner, Hoover’s, McKinsey, MRI-Simmons, and others.

Buyer Insight

Inquire: Who is your target audience? How do consumers of your products and services think and feel about your organization? What is the consumer’s relationship with your brand? What does the consumer need? What are their top deciding factors when purchasing? 

Identify habits and practices, usage, attitudes and emotions, segmentation, and lifestyle fit.

Investigate company research, secondary research, associations, trade groups, government reports, industry and financial analysts, in-person observations, and research from Pew Research Center, Google, MRI-Simmons, Mintel, and others.

Competition Insight

Inquire: Who are they? What do they sell? What is their market position? What benefits do they leverage? How healthy is their company?

Identify their targets, positioning, go-to-market tactics, features, benefits, quality, pricing, sales, market share trends, profitability, ownership, and partners.

Investigate year-to-year comparisons, reports, advertisements, research, industry news sites and blogs, Google, public library databases, online consumer reviews, consumer reports, interviews with consumers and retailers, and original research (going to stores and talking to sellers and buyers).

Overall Analysis

Once we conduct our initial research on your brand, consumers, and competition, we independently analyze each category to draw a conclusion based on the insight we attained from each phase. 

Overall Insight

We leverage the three conclusions to provide you with an overall insight to help your organization improve its communication. Strategic insights identify how your brand can position itself between what your consumers want and where your competitors are not. 

The insight must involve judgment and emotion. We use judgment in addition to objective statements to keep the insight specific to your company. The more emotion these words use, the more your messaging will impact consumers.

Here are some examples of strategic insight statements that won us high praise, including standing ovations, from organizations like yours:

• [Our client’s name] is the advocate and partner the consumer wants, but it must leverage its technology and portfolio to build recognition in the space.
• [Our client’s name] has a favorable following, but if it wants to compete with well-known national brands, it must position itself as a quick and healthy protein option for millennials and their families.
• If [Our client’s name] wants to scale its sales, it must build better relationships online and in person.

Watch this video to learn more about Axia’s Strategic Insights process.

What are our clients saying?

• "This process synthesized the direction of where we're going, gave us validation, and demonstrated demand for it in the marketplace." – Joelle Marquis, Legacy in Action
• "This type of strategic insight is exactly what we've been looking for from a marketing partner." – Steven Kaufman, Urban Mining