Yield Branding has been operating continuously for 28 years.
161 clients have honoured us with both long-term relationships and smaller assignments. From the most well-known brands like Scotiabank International, Sears and Porsche to the less well known like Periodontal Associates and Think Drink to clients whose brands don’t exist anymore like Alpha Trading, Hummingbird Centre and ING Insurance.
Almost every industry with a branding need has come under our advisory: financial services, professional services, retail, automotive, government, crown corps, associations, not-for-profits, healthcare, beverage alcohol, hospitality, packaged goods, education, media, resource extraction, transportation and power. We’ve run the gamut, or close to it.
We’ve seen communications channels evolve from print to fax, to email, to websites, to digital ads and now social media. When we started, print advertising and TV were king, now we might do two print ads a year.
We’ve seen the arrival of three new demographic cohorts: Gen X, Gen Y and now Millennials on top of Baby Boomers who were just coming into their own when we started.
We’ve seen three economic recessions in 1990, 2008 and technically 2015, though that didn’t seem too bad compared to the earlier two.
So what does 28 years in business really mean? Does a branding firm get better with age? What is the value of experience and insight?
We believe longevity matters for three reasons:
Proof of Concept. If clients don’t like your service or your product, over the long haul, they won’t stick around and they won’t refer you business, which can be a death knell. Second, if they don’t think your product has real value they won’t pay you what it costs to what it’s worth, you won’t be profitable and ultimately you’ll be forced out of business. At Yield over 75% our business comes from referrals so we believe we do a good job and our clients recognize that. Our service isn’t cheap and we’re proud of that.
Methodologies. Being around a while gives you time to test and refine your processes. See what works, what doesn’t, learn from it, adopt or move on. Our GENESIS™ strategic planning process has been refined more than a dozen times over the past fifteen years. We added a BrownPaper Workshop, which gives us much broader client alignment and input, we enhanced the environmental scan to include competitive value propositions, we added strategic imperatives to make sure clients knew they couldn’t change their brand without changing the process behind it, and now use half a dozen different insight-gathering methodologies because it all depends on how you ask the question and hear the reply.
Smarts. Most importantly, longevity gives you perspective. The ability to see patterns based on how people and brands have behaved over longer periods of time than one quarter. The ability to see how motivators like greed, fear, desire and status remain constants from one generation to the next even if their application doesn’t. The ability to recognize that channels may change, messages may change but the insights behind those messages don’t. This reservoir of knowledge and insight doesn’t become part of the DNA overnight, it comes from experience and years of refining the tools that deliver a truly brilliant brand strategy.
If you’d like to have a chat with folks who have 28+ years of de-ciphering brands, honing their craft and learning from history give us a call, we’d be happy to meet and see how our experience could help sort your brand challenge.
Brad & Ted
