Rediscover Your Brand's Stored Energy to Unleash Far More.

To those whose 2024 agency predictions bingo card included squares for constant disruption and shifting dynamics with and within client and agency organizations, so far so good. It’s been a wild first half. Client retention, budget pressures, agency restructures and M&A, another cookie delay, AI-mania, ongoing need to balance short- and long-term ROI – there’s been no shortage of challenges and opportunities.

Not that any of this is brand new. To take just one bingo square, according to a study conducted by the Association of National Advertisers, over the past three years 65% of respondents have transitioned some responsibilities once handled by external agencies to in-house teams. Most CMOs acknowledge that external agency partners still play an important role. But it’s never been more important for agencies to develop strategies and processes that deliver exceptional creativity and results that propel brand success. If we don’t, clients will surely continue to explore other solutions. When Fitzco took a fresh look a few years ago at how we unlock a straight-talk approach to thinking about creativity and our clients’ brands – what’s in the way of success and what we believe to be the path forward – we couldn’t shake thinking about it through the lens of a brand’s energy. 

Consider the people who genuinely like and care about you. Not the 17 salesy strangers who sent you follow requests on LinkedIn last week. I mean people who genuinely know you – those who are drawn to your energy, relate to it, are forgiving of your foibles and never pass up the chance to be in your orbit.

Like yours and mine, every brand’s energy ebbs and flows. But it is, at its core, foundational – formed over many years, informed by endless high, low and run-of-the-mill experiences. And like a person’s energy, a brand’s foundational energy can, over time, become hidden, pushed asunder, dulled by circumstances. 

Shakespeare (my energy likes 425-year-old literature references) had it right when he wrote, “to thine own self be true.” Of course, being true to thine own self requires knowing what’s up with thine own self to begin with. And with 37-month average lifespans, a CMO could be forgiven for skipping the history lesson in favor of getting on with whatever’s next. Forgiven, but often mistaken.

That’s why our first step to unleashing energy in brands is to start where many don’t or won’t: their endemic, genetically-infused goodness – what we call Stored Energy. It’s the stuff that’s right, whether we give ourselves credit for it or not. Anyone who’s done any form of therapy knows how hard this can be. Or conversely, how easy it can be to skip over what’s right and focus only on what’s wrong. Brands do it. Agencies do it too, often approaching pitches as opportunities to boil the ocean. 

When a new client partner calls, we presume their hope is to unleash what’s intrinsically authentic about their brand in a way that will connect and motivate. Their stored energy may be dusty, in need of reexamination and rearticulated for a modern world, new audiences, different megaphones. There could be all sorts of blocks in the way. But that energy is in there, it’s meaningful, and it’s waiting to be unleashed, and it should influence the long-term no matter how our brand grows and pivot over time – what we call in our process “New Energy.”

Here is a starter roadmap with four ways a brand can start getting to the core of its Stored Energy: 

What was the brand’s foundational reason for existing? Dig into the archives. Why did the company’s founder think the world needed this brand in the first place? What gap in consumers’ or customers’ lives was the company meant to fill? What were the brand’s founding values and beliefs. How were they articulated? The world welcomed this brand with open arms; we should understand why it worked in the first place. We find this is never a wasted exercise, and inevitably inspires all of us to contemplate the value of resurfacing the spirit and ambition that birthed the brand from the start.

What’s been behind the brand’s best moments? This could be a unique promotion that used to kill but no longer does. It could be an ad, a campaign, a mascot, a jingle or a personality that built equity in the brand, regardless of whether it’s still active today or not. It could be a product line that spiked and faded. We don’t go into this exercise assuming we’ll bring any of these examples back from the dead in a literal sense. Though sometimes, there’s something special in those ideas that deserve a second look.

Where are we winning now? To understand where we need to go, we can’t lose sight of what’s working. Our foundational strengths, even if we agree they aren’t enough and that there are blocks in the way of maximizing them, matter just as much as anything we choose to add to the brand’s story. These strengths could encompass anything from unique product features to a brand's unwavering commitment to social responsibility.

When has our marketing efforts been strongest? Einstein called compound interest the 8th wonder of the world. We’d posit that marketing integration is the 9th. Unlocking a brand's potential lies not in short-term returns on short-term efforts but in a unified approach that leverages integrated expertise. We find that most brand leaders, upon looking back at the high points over time, approached their marketing in the most holistic way possible. In any case, understanding what the brand did when it “did it best” is well worth reexamination. 

Back to Shakespeare: what’s past is prologue. No matter what methodology an agency employs, for any marketer or agency seeking to elevate their strategies, it’s well worth identifying a brand's Stored Energy to uncover its hidden potential. It’s key to unlocking remarkable results, and a fun and engaging way to start from a positive, optimistic footing.