Summer festivals epitomize fun, bringing communities together for unforgettable experiences filled with music, food, and celebration. For your brand, these festivals present a golden opportunity to connect with your target audience in a lively and engaging environment. Let’s explore how promotional products can take summer festivals to the next level while boosting your marketing efforts.

Event Planning and Promotion:

Effective event planning and promotion are crucial for ensuring a successful summer festival before the first note is played or the first vendor sets up shop. Branded merch plays a pivotal role in building anticipation and spreading the word.

Customized Invitations: Start the excitement early by sending out memorable invitations. Consider including a small teaser item like a branded magnet, bracelet, or keychain to pique interest and encourage attendance.

Social Media Contests: Engage potential attendees on social media with contests and giveaways featuring branded merch as prizes. Encourage participants to share their excitement by posting a picture of their prize and using a designated hashtag, further amplifying your reach and visibility.

Street Team Swag: Deploy a team of brand ambassadors to hit the streets and generate buzz about the upcoming festival. Outfit them with logoed apparel, hats, and tote bags filled with promotional giveaways to distribute to passersby.

During the Event:

Once the festival is underway, it’s time to immerse attendees in the experience and leave a lasting impression. Branded merchandise can enhance every aspect of the event, from stage branding to attendee engagement, for a memorable experience that will have people talking long after the festival.

Branded Backdrops: With eye-catching branded backdrops or banners, create social media-worthy vignettes throughout your festival. These visuals provide excellent photo opportunities for attendees and reinforce brand recognition.

Interactive Booths: Encourage interaction with vendors and sponsors by providing them with branded merch to give away. From custom sunglasses to reusable water bottles, offering useful and appealing items helps draw attendees to booths and fosters positive brand associations.

VIP Swag Bags: Treat VIP ticket holders to exclusive swag bags filled with high-quality products like Bluetooth speakers, beach towels, or insulated tumblers. This elevates their experience and provides valuable exposure for event sponsors.

Festival Follow-Up:

As the dust settles and attendees reminisce about their memorable experiences at your summer festival, don’t let the momentum fade. Keep the excitement alive and continue reinforcing your brand long after the event ends.

Thank-You Gifts: Show appreciation to sponsors, vendors, and volunteers by sending them personalized thank-you gifts adorned with your festival’s branding. Custom engraved awards, branded journals, or gourmet treats are all thoughtful gestures that encourage participation in future events.

Branded Merchandise Sales: Capitalize on post-event enthusiasm by offering branded merchandise for sale online or at pop-up shops. Attendees eager to relive the festival experience can purchase apparel, accessories, or other memorabilia featuring your event’s logo, generating additional revenue and brand exposure.

Year-Round Engagement: Keep the festival spirit alive year-round by incorporating branded merchandise into ongoing marketing efforts. Host contests or giveaways on social media featuring festival-themed prizes or offer exclusive discounts on merchandise to past attendees, maintaining a connection with your audience until the next summer festival rolls around.

Summer festivals are more than just events; they’re opportunities for businesses to connect with their audience meaningfully. By leveraging the power of promotional products throughout the entire festival process, businesses can create unforgettable experiences while gaining unparalleled brand exposure.

We’re here to help you unleash your brand’s full potential at summer festivals. If you’re looking for ideas to make your brand a summer festival fave, contact us today.

Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools in marketing. It can help you connect with your customers, build empathy, and strengthen your brand’s relationship with its audience.

In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of storytelling and how it can be used to improve your marketing efforts.

Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools in marketing

It’s so powerful that it can help you stand out from competitors and build customer trust. Storytelling is a way to communicate your brand’s values and personality through compelling narratives that connect people with your business on an emotional level.

You can use storytelling in many ways: ads, websites, social media posts–the list goes on!

Empathy leads to a deeper relationship with your customers

Empathy is a key element of any relationship, whether it’s with your partner or your customers. Empathy allows you to understand and relate to another person’s feelings and motives, which in turn makes them feel understood.

When customers feel like they are being listened to and understood by brands, they’re more likely to buy from those brands again–and tell their friends about them too.

Brands can be more relatable and human through storytelling

Storytelling is a popular marketing tactic because it’s a great way to show your human side. It allows you to connect with customers on a deeper level and make them feel like they’re part of the story, which can lead them to see themselves as loyal brand advocates.

Storytelling allows you to connect with your customers in ways that facts and statistics cannot. Stories are more memorable than statistics, especially when they involve real people who have experienced something similar in their lives. When we hear these stories from others, we tend to empathize with them because we see ourselves in those situations too!

Conclusion

Storytelling is the most powerful tool in marketing. It can help you build a connection with your customers and tell them your brand’s story. By telling a story, you can become more relatable and human for your audience–but it’s also important to remember that storytelling shouldn’t be used as an excuse for poor customer service or product quality!

If you’re a business owner or marketing manager, you know the importance of building a solid brand identity. A strong brand identity can set you apart from your competition and attract more customers than ever before. But how do you build a strong brand identity? In this blog post, we’ll explore some tips and tricks for building your own strong brand identity:

Your brand identity is more than just your logo.

Your brand identity is more than just your logo. It’s the combination of all the elements that communicate what your business does, how it does it, and who you are as a company. The logo is only one part of this equation, but it’s essential.

Here are five things to keep in mind when designing a new logo:

• Make sure it looks good on everything—from websites to business cards and other promotional materials (to see how your design will look on these items.
• Use colors that complement each other so they won’t clash when placed side by side or stacked together (for help choosing colors that work well together, check out Pantone Colors).
• Don’t use too many fonts; stick with two or three at most. Your message should be clear and easy to read, no matter what font you use!

The brand identity includes everything your brand communicates.

Your brand identity is everything you communicate about your company. It includes your logo, colors, fonts, and typefaces and how people perceive your company or product. Your brand identity is what people think of when they think of your brand, and it’s how customers perceive you as an organization and how they feel about interacting with you regularly.

When we work with clients to build strong brands, we always emphasize that it’s not just about creating something that looks good; it’s also about creating something that feels right for them as an organization. This means researching who their audience is and what they value before making any decisions—and sticking with those decisions once made!

Know what kind of audience you want to reach.

The first step to building a solid brand identity is knowing who you’re trying to reach.

Knowing your target audience’s needs, wants and desires is crucial. As one of the most critical aspects of marketing, it also goes hand-in-hand with knowing their thoughts about your brand and competition. Knowing this will help you create an effective marketing strategy that resonates with them.

Understand your target audience’s needs, wants, and desires.

When creating a solid brand identity, it’s essential to understand your target audience’s needs and wants. This will help you create an image that they’ll recognize as yours. It will also help you create a better product or service they wish to purchase from you because it builds on their expectations of what the experience of doing business with you should be like.

To understand your target audience’s needs, wants, and desires, first think about what motivates them—what drives them; what does their life look like? How might this change over time? Then consider whether there are gaps between how people perceive themselves now and how they want to be (e.g., older adults who want to feel younger). Next, consider why someone would choose one service provider over another (e.g., price). Finally, consider what inspires people in general when making purchases such as clothing or electronics (e.g., style).

Listen to what people are saying about you.

• Listen to what people are saying about you.
• Listen to what people are saying about your competitors.
• Listen to what people are saying about your industry.
• Listen to what people say about your customers, both positive and negative.

Research the competition and see what they’re doing right–and wrong.

It’s essential to research the competition. You want to know what they’re doing right and which areas they might lack. For instance, if you’re a dry cleaner and your competitors are all offering free pickup/delivery services for their customers, you can easily see that this is an area where you’ll have an advantage. In addition to looking at what your competitor does well and doesn’t do well, it’s also essential to understand what the audience wants from experience with your brand (or even just from a product or service). This way, when you have the opportunity during the design process to build out aspects of your brand identity (think logo design), it will be easy for us as designers to communicate those needs through visual elements like color patterns or typefaces.

Define who you are and what you add to the world.

Define who you are and what you add to the world.

Your brand’s purpose is your mission statement or why you exist. It should be clear and concise and define what makes your brand special compared to others in your industry. The more unique your brand is, the more likely people will remember it.

When defining who you are as a company, it’s important not to get too carried away with lofty ambitions or grandiose statements about what you want to accomplish for humanity at large—you’re not going to change the world overnight! Instead of generic aspirations like “making people happy” or “changing lives” (which don’t do much), focus on saying something specific about how your product/service will make customers’ lives better in some way—whether this involves saving money on groceries or providing an educational platform that helps young kids prepare for kindergarten (hey there!).

Stay true to your vision and values, even if it takes longer than expected.

Staying true to your vision and values is essential when building your brand identity. A big mistake many people make when they start a business is changing course because they think they need to compete with other brands in their industry or because they’re afraid of not being successful as quickly as other brands.

However, if you stick with what you know will work for your business, and what makes sense for the market, then you’ll be glad that you did. It will pay off for you and your customers in the long run! You’ll have a stronger brand identity and become more successful as an entrepreneur.

Building a strong brand identity takes time, but it’s worth it in the end

It’s not a quick process, but building a solid brand identity is worth the effort. As you learn about your target audience and what works for them, you’ll be able to develop your brand identity around those needs and wants.

What do you think of when you hear the name, Walt Disney? You probably think of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and all the other classic characters from Disney movies like Snow White or The Lion King. Those are all examples of how Disney has built its brand identity over time with various products (movies) and events (theme parks).

Conclusion

Building a strong brand identity takes time and effort, but it’s well worth the payoff. When you have a clear sense of who you are and how you want to be perceived by others, people are more likely to identify with your company—and buy from it! You also save yourself from wasting valuable resources on marketing campaigns that don’t speak to your target audience.

If you ask any successful CEO what the primary goal of any business is, they will say “to make sales and maximize revenue.” However, it is no longer enough in today’s competitive world to launch a product or offer a service and then sit back and expect the customers to come. Instead, companies have learned to think outside the box to stay ahead of the competition.

That is precisely where brand strategists come in. Being a good brand strategist shouldn’t be hard. It should be fun.

To excel in this career, a professional should stay updated with modern trends and learn new skills continuously. Brand strategists’ responsibilities can range, but they involve overseeing the business’s visual integrity, managing a team of employees, and helping market the brand. Good brand strategists instantly connect the dots and make sense of tricky situations.

At Exposyour, we have over ten years of experience creating brand strategies, so we decided to write this post to share with you essential skills for brand strategists in order of importance. What’s more, we will also give you some actionable tips for recognizing these skills when interviewing candidates for a brand strategist role.

Click on the links below for quick navigation:

Strategic thinking

Creative thinking

Communication skills

Quantitative reasoning

Design thinking

Skill #1: Strategic Thinking

You’ve probably heard a lot about strategic thinking. But in most cases, this term is used as something abstract. So let’s talk about how to measure strategic thinking, how to recognize a job candidate who mastered the skill, and how to learn to think strategically and train others.

So here is what we compiled based on our experience:

Strategic thinking is the person’s ability to draw a clear image of the business’ desired long-term future. By long-term, we mean one year and beyond. While drawing this image, the strategic thinker assesses possible risks, creates risk mitigation plans, discovers and maximizes the opportunities. The ability to recognize patterns between events and spot interrelationships between actions and circumstances is crucial for excelling at strategic thinking. That’s why it is one of the most essential skills for brand strategists.

So if we could break it down into more digestible parts, strategic thinking skill consists of the following sub-skills:

• Risk assessment and mitigation.
• Ability to recognize opportunities far in the future based on analysis of the current situation and past successes.
• Ability to analyze vast amounts of data, discover patterns in this data and make future predictions based on these patterns.

How can you test a potential candidate for strategic thinking skills?

As with anything in life, some people are naturally better at strategic thinking than others. That’s how great leaders are born. However, it doesn’t mean that others can’t learn this skill with some persistence and consistency. Give your candidate a simple exercise to test his/ her strategic thinking skills:

Test:

• Take a piece of paper and ask your candidate to write down an event that will occur soon (3-6 months from now) in your business or market. The event can be launching a new product, expanding the market, exploring new audiences, or a competitor coming to your niche soon.
• Around this circle, ask your candidate to write down ALL possible outcomes of this event, as many as possible. Then, using common sense and practicality, he can rule out the less likely results.
• Then ask your candidate to take a new piece of paper and write down the outcomes that remained. Under each outcome, the potential brand strategist should write down his course of action to describe how he will positively handle all probable outcomes based on his experience with similar events or his research. The goal is to minimize risks and maximize opportunities.

If you want to learn more about strategic thinking and develop creative interview questions for a brand strategist, we recommend watching Sun Tzu’s Art of War in a bite-sized format.

How to measure strategic thinking skills?

As we mentioned earlier, one essential quality of strategic thinkers is that they can draw a clear image of the business’s desired long-term future. So you can measure the level of this skill with the help of a forecast accuracy score.

What does it mean for a brand strategist?

Suppose your brand strategist works for a retail brand that focuses on senior citizens. He or she proposed a marketing strategy (based on the market research, of course) that requires significant funds to position your retail brand in a new market targeting millennials. In that case, you allocate $100K towards this strategy and hire three more marketers and five more salespeople to execute it. However, in a few months, your brand strategist realizes that the resources allocated are not enough, and he needs $50K more to continue executing this strategy successfully.

What does it mean?

Using forecast accuracy score, we calculate

the score as follows: 1-(((150000-100000)/100000)*100) = -49. So the brand strategist made an error of under-forecasting. Although it is practically impossible to make 100% accurate forecasts and forecast accuracy score goals vary from industry to industry, as a rule of thumb, a forecast accuracy score from -5 to 5 is considered great.

As a result, the forecast accuracy score is an excellent measurement for overall strategic thinking skills and has to be included in every brand strategist’s KPIs.

Suppose a brand strategist can accurately predict the outcomes, measure risks, and maximize opportunities. In that case, he/she will be able to make precise forecasts for investments in brand strategy and estimate the ROI. Surprises happen. A brand strategist’s role is to predict these surprises based on the past data and account for them in his/her forecast.

Essential Skill for Brand Strategist #2: Creative thinking  

Creative thinking is among other essential skills for brand strategists. Creative thinking complements strategic thinking as it makes a person open to new and different ideas. While strategic thinking requires a doze of critical and creative thinking, switching between the two helps us make better decisions.

Creative thinking involves using your imagination to create something new, generate ideas, consider various possibilities, and look at the problem from an unconventional perspective.

These are some of the sub-skills that masters of creative thinking have:

• Asking the right questions without the intention to respond.
• Active listening and openness to different ideas and opposing views.
• Ability to experiment and try different approaches to solve a problem.

How can you recognize creative thinking?

First of all, the person who can think creatively has overcome the most significant hurdle in life. To start thinking creatively, one needs to overcome the education, what his parents taught him, what society believes in, subconscious agendas, and all other rational stuff that trains our minds to have reasons for our actions and thoughts. The first sign of creative thinking is non-judgmental observation. So if the person can observe everything that happens around him without analyzing it and making comments, most probably, you have a creative thinker in front of you.

How do creative thinkers solve problems? 

When interviewing your brand strategist, put a problem in front of them and observe their thinking process. The problem could be that you are working on a marketing campaign for your brand, but your ads do not resonate with your target audience.

A creative mind will first clarify the problem. Then he will start generating ideas and looking for inspiration in other ads and marketing campaigns. They can be totally irrelevant to your product or brand. But they just look awesome.

Then move on to the creative process:

• A creative thinker will make a library of inspiration with selected ads that he liked to get the ideas out of their head. Then he will write down or draw as many ideas as he can. It is called active ideation. The next step is to the ideas on a scale from one to five and choose the best ones.
• Then a potential brand strategist will recommend a course of action. How to adjust your ads, implement the ideas and experiment with different versions. The goal of the creative process is to refine it as you go, rinse, and repeat.

Bonus tip: watch this TED talk by the Italian professor Giovanni Corazza to learn about how science can help us generate creative ideas.

Skill #3 Communication Skills

Communication skills are among essential skills for brand strategists because they allow one to understand and be understood by others. Brand strategist has to deal with people from different walks of life and across various departments, so knowing how to convey the message is vital.

Signs of excellent communication skills:

• Active listening. It translates to paying close attention to the person who is speaking without interrupting or judging. Asking clarifying questions, reflecting on what is said, eye contact, leaning in, mirroring are all active listening signs.
• Adapting communication style to the audience. A person who mastered the art of communication will always tell their audiences what THEY need to know, not what he or she wants to say. They care about people and how to give them what they ask for.
• Receiving feedback. Strong communicators don’t take things personally. They are confident about their abilities but know that there is always room for improvement. As a result, they welcome negative feedback because it helps them learn and grow. Instead of getting defensive or giving the silent treatment, they ask clarifying questions and seek solutions.

Interview tip:

• When interviewing your future brand strategist, watch the body language and how actively the candidate is listening to you. Find an opportunity to offer constructive criticism during the conversation and watch how the person reacts.

Want to become a great communicator yourself? Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends and Influence People” is, in our opinion, the best book of all time for those seeking to sharpen their communication skills.

Essential Skill for Brand Strategist #4: Quantitative Reasoning

A brand strategist is more than just a creative person with a smile on his face coming up with fun and smart ideas on marketing your product or service. He needs to know how to identify target customers and define their personas by studying statistics and demographics. That’s why quantitative reasoning is one of the most essential skills for brand strategists.

A brand strategist should be able to analyze where marketing funds’ investment will get the best results in terms of market share and customer acquisition. If a strategy isn’t producing positive ROI, there is no reason to continue investing in it. However, even a successful strategy or a campaign that seems to drive a lot of sales needs to be carefully studied to determine customer acquisition costs. The lower this cost, the more effective the strategy is. That’s where quantitative reasoning comes in. Brand strategists who know how to measure performance and take actions based on this data have a better idea of the brand’s health and ability to maximize revenues.

How to recognize quantitative reasoning in a candidate:

• The ability to read and analyze trends. 

Interview tip: Give your candidate some statistical charts, performance metrics of your marketing campaigns, and market trends data. Then ask him to interpret these numbers and come up with a summary of what is working and what needs adjustment or revision.

• The ability to write well. A brand strategist needs to master the writing skill to convey complex messages to all stakeholders. This position is also often responsible for content creation and oversees your blog, website, social media, etc. As a result, it is crucial that he can identify the right vocabulary and tone of voice that resonates internally and externally.
• The ability to adapt. Trends and market conditions change continuously, so a brand strategist must constantly adapt the brand’s strategy and adjust the course of action depending on the current situation. There were plenty of examples of failed marketing campaigns in 2020 because some brand strategists simply didn’t take the changing market into account when the COVID-19 began. For example, Singapore Airlines ran a controversial campaign “flights to nowhere” in September 2020. It resulted in heavy criticism of the airline for consuming jet fuel to please a group of travelers without considering the environmental impacts. It is a great example of how their brand strategist didn’t study market trends and that the people in 2020 were more concerned about the environment than ever.

Want to learn more about quantitative reasoning? Watch this TED talk by Rob Reid.

Skill #5: Design thinking

All of us experienced that frustrating feeling like we are “banging our head against a wall” trying to come up with a solution or an idea at some point. Design thinking equips you with a defined process that helps you identify bottlenecks, ideate solutions, emphasize with people to create a “prototype” of your idea, and test the assumptions. Design thinking gives you organization and skills to overcome the biases and opens different angles that you would never have found otherwise.

Signs that your candidate can practice design thinking:

• He can cut through the noise and solve the root problems. If a brand strategist has a problem, the gut reaction would be to think of an idea and execute it right away. However, a person who mastered design thinking will dig deeper using discovery tactics and uncover those “aha” moments that will allow him to find stronger solutions.
• He can work with any group of people from diverse backgrounds.  Design thinking enables a brand strategist to work with people across disciplines, skillsets, and seniority levels. Design thinking is a universal language that provides people with one common method and yields incredible results.

Standford School developed a great online crash course on design thinking. Highly recommended!

To Conclude

Brand strategist’s role is complex and encompasses various soft and technical skills that one has to master before taking on this critical role. Sometimes brand strategists are developed from junior digital marketers. Sometimes they come from technical backgrounds, such as data scientists or developers. Either way, finding a great candidate who mastered essential skills for brand strategists is a daunting task. In some cases, it would make more sense financially and operationally to outsource brand strategy to a specialized agency. We, at Exposyour, have 10+ years of experience working with many brands from various niches and can help you design a winning brand strategy that will generate results.