Finding your North Star to uncover your brand purpose and unlock success

In astronomy, the North Star is a star that appears to remain fixed, and not move, in relation to the Earth. This makes it excellent for navigation in situations where there are no landmarks - like at sea. In a similar way, during turbulent or uncertain times when nothing is certain, finding a North Star of your own for your brand or organisation is essential to help you find your way and galvanise around a unique purpose that meets your objectives.

We recently published a blog about a-ha! moments, where something suddenly crystallises and the way ahead looks clearer, more positive and maybe a bit easier. Discovering, and being guided by, your North Star is key to making sure you have more and more a-ha moments!

Why find your North Star anyway?

1. Coherent internal communications
   Everyone across your organisation will be heading in the same direction, so you work more efficiently towards a shared goal.
2. Increase employee autonomy
   Having a clear North Star will give your teams confidence to make decisions, knowing they align with your overall strategic direction.
3. Create compelling external communications
   Wherever people are in your customer journey, your business's North Star should be there too. That increases brand awareness and credibility.
4. KPIs and ROI become easier to track
   Aligning your metrics with your North Star means they're much easier to define. If your North Star is getting brands out there - you’re looking at page views, impressions and brand awareness qual data.

So now you know why, how can we help you find your North Star?

1. Discovery and research
   By doing thorough, detailed research and analysis, we understand a company's history, market landscape, competitive positioning and customer insights in depth. By hosting discovery workshops with you and your team, we can identify unique strengths, differentiators and arrive at a value proposition that makes sense for everyone.

2. Brand positioning
   Based on our research findings, we work to define and express brand positioning and articulation through workshops and strategic discussions to guide each company in uncovering its core purpose and establishing its very own ‘North Star’.

3. Strategic planning
   Once we’ve defined your North Star, we develop a bespoke, comprehensive brand strategy. This includes setting specific KPIs and objectives that are perfectly aligned with your North Star, determining the brand's tone of voice, visual identity, and messaging framework.

4. Communication and messaging
   We then craft compelling and consistent messaging that communicates your brand's North Star effectively to internal and external stakeholders.

5. Brand activation
   To ensure your North Star effectively permeates across your organisation, we activate the brand across various strategic touchpoints. This can involve designing customer experiences, implementing marketing campaigns or integrating our client’s purpose into product development, customer service, and other operational aspects. Activation is the bit where it all comes together!

6. Monitoring and measurement
   Finally, we help to monitor performance, tracking key metrics, and providing insights on the alignment with your North Star. By continuously assessing the impact of the brand strategy, we can make necessary adjustments to ensure optimised growth and success. This is where we refer back to your KPIs to make sure you’re on track.

A North Star is a strikingly simple concept, but surprisingly difficult to arrive at. Usually, we’re too close to the everyday machinations of our organisations to be able to see it for ourselves.

That’s where KISS comes in. With the benefits of industry experience and a fresh perspective, we tease out exactly what matters to you and your organisation, then bring it to life with actionable strategies. Whether it’s a website redesign, an entire rebrand, a perfect tuned campaign or social media strategy - they’ll all be very well served by a brilliant North Star.