Gain Insights: | Jennifer Layne Brands | Brand + Marketing Strategy

Strong brands correlate with superior business performance. Since 2007 the stock market performance of the Brand Finance Global 500 has outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of 22%. Notably, the “Brand” firms had higher returns, did not go as low and recovered faster from a downturn. Data shows strong brands and financially strong companies are not only closely correlated, companies with a strong brand have better financial performance.

Many companies, specifically in the B2B sector, have failed to recognize how building a strong brand can positively impact their business results. They may know that there is a disconnect between what their market believes about them and what they want the market to know, but haven’t fully appreciated how working on their brand will resolve this challenge.

We designed our services to specifically address your business results.
They are routes to your sustained prosperity.

Why You?

The organizational value proposition communicates the value a company provides at the highest level. Every firm should understand its overall value prop before creating product-specific ones. Let us help you develop your organizational value proposition and your product and service value props from there.

Why Them?

We ensure you understand who your audience is as humans rather than targets. We identify the emotional descriptors of your optimal target audience. Defining these descriptors will help to strengthen your brand’s effectiveness. We are ready to help you identify these.

Purpose

Brands with clarity of the organization’s purpose financially outperform those with no stated purpose. We help clients define the organization’s purpose beyond (but not to the exclusion of) financial metrics. Call us to begin work on identifying your purpose.

Survival Communications

Crisis happens. It’s how you respond that will make or break your reputation with employees and clients. We’re experts in effectively managing any crisis your organization may experience from CEO missteps to natural disasters and financial upsets.

Brand Narrative

Stories stimulate memory, and brands win when you capture memory real estate in the hearts and minds of your target audience. Your Brand Narrative tells your organization’s story in a way that the market understands exactly what you intended. We write stories humans connect with.

Brand Character

Let’s build your brand’s character. Character is the set of human attributes associated with a brand that give it a unique personality and recognition in the market and minds of its audience. Brand Character creates an emotional connection for your audience with its purpose, values and unique selling proposition.

Brand Strategy

We create a plan to meet your business goals that can be achieved via a consistent and purposeful long-term building of your brand.

Brand Architecture

How are the brands within your company related to and differentiated from one another? We think through future implications of an architecture and build the structure for brands, product names and service lines for optimum brand extension.

Metrics & Measurement

Brands can and should be held accountable for the prosperity of the organization. We identify and recommend fit for purpose measurement tools like Brand Valuation, Net Promotor Scores, and Brand Equity, which drive revenues, profits, share price, attraction and retention.

Marketing Strategy

We ensure your market understands you the way you intended to be understood. We identify priority channels, messages and sequencing based on your business strategy. Let us help you ensure your marketing tactics are aligned with a strategy that produces business results.

Internal Communications

Your internal communications need to be effective for your external comms to be authentic. We help employees successfully translate your organization’s value to customers so that they positively impact your business.

Brand Command

In many cases your marketing team is a team of ONE (you) and the brand team is a team of ZERO. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a brand and marketing expert on speed-dial? We’ve designed this membership just for you! Our team will help you get in control of your brand & marketing as well as your career via short weekly sessions. More!

Love What You Do

Jennifer was our marketing leader in a group where most of the sales staff had moved out of engineering/technical roles. She handled the internal challenges well by kindly educating us about the norms and practices of marketing. Jennifer's scope was quite broad but she managed to keep us all moving to the best speaker slots, conference appearances, and crafting our own customer events.

Jack JonesApplied Managed Services

I have worked with Jennifer for four years. Jennifer is a brilliant presenter, she is able to inspire those around her. She has excellent relationship skills and a can-do attitude. I have thoroughly enjoyed working with Jennifer in the Global Brand team at Shell.

Wendy OrhanShell, Senior Brand Communications Manager-Global Marketing

Jennifer is a true and great brand champion. Her deep understanding of how brands work and how they generate value to businesses come from actual experience and practice, particularly in the B2B space. Jennifer is genuinely committed to the customer causes and promotes brand management as a uniting element that brings together their interests and those of the business and their collaborators. Young at heart, she's also got an innovator soul, open to the new. Personally, she is a true powerhouse - with an amazing ability to enchant and captivate audiences, and a great networker, always looking for means and ways to promote the people and the causes she believes in. Always upbeat and trustworthy, her empathic style usually breaks any ice and make her a dear colleague and business partner wherever she goes.

Bruno MottaDirector at Neo Marketing Consultoria de Marca, Marketing e Comunicação & Senior Partner @ Fair Play Consulting

Jennifer's innate understanding not just of the Shell brand but its people and culture allows her to navigate complex situations and effectively generate results. She is not daunted by the size of a task but, rather, energised into action. Her dynamism and positive attitude are infectious and key ingredients to her management style, which has made working with her a very rewarding experience for me.

Rose Wangen-JonesShell, Global Business Director, Team Shell WPP

Since 2012, Jennifer has served as a guest lecturer for my Brand Management course at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. Her wit, depth of experience, and insights into managing a major global brand like Shell have made her favorite among my MBA students. Each year, Jennifer enlightens and entertains our class with up-to-the-minute briefings on how Shell is advancing its brand throughout the B2C, B2B and B2G environments. She has grown so popular that even non-students ask to attend the class.

Kim KimmeyExecutive Director at Hill Country University Center

I had the pleasure of working with Jennifer on a series of client engagements we ran over a period of 12 months. I was quite new to Shell when our paths crossed, and it was a joy to work with someone from day one who had such passion, drive and focus to the business and what we were trying to achieve. Jennifer's enthusiasm is contagious. Her attention to detail and understanding what the client, as well as the internal staff, want and need is a wonderful experience to share. Her leadership skills- in bringing a global team together and ensuring we are all sharing the same vision is amazing. It was a real pleasure working with and learning from Jennifer.

Bronwyn HummEvents Manager, ASX

As should be expected, for her self-possession and piercing read of people, business contexts, and micro-economic as well as big-picture-trends, Jennifer very accurately captures herself in her profile in characterizing herself as: Passionate, Authentic, Self Aware, Driven, Positive, Honest, Organized, Respected. I couldn't agree more.

David DupreeShell, Global Operations Manager, Commercial, Shell Technology & Know-how Commercialization

Call now to schedule a free gap analysis

We designed our services to specifically address your business results. They are routes to your sustained prosperity.