Consulting & Strategy
CLARITY DEFEATS NOISE. WE HELP YOU FIND BRUTAL CLARITY THROUGH DEEP DISCOVERY. SOMETIMES THAT MEANS UNCOVERING A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY OR VALIDATING A SNEAKING SUSPICION. SOMETIMES IT’S A LITTLE BIT OF BOTH. WE HELP UNEARTH THE TRUTH TO BEAT FAILURE®.
The Clarity Session by Butchershop
The core of The Clarity Session is the PreMortem Methodology. The PreMortem is a powerful yet simple mindset and method that focuses on one question only: What will cause you to fail? During the two-hour session, teams, organizations, companies and brands can make an impact-driven experience. The Clarity Session allows you to put fears on the table, build trust and team alignment, gain confidence and certainty, develop defensible strategies and next steps, build individual accountability, avoid costly mistakes, and ultimately deliver on what you need to prevent failure and achieve success.
Beat Failure® Workshop by Butchershop
The Beat Failure® Workshop is an intensive two-day workshop experience led by expert Butchershop facilitators, in person or online. We’ll guide your team through a series of exercises designed to get clarity on priorities and solve for possible failures with collective and diverse thinking.
Discovery and Insights Mining
Everything begins with discovery. We build custom discovery plans to immerse ourselves in your business, gain input from stakeholders and customers, and identify needs for additional research required to fill any knowledge gaps that exist or validate assumptions. Through insights mining, we bring a valuable outside perspective and strategic lens to uncover what’s most important. From there, we distill key takeaways and insights, and identify potential opportunities, implications, and recommendations for additional research and follow-up discovery work.
User Research and Consumer Insights
Too many strategies are built on assumptions, anecdotes, and intuition. At Butchershop, we use research to surface new insights and validate existing ones, so your strategy is informed by a deep and objective understanding of the audience. Consumer Insights provides data about trends in the broader market, while User Research zooms in on the motivations, attitudes, and pain points that influence behavior, giving us the data to shape a targeted approach to strategy, messaging, user experience, and more.
Brand Awareness and Brand Perception Research
Too often, companies and organizations operate on assumptions about how their brands are perceived in the market, which can lead to a misguided, narrow, or incomplete picture of reality that stands in the way of true growth and transformation. We believe in the importance of getting outside of the echo chamber to validate hypotheses and identify benchmarks and new goalposts for growth. This research leverages both qualitative and quantitative methods to get unbiased, data-driven evidence on the current state of brand awareness in current or emerging markets, and what the brand is known for compared to the competitive set.
Audience Segmentation Studies
Too many companies don’t truly understand who their customers are, or who their potential customers are, causing them to overlook new growth opportunities. Segmentation studies allow our client partners to gain more perspective into what their audiences look like—not just from a demographic perspective or a decision-maker point of view—but a deeper understanding of the attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and vulnerabilities that make them human. This kind of research leverages both qualitative and quantitative methods to help us get a deep understanding of the people we’re trying to reach and connect with.
IPO Readiness Market Perception Study
Companies considering going public or nearing their IPO moment often face big questions about potential investor perceptions that can create fears of doubt and uncertainty in how they can reach their full potential and achieve the highest valuation possible. The IPO Readiness Market Perception Study takes a temperature check from the broader retail investor market on key unknowns such as how they perceive investment opportunities in certain verticals, their appetite and likelihood to invest in companies like yours, and how they make decisions about what to invest in.
Strategy Workshop
We leverage workshops with our client partners to uncover themes, explore territories, co-create strategic opportunities, and build alignment. These workshops are powerful opportunities for client teams to gain new perspectives, challenge conventional thinking, and build excitement for the growth and transformation possibilities that lie ahead. Each workshop has a custom-built agenda of exercises that are designed to deliver the most impactful discussions and areas of collaboration for each project’s objectives. Workshops can range from 2 hours to a full-day or multi-day work session, depending on the needs and size of stakeholders.
Brand and Experience Strategy
We use the discovery and research process to surface insights about your brand, your offering, and your audience. These insights may expand or challenge internal perceptions and trajectories. In Brand and Experience Strategy, we take an expansive view of your brand, combining what’s true, what’s new, and what’s next into the blueprint for brand expression, including creative development, activations, storytelling, and digital experience.
Brand Architecture
Brand architecture is an organizational framework for complex or multi-layered companies with more than one solution or product offerings. The brand architecture establishes a hierarchy and relationships between the parent brand and any sub-brands, influencing naming systems, brand identities, messaging, and go-to-market strategy. Evaluating the brand architecture in moments of growth and transformation helps to bring clarity to the organizational structure and how it can adapt and scale with new visions, new business opportunities, or new mergers, acquisitions, or partnerships.
Brand & Content
THE WORLD IS OVERBRANDED. PEOPLE DON’T NEED BRANDS TO CHANGE THE WORLD, THEY JUST NEED THEM TO EMBRACE THEIR MOST HUMAN TRUTH AND CONSISTENTLY EXPRESS IT ACROSS EVERY INTERACTION.
Visual Identity
A visual identity provides the foundational elements for the visual expression of your brand. These elements collectively work to create an emotional impression and communicate personality with consistency across environments and audiences. The identity system maintains a line of communication with your customers — it can help grow awareness, reinforce a purchase, or transform the perception of your brand.
Verbal Identity
Verbal Identify is the foundational vehicle to communicate your story, message, and personality with consistency across environments and audiences. It maintains a living connection and conversation with your customers and can help grow awareness or transform the perception of your brand.
Sonic Identity
Sonic identity is how a brand translates its essence into audio to create a singular association between sound and your brand. It provides customers a “sticky” emotional connection to your brand on conscious and subconscious levels, giving them a sense of reassurance. To create sonic identity, we take the foundational brand experience principles and interpret them as audible behaviors of the brand in sonic representation. The sonic identity scales to key touchpoints like broadcast TV, social content, and in-product interactions.
Naming
Great brand and product names become part of our collective consciousness and vocabulary, and set the course for your brand personality and position. And evaluating what a name could mean and consider for a brand’s growth and transformation is often just as important as the name itself. Our process combines comprehensive strategy with a collaborative and creative spirit. We get clear on a brief, generate a list of thoughtful, vetted names, evaluate cultural and business implications that you might not have considered, and guide you through the selection and due diligence process.
Brand Workshop
We utilize workshops with client partners to uncover themes, explore territories, co-create opportunities, and build alignment. These workshops are powerful opportunities for client teams to gain new perspectives, challenge conventional thinking, and build excitement for the growth and transformation ahead. Each workshop has a custom-built agenda of exercises designed to deliver impactful discussion and areas of collaboration.
Campaign Creative
In times of growth and transformation, expressing and changing perception is key. One of the biggest failure points we see from brands is when they do the work to evolve, but then stop short of communicating that evolution to those who matter. Butchershop creates campaigns that drive your brand’s POV to interact, impress, convert and gain relevance. We focus on key metrics based on audience understanding and brand strategy, with the ultimate goal of increasing brand awareness, customer engagement or sales pipeline.
Launch PR Packet
Launch is a key point during any growth or transformation undertaking. When launching a new or existing brand, product, or experience externally, it’s essential to not just think about the “what,” but also the “how.” The launch PR packet provides your team with the story and visual assets to be shared with media outlets to get the greatest impact out of your launch.
Internal Brand Launch
We believe every brand has two audiences—your external customer and your internal employees. The success of your business depends on both staying highly engaged with your brand, especially at major inflection points where people experience change. Our Internal “Roll In” Campaign is designed to rally people and create participation with the brand—building excitement that aligns your organization.
Employer Brand
An employer brand is a powerful tool to align your people strategy with your business strategy during critical transformation moments in your company. An employer brand is an extension of your external brand, designed to foster shared values and behaviors of employees in visible and physical ways that everyone can share. It maintains a line of communication with and among your employees to reinforce a mission or transform perception to help in efforts to attract and recruit new talent, retain valuable employees and align culture toward a common goal.
Packaging Design
Packaging is often the last interaction someone has with your brand before engaging directly with your product, and it’s a pivotal moment in maintaining a consistent and delightful brand experience. Done well, packaging serves as a key experience for your brand's audience and can help grow sales by standing out in your industry or transforming the perception of your brand.
Event Experience Design
Events can serve as a living, breathing embodiment of your brand. We believe event experience is in the details, each moment is an opportunity for event attendees to experience the full scope of your brand personality and point-of-view.
Branded Environments and Retail Design
Branded Environments and/or Retail Design bring your brand story to life for key audiences, allowing them to interact with your product or brand first-hand. A living, breathing embodiment of your brand, these spaces can help grow awareness and drive affinity of your brand or transform the perception of your brand in the minds of your key audience.
Brand C-Suite Presentation
In moments of inflection, having executive alignment and enthusiasm is key for implementation not only internally, but across all other touchpoints and audiences on an external level. Brand C-Suite Presentations seize that moment and create a clarified groundswell for building excitement or transforming the perception of a brand, product, or experience on an C-Suite level.
Brand Guidelines
Brand guidelines are the rules and standards that ensure your visual and verbal identity system are executed consistently. They allow you to successfully scale and apply the brand across all marketing, communication and product touchpoints, and customer experiences.
Brand Collateral
Once your visual and verbal brand is approved, we’ll create a library of Brand Collateral that will help you start activating right away. We’ve included a list of typical deliverables, but we can discuss scaling and additional needs as part of a broader collateral scope.
Employee Brand Training
Your new brand is only the beginning—now it has to live in the world. Staff across your organization will be working with the new brand in significant and subtle ways, and it’s crucial that they understand how to deploy it in the design, marketing, HR, and sales materials that are created in-house every day. Monitoring this will likely fall to internal brand champions. To support these champions, we offer a “Train the Trainer” product, which supplements Brand Standards and Brand Asset Management with custom training tools and workshops.
Evergreen Content
Your visual identity provides the system and the core assets to begin building a robust brand. While your team will have all the internal tools they need to create branded assets, it can be helpful to have our team of brand experts create a library of images you can use across platforms—on your website, internal documents, sales and recruiting materials, on social media, etc.
Brand Anthem Video
Brand Video products help you tell your brand story in an engaging way with the goal of growing awareness to ultimately transform perception around your brand, product or industry. A Brand Anthem Video not only tells your story, but does so with gravitas and cinematic emphasis that match your brand’s unique personality.
Product Video
Product Videos help you explain complex content around a product, technology, or key feature. They can help turn a complex story into a simple clear narrative. Product videos can help to grow awareness or shift perception around a product, technology or key feature.
Company Story Video
For companies seeking funding or courting acquisition, a Company Story video delivers your story to interested parties with confidence and polish. It typically covers who you are, what you do, your culture, your aspirations, and your growth path, among other key points.
Brand Identity Video
For brands, a new identity is an opportunity to generate excitement and conversation, internally and in the marketplace. A brand identity video is an engaging, highly shareable asset that shows off the brand identity and by extension, the brand—a key piece of storytelling that highlights how you’ve evolved and where you’re heading.
Documentary / Editorial Content
We believe that customers are exceptionally smart, especially when it comes to parsing out the truth. The realest stories are often those with the most potential to resonate. A documentary or branded editorial content, can tell your story in a true and authentic way to grow awareness and transform perception around your brand, product, or industry.
Event Content
Branded event content leaves a lasting impression on attendees. Polished digital content sets the tone for the event, generates excitement, and supports wayfinding and other event information. We’ll work with your event team to create custom digital content for your event, and can even be onsite during the event to make sure our work works.
Motion Toolkit for Video
A Motion Toolkit is a useful resource for companies that produce a lot of their branded or video content internally. We’ll extend the motion style we created as part of your visual identity into a motion system and develop custom assets for your team to use, reuse, and evolve.
Digital & Product
THERE’S A LOT OF SHIT ON THE INTERNET. WE BELIEVE IT’S POSSIBLE TO MAKE SOMETHING BETTER OUT OF THE CALAMITY. DIGITAL EXPERIENCES THAT ADD VALUE, RATHER THAN EXTRACT. MORE THAN “GETTING ONLINE”, IT’S ABOUT BUILDING PLACES WHERE PEOPLE AND BRANDS CONNECT WITH INTENT.
Website Experience Definition
At this point in your project, we’ve developed a deep understanding of your business, your users, and your goals for digital experience. Using the insights we uncovered in Experience Strategy, we will define the user flows, information architecture, content strategy, and interaction approaches that will bring your brand to life online. We’ll then wireframe, test, and iterate on the user experience to inform Digital Design.
Website Digital Design
We use an iterative design process to explore how your brand can be expanded into digital, then create an experience that comes alive with visual design, motion, interactions, and content. As part of our process, we create a design system that our clients can use to extend their digital presence in a cohesive way. Our design systems include motion design, interactions and animations, as well as a coded styled guide to ensure pixel-perfect alignment with any development team.
Website Development and QA
Guided by the decisions made during Experience Strategy and the interfaces and design system created in the Digital Design phase, we proceed with architecture definition. We take into consideration who will be using the platform, how it will scale, and the core technical needs. With that information, we define a functional, sustainable tech stack. Front- and back-end development, mobile, and any other integrations are handled in sprint cycles where we aim to deliver maximum value in short periods of time. We guarantee a smooth and seamless deployment.
Web Copywriting
Your brand voice should be consistent across touchpoints, especially on your organization’s home—the website. We’ll provide thoughtful and effective site copy that supports your experience strategy and your business goals.
Motion Toolkit for UI
Signature movements are a key part of creating a delightful brand experience that is both memorable and intuitive. They aid in usability by providing continuity and informing users of key interactions and wayfinding. For companies building a flagship product, branded motion can reinforce the kind of confident and engaging user experience that creates loyal users.
Website Validation (User Testing)
We recommend validation at several points during the definition, design, and development process to ensure our work is resonating with users. Depending on the project, validation can be more valuable in some phases than others. We recommend a bespoke approach to testing, based on the specific needs of each project.
Product Experience Definition
At this point in your project, we’ve developed a deep understanding of your business, your users, and your goals for digital experience. Using the insights we uncovered in Experience Strategy, we will define the user flows, information architecture, content strategy, and interaction approaches that will bring your brand to life online. We’ll then wireframe, test, and iterate on the user experience to inform digital design.
Product Digital Design
Each cycle begins with UX explorations and hypotheses specific to each release stage, which will be activated in the design. Some cycles will be design-heavy, particularly the first, where your digital design system is established and codified. Others will simply build on this foundation.
Product Development and QA
We define the architecture and infrastructure for each release, including internal tools to empower your team, like integrations and an admin dashboard for product performance review. After development, our internal, integrated QA team makes sure performance is consistent across every interaction.
Product Validation
Throughout our process, we make sure our work works by testing it with users. Depending on the project, validation may happen in the Definition, Design, and Development phases. This may include Moderated User Testing, Unmoderated User Testing, and Sentiment Analysis.
Performance & Media
SO MANY WAYS TO CONNECT TODAY, BUT SO LITTLE CONNECTION. WE HELP BRANDS CUT THROUGH THE DIGITAL CLUTTER AND SHOW UP WHERE IT MATTERS, WHEN IT MATTERS.
Conversion Rate Optimization
After your digital experience launches, it’s time to observe and understand how it’s performing in the world, and make the updates that will supercharge performance and conversion. We’ll revisit the KPIs that we established early in the project, take a baseline reading on site performance, then address any opportunities for improvement with custom hypotheses and testing. Over a series of months, we’ll make thoughtful updates to ensure that our work works.
Brand Tracking Research
To gain a complete and comprehensive picture of growth and transformation over time, and identify areas for optimization and continued evolution, we establish a regular cadence of brand tracking research to measure key brand metrics vs. competitors over time with pre- and post-data analysis. This helps us to understand how perceptions and brand health are evolving and what lifts or changes are happening in the market that might be correlated with the brand’s success or challenges in meeting specific goals.
Brand and Creative Validation
While our discovery and strategy work sets us up to align on objective points of orientation, we often find value in gathering additional “creative insurance” to build even more confidence in the strategic or creative direction we’re recommending for a brand. We believe that testing should not be used to give a red or green light to ideas, but rather to better understand our audience and what’s resonating or not resonating about messaging concepts or creative executions.This helps us identify opportunities to strengthen the brand and creative before launching in market, or spot any major red flags.
Campaign and Communications Strategy
To create impactful and memorable campaigns, we apply our strategic toolkit and lens of thinking to develop a jumping-off point for conceptual thinking that’s not only tied to business goals, but taps into core human truths that will resonate with our audiences and leverage media in unique ways. We develop a vision and recommended approach for campaign initiatives, from building brand awareness to launching a new product to drive conversion or leads. Our approach is designed to inspire our creative & media teams to push the boundaries of their thinking and the category, and set our media partners up to develop impactful media plans and buys.
Media Planning and Management
Our Campaign and Comms Strategy work culminates in up to three media plans (budget and corresponding KPI & ROI options). The budget options traditionally span (1) low-end, high-end, and KPI-driven. For the “KPI-driven” option, we work with you to determine key media campaign goals, and from there calculate the “best case” budget, to consider alongside our low and high options. We work with you to determine the best of the three options, and then proceed to tactical media planning and ongoing management and optimization.