Fusion Dynamics
Fuselage helps accelerate your brand to its optimal orbit through a set of integrated marketing practices we call fusion dynamics. These integrated practices consolidate stakeholder requirements and fuel your marketing with tangible value – from relatable brand mythologies to logical feature/benefit hierarchies to sustainable selling propositions that effectively communicate your offering’s unique position to the world.
This holistic approach is vital – because commerce has reversed poles since the age of command-and-control product development that relied on choice-limited, mass-market methods for promotion and advertising. It takes more than a wonder machine, a unique selling proposition and a cute mascot or jingle to win today’s dynamic and competitive markets.
Instead, the key to markets today is to build from their edges with category-challenging products, authentic brands and hyper-targeted campaigns. This requires a thoughtful approach not only to the practical needs – but also the emotional, cultural and moral needs – of niche audiences. Their choices play out across the landscapes of heart, tribe and soul, as well as pocketbook or ledger. The prize isn’t short-term revenue – it’s brand loyalty – and transformative market share.
Please tab through our practice areas above. Through their blend of arts and sciences – the power of fusion dynamics – we aim to cross your brand into the new marketing frontier, and will work tirelessly to maximize your success.
Constructing Tales
Our world is permeated by media. Whether at work, play or in-between, words, images and videos swirl around us competing for attention. That which most often wins it calls out through the primal power of myth, symbol and ritual – building blocks of story. Something deep within our psyche responds to the structure and rhythm of story, and the best brands tell fantastic ones.
Creative guru Robert Mckee goes so far to say that storytelling is the leading way to put ideas in the world today. That’s likely why brand stories are everywhere, water we fish don’t always see. And yet those that tap into cultural currents and build up suspense can command our hearts. This is why your story is so important, and why we’ll help draft, craft, revise and tell it to the world.
So, your core brand story could be that of David-versus-Goliath, hometown-hero-makes-good or saving-the-planet-one-sale-at-a-time. Whatever your brand story, know that brand identity is more than just a name, logo and blurb. It includes a full range of tropes that empower prospects to see how, where and why your brand will enable them to share in the daring — even transcendent — act of participating in the ever-widening narrative of human progress.
Compelling Stories. Services include: brand discovery, taxonomies & roadmaps, storyboarding & copywriting, public relations & media plans, marketing plans.
Thinking as Designers
Strategic design is our powerhouse practice. That’s because our general approach to most all challenges is that of “design thinking”: comfort with ambiguity, synthesis as well as analysis, convergent as well as divergent cognition and tangible prototypes to spur ideation and iteration. Although design must ship, a designer’s work is never quite done. This is because good design solutions generate new design opportunities.
We design solutions across a range of styles – from fun and friendly to clean and corporate to smartly functional. In this we are proud to offer the experience, flexibility and ability to construct an entire toolset – semantic, visual, iconographic – that can educate and influence your prospects through the diverse, specialized communicative languages of the market.
Of upmost priority is that we deliver “on-brand” creative across all channels – packaging to print to digital and beyond. Although we expect to sharpen or sometimes overhaul your creative, we also expect to work shoulder-to-shoulder to maintain ongoing brand synergy while we introduce new brand possibilities. Whether you sell a single product, a “branded house” or a “house of brands”, we design strategically with your future business goals always in mind.
Strategic Designs. Services include: identity systems, sell sheets/brochures, tradeshow displays, packaging/point-of-sale, websites/landing pages.
Targeting Audiences
It’s never been easier to build an audience – some have even come to think that all it takes is some gumption and a social media account. That’s worked out in a few outstanding cases – but most often it takes this plus clever strategy and ideas about what you’re hoping to accomplish. Do you want to build a specific audience to test drive your product, influence others to give it a go, or maximize sales by proving to a laggard segment that others have deemed your product or service safe and effective?
What’s important is that each step of the way you make a courting exchange with the audience you are building. This is where permission-based content marketing can make a big contribution – the bite-sized pieces of your brand that prime the prospect for an ongoing purchasing relationship.
Marketers generally conceptualize this process as a funnel – awareness campaigns deliver leads, which are nurtured via content marketing to convert into prospects. Total leads diminish each step through, but those ushered into the sales cycle have become educated, if not enthusiastic, about your offering. What takes this process to a whole next level, however, are network effects – the rapid accumulation of leads that can happen when everything is firing in sync. These keep the “flywheel” of evangelizing customers in motion, and can help build new audiences beyond even your most enthusiastic expectations.
Smart Campaigns. Services include: integrated ad campaigns, digital/content marketing, social media promotion, gamification and contests, cause marketing.
Helping You Flourish
The market is a complex adaptive system. This is why marketers so often employ ecosystem analogies to make sense of its activities. As they say, your product needs a niche — which means you must define your own category, while also building symbiotic relationships with suppliers, competitors, consumers and institutions.
We do believe selectionist frameworks are key to market sustainability, but that we must also supplement them with the humanistic concept of flourishing. To flourish demands that you engage and entertain prospects on their path to long-term brand loyalty. It’s an approach based on a conscious decision to not over-engineer, but to conscientiously connect, and connect with, well-understood points of our common humanity.
This is why we approach relationships through the lenses of fairness, integrity and transparency. These fundamentally human values help generate virtuous cycles of trust that lift us all. And trust is golden. Never before have people had such broad access to products and services – as well as the means to circulate negative opinions about them. This is not an era for slash-and-burn business. Instead, it is a promising time for responsible brand stewardship and acceleration, to reap the rewards of market goodwill for years to come.
Sustainable Journeys. Services include: repackagings, brand repositionings, brand extensions, brand portfolios, partnerships.
