Brand strategists are working in increasingly complex environments with the branding discipline being stretched to greater uses than ever before. The not-for-profit sector, for instance, provides a good test of branding technique with more and more not-for-profits thinking in terms of branding as a organizational strategy.

Regardless of the business sector, those responsible for brands are dealing with pluralistic institutions and customer populations. Most companies are no longer single-product companies or businesses focused on a single market segment. Business is segmented, fractionalized, “mass-customized,” even “one-to-one.” Therefore, effective brand stewardship requires the ability to think on many levels. Corporate branding strategies, by necessity, must also think in terms of business segments, business units, product lines, customer groups, demographic cohorts and psychographic or “affinity-based” groups.

Message Matrixing is a technique we use to 1) identify different descriptors of the prospective customer segments and 2) insure that messaging and contact is in alignment with corporate branding. This technique goes hand-in-hand with, and creates a “bridge” to marketing strategies that make significant use of database or rule-based marketing.