Brand Management
What does your brand stand for in the market? Does it stand for anything? And if so, is your brand defined only by your consumers, or driven by effective messaging and marketing from your company or organization? What is the experience your audiences are having with your brand? Are they positive or negative — and are you constantly measuring feedback and adjusting your communications plan accordingly?
We help companies and organizations understand what their brand really means — what it stands for in the market — and that doesn’t mean evaluating the logo and tagline. It means evaluating every touchpoint your consumers or constituents have with your product, service, or issue. It involves the look, the price, the packaging, the customer service, and the promise delivered at every encounter. At its core, brand management is about creating a relationship — a connection — between you and your consumer. And we’re great at it.
Issue Advocacy
By definition, issue advocacy is marketing or advertising intended to influence a political issue, legislative proposal, or public policy position. We like to think that no one in the region has more experience doing just that.
We work with national and state trade associations, business and issue coalitions, and Fortune 500 companies to help them understand their public perception, who their communication targets need to be, and what needs to be said to get them talking. We also help clients understand threats and opportunities, and we develop strategic plans to deliver the right message to the right audiences. The more controversial the issue, the more we gravitate toward it.
Reputation Management
Reputation management is the understanding or influencing of an individual’s, organization’s, or business’s reputation, and understanding how this reputation plays out over the Internet, through social and traditional media, and in virtually any public forum.
Our expertise is knowing how to manage a client’s reputation by engaging with the media, engaging with the client’s targets — both fans and opponents — developing strategic plans and messages that will resonate, and identifying appropriate spokespeople and channels to deliver the message.
Crisis Communications
Who you are as an organization is just as important as the services or products you offer. Stakeholders—from consumers to employees—want to be linked to organizations they believe in, have common values with, and ultimately, trust. Those strong relationships however, can be demolished in a moment’s notice with one single misstep. In fact, an organization’s response to a crisis can affect its reputation—and success—for years to come.
While not every crisis can be planned for, having communications counsel before, during, and after a crisis event can make all the difference. Here at Eckel & Vaughan, we have an unflappable team with the knowledge and experience to take an organization through a crisis successfully. We’ve helped numerous clients anticipate reputational vulnerabilities, create monitoring and response processes, plan appropriate responses and navigate a crisis situation to control messaging, manage sentiment, and shape perceptions.