Brand Vision: The Clear Line of Sight Aligning Business Strategy and Marketing Tactics

This book is based on a critical premise: that, rather than merely a series of aesthetic decisions on typography and graphics, marketing can be a powerful force that helps a company communicate its strategy.

In a global survey of more than four thousand senior executives, consulting firm PwC found that 80 percent of the respondents admitted that few of their associates understood their company's corporate strategy. And even that figure is wildly optimistic. According to research reported in the Harvard Business Review, 95 percent of a company’s employees, on average, are unaware of or do not understand its strategy.

Brand Vision: The Clear Line of Sight Aligning Marketing Tactics and Business Strategy hopes to change that by offering simple, easily implemented tools connecting a company’s marketing program to its business strategy. It’s based on a critical premise: that, rather than merely a series of aesthetic decisions on typography and graphics, marketing can be a powerful force that helps a company communicate its strategy. Not just externally, but internally as well.

The author has covered this territory for more than four decades, working as a strategist, creative director, and writer for one of the country’s largest business-to-business advertising agencies. He has worked with large international companies to develop marketing campaigns and programs from social media, search, email, and websites to more traditional print advertising and direct marketing. He knows this territory well.

About the Author

A graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, Jim Everhart has almost half a century of experience as a professional writer, working as an award-winning journalist and editor, an Associated Press news reporter, an author, and a scriptwriter. He also played a leadership role in strategy, technology development, and creative implementation for more than three decades, most of the time spent at Godfrey, one of the largest business-to-business marketing agencies in the U.S.

He was fortunate to be at the center of the action when the Information Age truly blossomed, leading Godfrey in its adoption of web, email, search, social media, and multimedia. As a result, he has championed new technologies, integrating them in a mix of traditional and non-traditional tactics. He has created campaigns and programs achieving results for clients like GE, DuPont, Bosch Rexroth (a division of Robert Bosch), JLG (a division of Oshkosh), YORK (part of Johnson Controls), and AMP (now part of TE Connectivity).

Not being at a large global agency has been a considerable advantage. Jim was able to cross the impenetrable silos that large agencies construct around these diverse activities and exploit the new media’s unique strengths at the program level.

He developed specific tactics into strategically integrated campaigns, creating programs and materials for advertising, sales support, presentations, social media, search, trade shows, customer relationship management (CRM), and account-based marketing (ABM) programs.

The typical global agency would have at least five different people – and maybe five separate departments – covering this turf. With no one to range across the entire landscape as Jim did at Godfrey.