How can we help entrepreneurs find their market?

The role of a communication agency is to know how to support a project from its marketing dimension through to its expression in communication. Here is how we help project leaders reach the market.

Whether you are an entrepreneur, a start-up founder or in charge of a brand launch within a company, you face multiple demands every time:

• Technology,
• HR,
• CSR,
• trademark registration,
• legislation,
• advertising,
• events,
• press relations…

It's like an equation with infinite factors to which you must find the solution: finding your market.

It's difficult, almost philosophical, to step back from your cherished project and work out how to solve this equation, especially when the project hasn't yet fully taken shape.

It's obviously very introspective, which is why you have to share in order to succeed.

The hourglass method

With our experience, we have developed a method to help project leaders: the hourglass method. At the top we have a stock of information, the grains of sand. They are both data and complexities. They are many and clumped together until we ease their path. The aim is to get them through the narrow neck of the hourglass. As with any hourglass, timing is key.

Find your fundamental purpose

The first step is to put all the challenges through the mill to find a certain consistency in them. That takes time, consultation, an analytical mind and the ability to draw analogies. You have to absorb everything, work iteratively and be very introspective.

Next, the conclusions must be compared with the deep intentions of those behind the project or company. This is the stage where the purpose comes in. 

“But why do you want to do this?” 

“What are your deep motivations?” 

Money isn't the only driver…

The aim is to sum up the whole project in a vision, a fundamental purpose for the company. It's a work of simplification essential to seeing a project through.

Turn your fundamental purpose into a brand idea

At this stage, you have to align the deep motivation with which you are taking your project to market with the way you will sell your product or service to that market: in short, the brand idea. This process is also an act of simplification, because the brand idea must be simple, singular, surprising and lodge itself in the minds of customers and even non-customers. It is greatly simplified by the previous step.

Feed this brand idea.

A brand exists only through the richness of the imagination it carries. You now have to broaden and enrich it with notions, images, content and echoes that can permeate the market and potential customers. It's a stage of opening up that draws on the genesis of the project to produce the proof of its brand idea.

This method creates a strategic alignment between an idea, a project and its launch on the market, without the brand becoming a mask or a clown's red nose for purely commercial reasons. Behind great brands, there is something deeper that ensures their lasting place in people's minds.