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Brand Acculturation®
By employing this very specific brand-development methodology, it is possible to create a brand that becomes an integral part of culture. Cultures do exist on varying levels and magnitudes. But regardless of how we define them, establishing a brand within a given culture is arguably the Holy Grail of marketing. As such, Brand Acculturation results in wide consumer acceptance and ultimately, significant Word of Mouth - the most powerful medium of all.
The process of Brand Acculturation employs a broad array of agency disciplines, including Account Planning, Marketing Technology, Contact Planning, Business Strategy, PR, Client Strategy and On/Offline Creative.
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Creatively Guided Management Consulting®
Today more than ever, creativity has its rightful place at the business table. Best of all, it's no longer the sole domain of the folks in the marketing or creative departments. CGMC maximizes the impact of creativity on product design, business design and definition (or redefinition), development of new channels of distribution, employee relations, staff productivity, constituent management, and sales and volume management, to name a few.
Simply put, CGMC is a blend of the traditional disciplines of Management Consulting and the creatively-oriented discipline of Marketing, designed to effect positive change on non-marketing specific business functions through the use of unconventional, creative thinking and analysis.
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Disruption Planning
Sacred cows, beware.
Every industry, save for new and emerging ones, has within it, long-established, well-accepted norms - conventions that few, if any, have ever challenged. Disruption Planning is a thoughtful method by which conventions are identified, their relevance (or lack of) to consumers explored, and the opportunity to disrupt these conventions unearthed.
Often, Disruption Planning sparks fundamental change within an organization - resulting in an entirely new, more progressive orientation. Other times, it is the springboard to the kind of whiplash marketing that jars the category, creates cultural buzz and drives bottom-line results.
Disruption Planning is an important component of the Analysis and Understanding phase of Brand Acculturation and is based on in-depth industry/competitor analysis, deep consumer learning and an insatiable desire to find a better way of doing business.
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Contact Planning™
Contact Planning is the emerging art of identifying consumer behavior patterns - based on Experience Mapping - and determining how best to intersect those patterns with market communications. Thanks to the heightened understanding of the consumer product experience that Experience Mapping yields, Contact Planning not only facilitates connection with a targeted audience, it does so with considerably heightened relevance, and thus, greater efficiency.
In its most powerful form, Contact Planning actually creates entirely new pathways by which to reach consumers - often creating new forms of media that, in and of themselves, become engaging. Thanks to Contact Planning, it is possible for the delivery of the message to become as much of a phenomenon as the message itself.
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Digital Hubbing
Digital Hubbing is the discipline of driving consumers from their intial brand contact point to a central, digital location in order to gain a greater sense of a brand's experience. Digital Hubs work best as online experiences highly targeted to the core message of a campaign, and which extend and enhance a consumer's understanding of a brand.
Essential to the practice of Digital Hubbing is the creation of other, carefully interwoven, digitally active "media" such as SMS, WAP, blogs, etc.
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Rapid Prototyping
Yes, we strategize, conceive, plan, buy and present. But we also film, edit, score, write, orchestrate and color correct. Thanks to significant advancements in computing power, those functions historically reserved for high-end (read: expensive) production houses, have now come within the core skills of the agency creative team. As a result, armed with high quality digital cameras and videocams, as well as professional editing and sound design applications, we can now create finished video and music for all but the most demanding of viewing environments.
So, now, storyboards become semi-produced films. Print comps employ publication-ready imagery. And radio can be heard in a state that closely mirrors the final product.
Best of all, it no longer takes months and months to arrive at a viewable product that resembles (or in many instances, is) the final product. Thanks to digital imaging technology, it's now a matter of days.

Experience Design
Created properly, product design and the resulting consumer experience becomes as powerful a marketing weapon as the marketing campaign itself. Nothing engenders Word of Mouth like a stunningly designed product. But practically without exception, the true subject of Word of Mouth is the user experience.
The ethnographic skills of our Planners are perfectly suited to developing better product understanding as relates to the user experience. Whether it's leisure travel, banking products or traditional package goods, there is tremendous value in objective assessment of the consumer's product experience. And without fail, if you listen properly, consumers will suggest how to positively shape the nature of that experience - often yielding insight leading directly to development of new products altogether.

Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative research practice used predominantly by cultural anthropologists when studying tribal societies. Recently, this research practice has been adopted and evolved by more progressive marketing communication firms. Immersion in the behavior and belief system of consumer segments provides ethnographers with deep, rich, relevant learning. Ethnography includes methods such as passive observation, in-depth discussion, active participation, and video cataloguing, and is a tremendously efficient way to develop otherwise unobtainable consumer understanding.
Ethnography is a key component of the Analysis & Understanding phase of Brand Acculturation.
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Ambient Engagement
Ambient Engagement is a highly cost effective way to amplify awareness of your brand, and create a stronger, more organic relationship between brand and consumer. Buzz marketing, viral marketing, influencer marketing, and evangelist marketing that includes methods such as blogs, online videos, and ambassador programs provide a method to speak with, rather then to, consumers. The result is a stronger, more engaged, more organic relationship between brand and consumer. As more and more consumers tune out and question the credibility of traditional advertising, evolving how we approach advertising, and maintaining a two-way line of communication with the consumer will be essential. And, for those marketers who have smaller budgets, Ambient Engagement can yield massive ROI.
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HybridPR™
An elastic blend of Advertising, Public Relations, Promotions and Interactive Media, HybridPR is perfect for those weary of expensive, unproductive and traditional advertising-oriented marketing approaches. The key to HybridPR's success lies in its ability to generate significant unpaid media exposure as a direct result of interwoven marketing initiatives specifically designed to generate high-profile publicity.
We've applied HybridPR to national clients with significant marketing budgets, and to regional clients with limited budgets, with equal success.
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Experience Mapping
Rarely does a consumer/product interaction happen in a single, isolated instance. The consumer experience is best described as a wandering, map-able journey. Experience Mapping, the first step in the process of Brand Acculturation, describes in great detail the journey every consumer embarks on when engaging with a product. It unveils the emotional dynamics inherent in each distinct step of their journey. And uncovers important, leverageable points of potential contact along the way.
Often, the process of Experience Mapping reveals as much about product deficiencies as it does marketing opportunities. As such, it can be an important component of the separate discipline, Creatively Guided Management Consulting.
The process of Experience Mapping primarily involves agency Account Planners, Contact Planners and Client Strategists. It also involves the client to a significant degree - as the insights gained often have implication far beyond the traditional bounds of marketing.

SynchroMedia®
Traditional media plans presume effectiveness based on frequency and the power of collective impression. But with traditional media's waning power, and consumer stimulus overload, the interval in which media impressions are made can have widely varying effect on marketing productitvity. Common sense dictates that the more greatly dispersed the message interval, the less likely recall, and therefore ultimately trial, is to occur.
SynchroMedia, exclusive to BCF, reverses this trend by collapsing the period of impression to within a matter of days, if not hours, creating Instances of Synchronous Exposure™ (ISE) - the bedrock of the SynchroMedia discipline. The net effect of ISE is the impression of more media mass than actually exists. Further, by exposing the consumer to multiple impressions from diverse sources within a highly concentrated period of time, we create a sense of phenomenon - the sense that, "Wow, this XYZ product must be a big deal." Experience shows that when a product has perceived cultural mass, consumers generate invaluable Word of Mouth, the most powerful, trial-inducing medium of them all.
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Mobile Digital
Through the permission-based delivery of content to PDAs, cellphones and other wireless digital devices, Mobile Digital allows marketers to repeatedly connect with consumers outside normal media channels.
Mobile Digital includes delivery of experiential, functional and promotional content and can be used to support brand awareness as well as drive immediate consumer action.
When technologically integrated with modernized versions of traditional media like digitally activated outdoor advertising, Mobile Digital can be a highly intrusive way to activate a brand.
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Brand Essence Development™
A brand certainly must have a competitive market positioning. And it must have a clear consumer benefit and related messaging as well. But today, that alone is not enough. Logic won't win the day.
Many of today's most powerful brands rest on difficult-to-explain, emotion-driven, and highly intangible consumer allegiance. In short, they've found ways to be about something consumers find meaningful. That's where Brand Essence Development comes in.
A vital component of Brand Acculturation, Brand Essence Development is one of its key outcomes. In short, it is an expression of the heart and soul of the brand. Beyond the familiar, positioning/benefit/messaging components of a brand, defining a brand's essence provides a strong, emotional, gut-level understanding of it. The Brand Essence speaks in the language of the consumer's heart - translating traditional marketing-speak into expressions more resonant with the consumer.
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PartnerShift® Marketing
Co-Marketing, or Partnership, is by no means a new phenomenon. Pairing two similarly aligned brands for mutual benefit is a growing practice, and typically accomplished by partnering brands of like stature. But, the real trick in partnership marketing is to pair a lesser known brand with one having significantly greater heft, instantly creating heightened perceptions of the lesser client brand. Creating such an environment, one where the client brand enjoys the halo of the more powerful partner brand, is precisely what PartnerShift Marketing is all about.
At the core of PartnerShift Marketing lies the imperative to create sufficient value that the dominant brand sees reward in participation. Absent that, successful relationships are rarely forged. Establishing such value is invariably the outgrowth of focused, creative thinking.
PartnerShift Marketing is a tremendous way for a brand to very quickly leap to an entirely new level of credibility and recognition.
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