Brand Authenticity

Over the seven years we've been supporting brands, we've lost count of how many startups we've worked with. Maybe more than 200… or maybe we're undershooting. We've always seen this digital ecosystem as an explosion of opportunities and possibilities: the emergence of new business models, the democratization of information and communication channels, new methodologies centered on agility, a different way of understanding work…

For a few years now, these possibilities have spread not only to the entrepreneurship ecosystem, but to the vast majority of companies and businesses across all sectors. Even those most entrenched offline—like education, pharma, or energy—now have their tactics integrated into the digital sphere.

This exponential increase has been leaving some consequences that aren't so positive for growth. There's a lot of talk about the fierce competitiveness, especially in B2C. There's talk of rising acquisition costs in advertising, a tool that not long ago was key and highly profitable for many businesses. There's talk of saturation in organic channels and the challenges of connecting with your audience through third parties who control your visibility entirely, or even the privacy and security of your users.

But the complexity of the digital ecosystem runs even deeper. Messages that worked yesterday don't work today. People considered influential lose relevance or even become counterproductive. Channels we could once count on have stopped working. In this volatile and ever-changing environment, is luck our only option?

Change is the only immutable… or is it

Anyone working in the digital ecosystem will have heard a thousand times that the only immutable thing is change. At Soluble we disagree. Since we started, we've defended—and can now say we've proven—that there's something more about brands that won't change: their essence.

This is relevant when your goal is a rebranding, shaping our website, or simply activating our brand, but this exercise is feasible from the moment we have a somewhat clear picture of our market fit.

In any of these cases, dedicating time and resources to discovering what a brand is as the foundation for growing in a consistent and flexible way is one of the most profitable investments a brand can make, and also efficient, honest, and above all, sustainable.

Why? Because this will help you make coherent business decisions, choose only optimal opportunities to achieve your goals, and allocate time and resources to adding value—instead of being stuck in an endless loop of trial and error without a reference point for what your brand actually needs.

From this premise, at Soluble we design strategies based on what the people who make up that organization already are, already do, and what they could do, as well as their purest motivation. This approach requires stopping the focus on rising trends or the latest brand that's gotten everyone talking. In fact, if you stop to analyze why those successes happened, one way or another you'll arrive at the same magic word: authenticity.

Observe and put into perspective

Authenticity means finding the attributes the brand has, whether its creators are more or less aware of them. This requires us to immerse ourselves in the company's reality, its context, and above all, the people who make it up. We never stop saying that immersion is the most crucial part of any project, whether it's rebranding, design or web development, or the launch and consolidation of an action plan.

Once observation is complete, it's time to put everything we've found into perspective. Our goals—whether short or long-term—truly understanding our audiences, and knowing the terrain we're playing on is fundamental to this part of the work. What we're looking for is to surface the strengths that will help us connect with the right people.

We never lose sight of the fact that all of this must generate useful, easy-to-apply tools. That's why it's essential to work carefully on strategic and practical concepts that crystallize the benefits of the strategy: facilitate decisions, shore up opportunities, guide acquisition, align the team, and connect with the people we're addressing. All of this, to be more effective in meeting today's goals and moving closer to the transcendence we're seeking tomorrow.

Brand platform to encapsulate the essence

In this final part, the brand platform comes together—a limited number of sentences that must be capable of encapsulating the complex universe of the entire brand, its possibilities and opportunities so they become executable tools. A challenge that would seem impossible if we didn't have the power of words, their meanings and nuances, which are key to embracing the consistency and flexibility a brand needs in the digital environment.

If we do our job well, when we present the results to the people we work with, they experience a single surprise: seeing themselves reflected in words they've been searching for a long time. That sensation of the suit fitting perfectly with the brand's reality and aspirations makes the next step easy: coherence. But that's worth another Solublabla.