Digital Kitchen + Methodologie: Sustainable Brands 2015

Our Process

The perfect marriage of exceptional brand strategy and extraordinary activation.

Brand

A company’s brand is its most valuable asset, and when managed well it pays big dividends—market differentiation, customer loyalty, employee alignment and competitive advantage. We believe great strategy provides the basis for building enduring and engaging brands.

Position

The insights we gain through research reveal the core of your brand—the intersection between your customers’ perceptions and what the internal findings show to be universally true. We build a strategic platform from this foundation, defining your company’s purpose, positioning and personality.

Purpose articulates your intent—why you do what you do. Positioning conveys what makes you different from others. Personality captures your authentic and unmistakable character. Working in concert, these brand elements act as a touchstone, inspiring and aligning employees, shaping the tone of conversations and giving customers a compelling reason to engage with you.

Messaging

Your brand has to stand out to get noticed, but to take the next step it also needs to stand for something. That’s because relationships are built on shared values, beliefs and preferences. It takes courage, but the rewards of unequivocally saying that this is what you stand for and this is what you can’t stand, are huge.

It’s how to create authentic, emotional and sustainable connections with your audience. We excel at finding the emotional core of a brand, the center of gravity that inspires great work and creates long-lasting relationships—and at communicating that core, while working within your organization to ensure that everyone can, too.

Storytelling

Every brand wants to stand out from the crowd. The brands that do it consistently well know that surprise is key. That’s because people are wired to pay attention to surprising experiences. They act on the most primitive and emotional part of our brains, and we can’t help but remember them.

Generating this level of influence is critical for turning communications into sales. We do it by combining provocative insight, ingenious invention and daring storytelling to create work that never fails to surprise.

Reporting

We’ve been crafting annual financial and sustainability reports for Fortune 500 companies for more than 25 years. With a deep understanding of the process, audiences, trends and value of reporting, we’ve devised strategies for shifting reporting online, increasing stakeholder engagement and unifying disparate CSR efforts under a single program brand. Our team is GRI G4 certified and is adept at navigating complex internal and external stakeholders with the goal of producing an accurate, authentic and leverageable sustainability report.

Activation

Reporting is more than a moment-in-time snapshot of an organization’s activities: it’s an opportunity to collect stories, data, achievements and opportunities and share this information throughout the year. We work with clients to activate the rich content in their CSR reports and transform it into video series, employee engagement campaigns, social media activations, leadership communications and anything else you can dream up. CSR communications are bigger than the report alone: they disclose your organizational goals for building a better world and a long-term successful company.

Case Studies

Tableau

Whole Foods

Tableau

Although a young company, Tableau Software has experienced rapid growth and popularity among enterprise businesses for their business intelligence and data analytics. Tableau engaged Digital Kitchen to help uncover what was behind the data and visualizations: to tell the stories of the impact Tableau has had on people and individual lives.

To view video, use password ThisIsDK.

Tableau customers are an incredibly passionate group, with unique and impressive stories of personal change—their stories became part of a customer film played at Tableau’s employee conference as a way to share back with employees and to demonstrate the importance of their work. Since then, we’ve filmed new stories from brand customers such as Wells Fargo and the Texas Rangers from their points of view—each with similar successful outcomes evoking the emotional and business impact of Tableau.

To view video, use password ThisIsDK.

When it came to the annual Tableau Conference in 2014, Digital Kitchen was tapped to rethink the conference branding and website, to bring simplicity and humanity back to the art of interpreting data, and to make the world of data more accessible to the masses. We designed an energetic brand system that extended across all conference materials that resonated with clients and customers.

Whole Foods

Earth Month has come a long way since 1970; however, the holiday is often co-opted by corporations that conveniently use the occasion to tout their own records and educate the public with half-baked “going green” tips. Whole Foods reached out to us to break through the clutter of Earth Month and authentically engage with those who see sustainability as a mission, not a fad.

Together, we launched a socially driven campaign to celebrate and redefine the often underappreciated subculture dedicated to sustainable living.

We established Whole Foods Market as a company that celebrates the core values of Earth Month, participates in sustainability practices and engages local communities 365 days a year. Via website, social, in-store branding and custom influencer kits, we developed Earthlingmonth.com and trounced the typical greenwashing that occurs in April by racking up over 40,000 unique visits during Earth Month, surpassing expectations by a whopping 372%.

The Earthling campaign fostered authentic eco-dialogue, community action and involvement in Whole Foods Market in a truly meaningful way.

We Are Earthlings Join Us poster in bakery

2014 Gold Addy for Integrated Marketing Campaign — Seattle American Advertising Awards

Target

Avery Dennison

Target

The Target brand is one of the most consumer-loyal brands in the world, known for its playful, creative and engaging brand expressions. And yet their sustainability reporting was lacking the storytelling and narrative for which the Target brand is renowned.

We worked with multiple internal stakeholders at Target to help them elevate their storytelling, their design and the impact of their work. Beginning with a redo of the structure of the report, we collaborated to map a brand-new Value Chain that better reflects the depth and breadth of their activities and better positions them to report using the GRI G4 framework.

We infused the report with visuals, infographics, interactive features and that compelling Target brand. The result? A beautiful, functional and, dare we say, irresistible expression of their corporate responsibility activities—one that everyone can get excited about.

From social media to corporate website, we worked with Target to make sure that the good work and good stories captured in the CSR report extended their reach.

Overall, our best CRR yet! Great partnership and CSR brains helped us make many improvements. A huge success.

Katie Hagen,
Internal Marketing & Enterprise Communications

Avery Dennison

Avery Dennison is an 80-year-old Fortune 500 company, with a strong track record of sustainability and a commitment to innovation and evolution that starts at the top, yet extends to nearly all 60,000 employees. In 2014, they approached Methodologie to help position them as a sustainable company and then communicate that position and vision.

Through a series of stakeholder interviews, competitive reviews and strategy sessions, we developed an overarching sustainability messaging platform that will carry them into the future and help drive everything from social media to video, meeting agendas to their sustainability report.

Critically, we aligned their three business divisions around the corporate center and a single purpose:

To Be a Force for Good.

Today, we’re working with them on everything from their sustainability report to video to thought leadership, helping to tell their story, authentically.