Corporate Presentation

1. Consultancy in strategic brand building and management

2. Branding is everything one does to connect business
strategy with customer experience, generating
preference, loyalty and, ultimately, sales.

3. About us
What we do
Why we do it
What we do it for
How we do it

4. A dream space for thinking
A project small in size, large in ambition
An idea brands as strategic tools
An objective learn to spread knowledge

5. What, why, how and what for
brandSmith is a Madrid-based consultancy that since 2008 helps
organisations understand and manage their brands so that they can fully
integrate them into their business strategy, transforming their potential value
into real value.
We believe that when built on solid conceptual foundations, a brand becomes
a first-class management tool that pulls and pushes strategic decisions that hit
the mark: those that are successful in the marketplace and that clarify the
culture of the organisation.
To do so, we lead self designed brain-storming sessions at top executive level
in search of brand-concepts, that we then turn into actions that are deployed
throughout the brand’s four areas of influence: people, product,
communication and environment.

6. Conceptual branding
Based on Christopher R. Smith’s twenty years experience in advertising,
design and corporate identity project management, brandSmith proposes a
new approach to brand builiding and management: conceptual branding.
This line of thought and action maps out a route that goes beyond logotypes,
names and symbols. It is in fact more of a journey in search of the emotional
intangibles that make a brand unique and different to others, and of the four
vectors that give us the full scope of it’s nature: it’s what, it’s how, it’s why and
it’s what for.
The results unfold in the shape of ideas and concepts that bring consistency
and coherence to every strategic decision that the organisation has to take,
especially those that have to do with human resources, research and
development, business growth and, of course, marketing.

7. Christopher R. Smith
Christopher is a specialist in strategic branding. The As a speaker, he is regularly invited to a wide range of
founder of brandSmith works directly with his clients, business forums, and has been delivering keynote
developing and defining the concepts that stand behind speaches at the Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Bilbao
the brand and helping deploy them throughout the Manager Forums since 2006. He also participates in in-
organisation and the market. company training sessions for multinationals such as
Eroski, Orbea, Roche or Disney. His articles have
He is a member of TopTen Strategic Marketing Spain appeared in specialised business press like Manager
and of Lid Speaker Agency. His book Differential Business Magazine or Expansión.
Identity: Brands that Lead, Innovate and Create Value
(Crecento, 2009) was published as part of the Top Ten Born in Kent, England, in 1969, he holds a degree in
Business Experts Collection by the business newspaper Image Science from the Complutense University of
Expansión. He is also co-writer of Beautiful Pyme, Madrid, and has further studies in Design Management
Pratical Ideas in Marketing and Communication for (EOI) and Design and Advertising (IED).
Small and Medium Sized Companies (McGrawHill,
2005) and contributes to the books I Symposium on the In his previous posts as Project Manager at Sendín &
Thought of Javier Fernández Aguado (ORH Grupo Asociados and as Creative-Executive Director at
Editorial, 2010) and Design and Company (Limite Adverbo, he ran brand-based projects for the Spanish
Design, 2007). Government, the Tourist Department of the Regional
Government of Extremadura, Grupo Mahou-San
He is Professor of Strategic Branding at the EAE Miguel, PwC, Grupo Santander and Accor Services,
Business School (MBA, International MBA and Master among others.
in Marketing Management) and he teaches at the José
Pons Foundation on their Master in Industrial Property.

8. Services we offer
Brand-concept generation workshops
Strategic brand tool-kit creation
Consultancy for internal deployment of brand culture
Advice on the development of a 360º brand experience on the market
Systematization of brand architectures
Internal and external brand perception audits
Study and analysis of positioning and corporate identity status
Naming, taglines, design and redesign of logotypes and symbols
Graphic and Visual Identity Guidelines
Creative and design of brand books
Colateral design: stationary, editorial, web, etc
In-company training

9. At Orbea we have been working with Chris regularly for a few years
and we are delighted with his professionalism and his ability to
interrelate with the company’s task teams. Beyond his insight on
branding, he has helped us think about and establish our own
experience in a way that is more orderly and valid for us to plan
our brand-orientated activities.
Miguel Ocaña Arizcorreta
Managing Director, Orbea

10. Our way of doing things
Our style
Our three principles

11. Our style
Creating a positive brand experience requires ability in strategic planning,
management and above all, conceptualization. To get it right, however,
demands a deep knowledge of the context of the brand. This is why we work
closely with our clients and their teams to make sure that we all understand:
- What the differential and relevant traits of the brand are
- How the brand acquires meaning in the mind of the prospect
- What connections exist between the brand and user’s enduring self concept
- How to convert intangible returns into real value
This approach results in an atypical style of consultancy that, given the
indispensable honesty and mutual confidence, evolves into an experience of
joint exploration where more than imposing our solutions on our clients, we
strive to help them find their own.

12. Principle #1: ideas first, words come after
Just as any other brand consultancy, at brandSmith we have our own work process that naturally adapts to
each client’s monetary and agenda requirements. The three phases, however, are designed with an
inalterable criteria and order: conceptualization, systematization and execution. And that’s because
speaking without thinking is like shooting without aiming.

13. Principle #2: self-knowledge
Before delving into the branding riddle we must be able to pin-point the particular and distinctive
traits that define what and how we are. To do so, instead of thinking about logos, names and
symbols, we must pull away from the product and deepen our understanding of our company
identity. It all begins with a correct consciousness of who we are.
BRAND EXPERIENCE
DEVELOPMENT
WHAT OTHERS THINK
AND SAY WE ARE
WHAT WE THINK AND
SAY WE ARE

14. Principle #3: webwork of meaning
Brands come to life in prospect’s minds in the form of a complex webwork of meanings that are
generated over time in every conversation we establish with them. The essence of a brand is not the
logo or the name, but the collection of memories, experiences and data that people associate with them.

15. Chris is an extraordinary professional with an outstanding creative
capacity, ready to work intensively so that the project maximizes
client satisfaction. A marvellous person.
Javier Fernández Aguado
Managing Partner at Mind Value, Top Management Consultants

16. Our work
Four examples:
Orbea
Dolmar
Ágathos
Hune

17. Rethinking a legendary brand
brandSmith has been working non-stop with Orbea
since 2008. Orbea is a Spanish world class bicycle
manufacturer with sales of some 70 million Euros of
which 65% come from sales in over 70 countries
abroad.
Orbea needed to refurbish the brand, and we have done
so top-down, without touching the logo, reworking the
brand concepts with the Management and then working
on the internal deployment of the concepts with different
task forces. The most evident result of the job that we
have undertaken so far is a 220 page book that brings
all the concepts, ideas and strategic challenges
together.
We are presently working on the external activation of
their newly defined identity, creating concepts for their
stores, graphic and language atmospheres for their
communication and redefining brand architecture.

18. A new brand for international markets
Dolmar, a group of companies dedicated to RD
and innovation in oenology, has hired
brandSmith to study their present brand portfolio
and to redefine the master brand before
launching an ambitious international expansion
plan.
The present situation of the companies was
analysed and the brand concepts were
reworked in two workshops, where optimal
brand architecture was also revised.
Having finished the conceptualization stage, we
are now working on the name and design of a
new brand.

19. Rigour, knowledge and beauty
Agathos is a newly-created consultancy and
training company for women exectutives and
independent board members. They were looking for
a name and a look and feel that talked about
knowledge and transmitted excellence in execution
in a feminine context.
brandSmith’s solution was to translate Agatha to
Greek, taking our inspiration from the festivity of
Santa Agueda in certain parts of Spain, a day on
which women govern the town, and that in Greek
means “she who is good and virtuous”. The use of
the Greek also connoted intellectual properties.
For the graphics we shot a set of photographs of
agates, that combine and mingle on the different
applications and on the web, in such a way that the
subtle play on lights and shadows resemble the
idea of solid and rocky rigour and beauty.

20. Professionalism and humanity
Hune is the name of this school of personal and
professional development. The prime difficulty was how
to communicate a professional training out-look without
losing sight of the humanist profile of their programmes,
where master degrees in management live alongside
programmes in oratory, family training, coaching and
emotional intelligence.
Hune is an acronym of “humanismo” and
“negocios” (humanism and business), and is
phonetically identical to “une”: unite.The design is based
on the repetition of one singular element, the “u”, that
appears in every letter in different positions.
The original design dates back to 2008 and it was
redesigned in 2010 when the company gained
consideration of an Institute instead of a Superior
School.

21. Christopher has the ability to move between the macro and the micro
without losing the context of the global objective. His conceptual
creativity and his exquisite respect for timing is worth mention. His
manner is always friendly and comfortable. It’s delightful to work
with him.
Jon Elejabeitia
RD Manager at iHune

22. Ideas must be searched for in the same way gold diggers used to try to find gold, with a
pickaxe, a shovel and a dish. You dig, you chop, you look around here, a bit further on, you
look again, you go back to the beginning, you filter it all… Hours and hours spinning the
dish, searching, observing, analysing each fragment from different angles in order to
separate what’s useful from what’s not. That’s how we work at brandSmith, looking for new
ideas first. With patience, effort and time. Thinking and investigating, always trying to find a
better way to explain this branded world.
Thank you for your time and interest.
Christopher R. Smith
+34 607 70 11 59
chris@brandsmith.es
www.brandsmith.es
Linkedin: http://es.linkedin.com/in/christopherrichardsmith
© brandSmith June 2011