For more than twenty-five years, we've been expanding how organizations understand, leverage and apply Brand. That work has led us to a simple conclusion: Brand is capable of contributing far more to an organization than its traditional role has allowed. Applied at a higher level, Brand becomes a strategic business discipline that expands a business' overall value and potential. Our Firm Profile provides an overview of the thinking that has shaped Cohesion, the philosophy tha

For more than two decades, organizations have invested heavily in technologies, platforms and capabilities that transformed Performance Marketing into one of the most measurable, manageable and accountable business functions in the enterprise. The investment was well placed. It also created an unintended consequence. While Performance Marketing evolved dramatically, comparatively little attention was devoted to expanding the functional role of Brand. Today, many organizations

The obvious time to engage an outside brand resource is for a planned brand initiative. Major efforts like brand, product and service, launches, rebranding, repositioning, portfolio reframing and more. But in addition to those planned efforts, we’ve found that the deeper and more impactful value of our brand work comes from day-to-day stewardship: The work with leadership teams and marketing to constantly calibrate brand and business direction as the organization subtlety evo

When some leaders see “brand” they often make a mental jump to: “Oh, this is about marketing.” But this is about something bigger than marketing, alone. Something that works in practice for the highest levels of leadership. At Cohesion, we've spent years building a proven approach that unlocks brand from marketing and uses its principles to drive strategic value for the business itself. Because when brand is confined to marketing, strategic potential and business value stay l

In many organizations, leadership teams do not describe the business or its key assets in the same way. Ask five leaders to explain what a product, platform or the business itself is meant to be, and you will get five different answers. The differences are often subtle. But they show up in how priorities are set, how decisions are made and how the business and its offerings are presented. Over time, those differences create friction: Messaging shifts depending on who is speak

Far too often, brand integration efforts start with naming and identity. After months, and sometimes years of planning and negotiation, the detailed strategic thinking that went into a deal is many times pushed aside for a process that resembles business decoration. The real brand issue is defining what the combined business can and should be, before deciding how it is expressed. After an acquisition, leadership is usually pushed into a set number of potential options: Keep t

You can’t build what no one owns. And in most small and midsize companies — and yes, even some larger ones — no one truly owns the brand. Management assumes marketing is handling it. Marketing assumes that strategy was already decided. And the reality? Everyone is simply “too busy” to deal with it. We see this over and over: Mid-level marketers buried in trade shows, campaign execution, and martech platforms. Agencies focused on deliverables, not direction. Executive teams la

Thought leadership. Issue campaigns. Reputation management. At Cohesion, we've been working with organizations for more than 25 years to leverage key issues to drive corporate brand positioning, understanding and value. This work represents a unique blending of business strategy, brand development, marketing / communications, public relations and social media. As a full-spectrum brand agency, it's work that Cohesion is perfectly built to develop. And while many companies dab

For Holland, a growing construction services firm that was founded in Illinois and has expanded to Missouri, Cohesion was engaged to...

In 2022, Cohesion was engaged to develop a corporate brand positioning and messaging platform for Spartech, a leader in engineered...

Waterway Carwash is widely recognized as the leading innovator in the car wash industry and has multiple locations in St. Louis, Kansas...

Internal issues can significantly impact a company's ability to support its brand effectively. Some of the biggest internal issues...

It was 1994 and I* was receiving a CLIO award in San Francisco for a three-word billboard I wrote for Volvo. What I knew to be true had just been validated: It’s all about the message. Now, years later, our firm has proved that truth over — and over again. For some of the largest organizations in the world; for the most complex businesses and situations. Without the right message, (and the right strategic positioning and marketing foundation) marketing is ungrounded, and too

It starts with large and mid-sized organizations that have subsidiary businesses, profit centers, properties, products, services and/or brands. Organizations large enough to have complex marketing and sales needs (and challenges), but not necessarily large enough to support (and fund) a variety of separate brand efforts. [Too many choices often make understanding (and purchasing), difficult.] One day it happens: “I think we need our own logo for our (fill in the blank from th

In many cases, companies that hire agencies expect that those agencies will properly nurture and manage their brands -- even though...

We’ve learned a lot about how large and midsized organizations function and behave during our 25 years of business. One of our key...

The Journey To Create Efficiency; Ensure Consistency For more than 20 years, we've been honing a process that begins with a blueprint. An...

The Art of Framing Perception As a strategy firm, we are often engaged to help businesses, brands and solutions (products) become more...

Since 1999, Cohesion has been working with private equity firms -- directly, and through portfolio companies -- to create and enhance value. We are named Cohesion because that's what we help organizations find. A more cohesive and integrated structure. Deeper and more relevant meaning. More consistent and reliable revenue and value. Private equity faces a unique challenge: How much should we invest in integrated planning for one portfolio company or platform, given that our e

Prior to its transition to Mercy South, Cohesion was the brand agency for St. Anthony’s, a community health system brand in south St....