Brand Activation That Scales Behaviour Change & Drives Purchase Intent
Grounded is a world-class brand activation agency that closes consumer intention-action gaps and drives behaviour change — especially at retail.
What Is Brand Activation?
Brand activation is the work of turning a brand's positioning into an experience that causes a specific behaviour — a trial, a switch, a purchase, a return visit. They are generally designed to do one of three things. Get more people, buying more often and / or spending more.
Most brand activations focus on short term sales uplift or fit within promotional calendars. Sometimes that’s appropriate. We believe that the best brand activations motivate your customers to come to you for help to grow the category, drive purchase intent consistently at exactly the right moment along the path to purchase (to drive media efficiency and ROI) and help your customers deliver on their own sustainability goals and commitments.
In other words, they should deliver superior bang for your buck and result in real, measurable, sustainable behavior change.
Typically, in a retail context, brand activation includes POSM, retailer activations, in-store experiences, trial driving / sampling initiatives and promotional marketing - designed to encourage a retailer to provide preferential support, feature and display to convert more shoppers into buyers.
More broadly it can be omnichannel marketing, pop events and brand experiences, social commerce or even internal stakeholder programming and engagement…just as long as the aim is to influence behavior and get people to ’do something’ as a result.
THE GAP
Converting Intention into Action
Traditionally, the intention-action gap is described as the shift from "awareness to consideration" in the consumer journey.
Bridging this gap often involves:
• Considering the entire path to purchase from awareness to consumption and even recommendation and referral.
• Focusing on the key moments that matter most to shoppers along that path to purchase
• Investing in product development, packaging, display, or improving navigational education and inspiration in the category to ensure that shoppers are more likely to choose your brand
Here at grounded, we think about it slightly differently. For us, the ultimate goal is to shift consumer behavior toward better, more sustainable choices by addressing and overcoming these barriers to action.
These may include:
• Relevance: Shoppers may not see the product as relevant to their needs.
• Disbelief: A lack of trust in claims about sustainability.
• Disconnection: Insufficient emotional resonance, significance or importance
• Inconvenience: Difficulty accessing or using the product.
• Complexity: Confusion about category options and benefits
It's often said that price is factor - but we disagree. Price is only a factor if the brand is substitutable…which means that the value proposition isn't strong enough - without a clear connection between the WHY and the WHAT. Sustainably helps reframe value, not replace it.
How We Do It: Brand Activation for Good
Brand Activation for Good is a series of design sprints that help you re-imagine value creation with your key customers and co-create breakthrough initiatives to grow the category, commercialize sustainability and drive purchase intent.
So whether it’s’ through branding, design, sustainable packaging, toolkits, campaigns or commercial innovations that embrace the potential of circularity – we can help you advance your customers’ sustainability goals and commitments, get buy-in and secure additional display, investment, collaboration and support - turning reasons to believe into reasons to buy.
THE FRAMEWORK
We can help you:
1. Map the path to purchase.
Find and quantify the biggest intention-action gaps across the path to purchase.
2. Build the big idea.
Build a strategy and co-create an idea (sometimes with your customers) that maps back to sustainability goals and commitments and the commercial drivers of the business.
3. Design and test fast.
Develop a range of claims, mechanics, creative, tactics, experiences and toolkits — all testable in a day
4. Sell it in.
Create a commercial selling story to pitch the idea to retailers and internal stakeholders
Activations That Converted
See our case studies
BIC to School — Bring JOY Back To School.
Turning the back-to-school season into a platform for donating school supplies and delivering tangible joy to teachers and classrooms nationwide.
WhistlePig + Pit Viper — SummerStock
100% solar-powered whiskey, launched with a party rather than a press release.
Unbeeliveables + Delhaize
Harnessing the power of bees to educate shoppers and reward them for helping to protect them.
Lycra + Qira: Farm to Fiber in Virtual Reality
Bringing brands, retailers and key customers to a farm in Iowa at trade events and exhibitions around the world - using the magic of VR.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Most focus on promotional tactics and execution. We use diagnostics to identify the biggest intention-action gaps and where activation fails to convert, then rebuild it to deliver revenue, ROI and impact.
Yes. We can easily sit alongside your current roster of agency partners and provide strategic clarity, creative firepower, tactical planning and even IAT leadership.
Every engagement starts with a full 5C landscape assessment and intention-action gap analysis to arrive at the job to be done.
We identify where they break down: positioning, execution, channel alignment or measurement. Then we fix the exact points where conversion is being lost.
You will get ideas, activations and a selling story after just one day. Conversion ROI and measurable impact follow as campaigns are executed.
Explore Brand Activation In Depth
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