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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Southern Growth Studio?
The Southern Growth Studio is a brand marketing and product innovation consultancy with offices in Oxford, Miss. and Memphis, Tenn.
How does the Southern Growth Studio work and think?
Strategic Insight Gets Results
Unlike traditional advertising, public relations, interactive marketing, research, and design firms, the Southern Growth Studio insists on rigorous, measurable strategies for client projects and accounts.
Results come from a deep immersion into a client’s business and a process that leads to valuable insights and on-target actions that successfully commercialize a product, service, or company.
Pragmatic Approach to Marketing and Innovation
Studio members view marketing as a value-generating toolkit and competitive leverage, not as the manufacturing of artifacts. The Studio sees innovation as a pragmatic and necessary aspect of any thriving business, not as a buzzword without plan or process.
Brave Clients Apply Here
Clients call on the Southern Growth Studio when they are ready to leap, create new markets, or redefine the marketplace.
Most of our clients have keen entrepreneurial instincts, whether they lead their own private companies or lead a division of a publicly traded corporation. We work well with company leadership, directors, brand managers, product managers, as well as with companies without dedicated marketing or innovation teams.
Clear Point of View
Studio members share their encouragement, passion, and deep experience by hosting workshops, giving presentations, publishing articles, and speaking on many aspects of marketing, innovation methods, and business strategy. We learn, teach, collaborate, and clarify issues for clients, the market, and ourselves.
What does the Southern Growth Studio do?
The Southern Growth Studio helps organizations find new streams of revenue inherent in their brand. We inspire top-line revenue growth by recognizing and amplifying opportunities.
Services
Methods include branding or re-branding a company or product, leading a non-traditional marketing campaign, or crafting and launching a new product, service, or line of business.
See THE LIST if you want to know every type of service or project we have touched.
Classic
What we really do is marketing in the classical sense. We help clients with upstream planning and strategy, create market-centered innovations, lead downstream marketing efforts, measure the effectiveness, and adapt for maximum return.
The Golden Thread of Experience Alignment
Knowing that each organization must make sense to itself and to all its audiences, the Southern Growth Studio helps clients discover or recover their Golden Thread, the intangible essence that really defines an organization.
Next, the studio uses the Golden Thread to inform strategic decisions, set priorities and plans, plan, and gain market share for clients. Finally, the Studio maps all of a client’s experiences, ensuring that every touch point with each audience conveys the quintessential spirit of the organization. We call the outcome Experience Alignment. Experience Alignment gets real results.
The Growth Engine
The Studio applies its Growth Engine methodology to inspire and focus client innovation. There is no Holy Grail to innovation, just a lot of smart, hard work and a simple process. Ask any investor: no idea or product concept matters that much in itself. The successful execution of a worthy idea makes the difference.
The Growth Engine gives a clear framework for successful innovation:
- The Growth Engine measures, validates, and quickens commercial endeavors.
- We translate the process and results for clients along the path of discovery.
- We talk math, markets, and sense.
- We make sure clients understand our recommendations, plans, and actions—and that all questions are answered concretely and visually, where possible.
- We set clear goals and serious deadlines. Innovation is business, after all.
- The Growth Engine methodology supplies the freedom to invent and the structure that ensures key projects get the traction, resources, and focus they require.
Interactive Background
Studio members have interactive DNA. We grew up during the Web and digital era and then learned the principles of traditional brand marketing and communication.
How we use interactive tools:
- To connect commerce and customer. We craft compelling interactive campaigns, rooted in the intersection of business strategy and user desires. The Studio’s award-winning interactive marketing is a cost-effective way to drive business.
- In integrated campaigns that use a wide variety of tactics. For thousands of projects, we lead interactive strategy, design, content, and development. That includes social media marketing to AdWords and e-mail campaigns to viral microsites, dynamic sites integrated with backend systems, software usability, and more. Again, check out THE LIST—it’s expansive.
- With wired experience. We have a long list of awards, publications, and thought leadership on user experience, Web design, and how businesses prosper by using interactive tools to better connect to the market.
What does the name of your company mean?
The Southern Growth Studio is a new breed of service organization. We are fierce, ardent capitalists on a social mission. We practice economic development the old-fashioned way, by working hard and using our talents and experience wisely.
Southern: We choose to live in the fertile, authentic place called the South. All of the old stereotypes have passed and the region is birthing a new culture.
The Mid-South remains a nationally and internationally renowned hub of invention, innovation, and a thriving place to launch, grow, replant, or locate a business. Rock’n’roll, overnight delivery, the motel, the luxury range, Astroturf, and so much more have grown from our native region.
Growth: We apply the timeless virtues of hard work, inventive thinking, rigorous planning, and courageous, calculated leaps on behalf of our clients.
The whole region must improve its quality of living to grow opportunities for all. If the region creates new markets or leads a game-changing leap in a market, the old aphorism holds true: the rising tide raises all ships.
Studio: We are NOT an advertising agency, a design shop, or a media broker. Such models of marketing are dead or dying. Studio best conveys the type of work we do and collaborative culture we aspire to embody.
Takeaway
Think of the Southern Growth Studio as quicksilver for entrepreneur leaders.
© Southern Growth Studio. All rights reserved.
Ready to grow? Email aquavita@southerngrowthstudio.com