Simple, clear and focused, Trax Associates offers an accelerated and innovative approach to re-orientate business and institutional thinking in the building of brand goodwill and market competitiveness through converging knowledge and capabilities.

Key frameworks used in the Trax Method© are as follows:

– The Brand FCD© Strategic Planning Tool (Convergence)
– The CSE© Competitor Signaling Environment (Competitiveness)
– The Trax BrandDesign© Workshop, (Visioning)
– The market-think® Learning System (Alignment)

Once integrated, these proven frameworks ensure that what consumers see, feel and experience is delivered through brand-driven business policies from planning through to execution and measures. What makes the comprehensive Trax Method© relevant and timely for emerging market companies is the culture it promotes through continuous learning, skills enhancement and knowledge sharing across all brand – related capabilities and processes.  Especially for organisations without deep brand competencies, experiences and structures.

To demystify the complexities of brand building at every phase of brand development, Trax Associates developed the Brand FCD© as a central concept to drive the convergence of what people see (in form or the representations of identity), what people feel (for the personality of how an organisation behaves), and finally what people experience (the way products and services are delivered) through your business. While brand building becomes easier through the adoption of this model, new brand-related disciplines, processes and capabilities need to be integrated within an organisation as your brand evolves.

The CSE© or the Competitor Signaling Environment was first developed and piloted on the building of Malaysia‘s first fuel brand – Techron Unleaded – for Caltex Oil (now Chevron Corporation) in the mid-1990s by Yasmin Merican. With the Brand FCD© as a measure of brand strength, the ability to rapidly audit and track competitive brand power through this innovative approach facilitated the development as well as the market response strategies before, during and after the successful launch of the Techron brand. This method was also deployed a decade later at national oil corporation Petronas between 2002 and 2004 and also at many of Malaysia‘s larger organisations as an introduction to competitive market thinking and monitoring.

On the leadership’s decision to brand and invest through board policy or management decision, the first aspect of brand building is to engage key stakeholders from the Board to C-2 executives on their collective market vision. The BrandDesign© Workshop – usually conducted – over a weekend, travels through six (6) distinct activities from a pre-workshop audit of the organisation through a during-workshop exploration on perceptions, an understanding of the competitive environment to effectively positioning, aligning and finally converging commitments post-workshop for the blueprinting of the brand plan. The BrandDesign© Workshop was first piloted at Petronas between 2002 and 2004 and was recently deployed at TalentCorp in 2016. A proven method accelerating consolidation of organisational inputs and commitment to new learning on competitive market and brand leadership.

To compete with the best in the world, no company or institution can escape the strategic brand development route, especially if the intent is to grow brands as a competitive and sustainable advantage. The market-think® system was developed on the realisation that the fastest way to new knowledge in any discipline is to converge learning within an empowered function from brand strategy development, knowledge and customer management, people, process and systems alignment, communications integration to performance management. While the majority of brand projects at emerging markets usually start from a project platform, the market-think® approach builds the knowledge and process foundations for accelerated brand learning and competencies to manage brand value or equity  over the longer term.

Once the business is ready to institutionalise at the mature brand building phase, and when board policies and leadership commitment to brand is more strategic, the  new brand-driven business impetus requires the physical presence of an empowered brand department. As successful brand building requires converging, rather than linear or vertical process interface from many within organisation and from many in the external brand ecosystem (from design through to communications and business process integration), the ‘Living Brand’ workspace was uniquely designed (in collaboration with Malaysia’s GDP Architects) to shape new responses for individual and cross-functional learning within the centralised brand unit and across the organisation.