Building Brands for Bands, Businesses

Ben Nunery, founder of Powerhouse Factories

Building authentic brands – for both bands and businesses – is music to everyone’s ears at Powerhouse Factories.

“From the beginning, we’ve implicitly understood how musicians and bands have a good approach to brand,” says Ben Nunery, the co-founder of Powerhouse Factories. “Musicians have always lived and died based on their ability to intersect their image with their music. If their persona and their product aren’t aligned, people just aren’t interested. This is the same fundamental challenge that big brands face every day.”

Powerhouse Factories was founded as a small gig poster shop in 2004. “Over the past 10 years, we’ve designed posters for musicians like Bruce Springsteen, The Black Keys and Wu-Tang Clan,” explains Nunery. Since then, they’ve expanded into brands in the consumer goods, food, home and retail categories, just to name a few.

It was apparent from the beginning, Nunery recalls, that setting up shop in Cincinnati’s corporate branding hotbed of P&G, KAO and GE would propel Powerhouse Factories toward becoming the agency it is today. “Powerhouse Factories found itself parlaying passion for design and marketing bands into big brands,” Nunery explains. “Whether we had planned on it originally or not, we quickly found ourselves in the middle of the action.”

The biggest lesson learned from the past decade in business, Nunery says, is to hone in on a specific approach and grow capabilities to help the brand align their stories with their actions to create meaningful, authentic experiences. “Today, we believe bands are still doing this way better than most brands do,” he explains. “We are committed to the idea that brands need to live what they sell. This is a simple idea but traditional brand and advertising efforts often fly in the face of this logic. The world doesn’t have a shortage of stories; it has a shortage of brands willing to live up to the stories they tell.”

That’s why Powerhouse Factories is committed to helping businesses explore their branding, marketing, products and engagements as a unified consumer experience while helping them to develop and deploy powerful initiatives to complete their brand message. In addition, according to Nunery, Powerhouse Factories is thought of as a brand “enculturation” agency.

“We offer interactive digital, branded and unbranded content services, social media support, experiential marketing and PR. This range of expertise allows Powerhouse Factories to enculturate brand messages across communities in more authentic and culturally relevant ways,” explains Nunery. “We’re interested in helping brands intersect their brand stories with actions that demonstrate their point of view and reinforce their message.”

Powerhouse Factories also offers quantitative and culturally focused research and insight, as well as strategy or “brand catalyst” services that help brands explore, refine and optimize their consumer connection opportunities in the new social era. Plus, says Nunery, Powerhouse Factories support decision-making processes within organizations and can also implement those decisions, ideas and insights across the organization.

For more information visit powerhousefactories.com or their Facebook Page.