Cerebra

I’m not married and I don’t have kids. The closest I have ever come to being a mom is looking after my two ageing cats. Yet this information became completely irrelevant when I started working at Cerebra, and one of my clients was an FMCG product that was targeted at mothers trying to make better choices for their families. I had to make sure that the brand voice was that of a mother, speaking to other mothers.

Recently (a fellow Cerebran) and myself visited the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra as a team building exercise. While listening to the music I started thinking how Cerebra is like an orchestra.

It all starts with the composer
What do Beethoven, Mozart, Strauss and have in common? A bunch of composers and then John, Cerebra’s strategist … I promise it isn’t a riddle.

Cerebra’s tag line is ‘We are community’ which refers not only to the culture fostered within our company but also through our role as curator of our clients’ communities. In our last post Our Identity Part 1: The Cerebra Mission Statement and Manifesto (or who we are and why we exist) we spoke about our mission statement and manifesto - the answers to “who we are” and “why we exist”. In this post we’re going to talk about “what we do” – the lifecycle that all of our clients’ communities go through before reaching maturity and self-sustainability.

A few weeks back members of the management team at Cerebra got together to discuss how we could better integrate two particular departments within the business. What started as a simple discussion about a business process resulted in some extremely constructive debate and discussion around how we position our company to staff, stakeholders, clients and the market in general.

Our children are living in the information age. They have moved from just chatting via text messages, BBM, WhatsApp, IM, mig33 or MXit. They want to stay in touch with friends; which is where social media comes in. With incidences of cyber bullying, sexting and pedophiles on the prowl, it’s only natural that parents are concerned about their online safety. While you still want to keep tabs on what is going on in their lives and what they come into contact with, you don’t want to invade their privacy and end up losing their trust. It’s important that you educate and empower them by setting proper ground rules.