Brand Strategies and Reviews
We can develop a new brand strategy for you or review your current brand so that your identity is consistent and strong, always – and reflects the message you want to be telling.
How does your brand compare to your competitors?
Could your identity and message be more unique or stand out?
What opportunities are there for growth and strength?
Does your brand reflect the message and meaning you want it to?
These are the questions you have answered when we complete a brand review or strategy.
BRAND REVIEW:
Everything from your logo and colour scheme, to your stationery, advertising layouts, and social media presence, can be reviewed and assessed.
Once all of the necessary samples and information about your business are gathered, a brand report is compiled for you – including information such as: a competitor brand and positioning analysis, branding update suggestions, positioning ideas, opportunities for individuality and improvement, cost saving solutions, and outlining a strategy to make your identity strong.
BRAND STRATEGY:
Basically a brand review, but for a brand you haven’t launched or developed yet!
A brand strategy helps determine how you need to position your brand according to your businesses mission, vision and values – and what that should physically look like through an identity, and how it should be reflected through your voice, culture and style.
A brand strategy is a great option if you don’t want to undergo a full brand development, but need some professional and insightful advice to start you off in the right direction.
We consult with you on all the important aspects and compile the strategy for you.
Your brand strategy includes: identity values, cultural values, suggestions for voice & communication style, colour psychology and suggestions, logo and symbolism guidelines, and brand architecture (if relevant).
We can even help develop a set of brand criteria for you so your own designers and strategists can do the work for you in-house.
Our Method & Approach
Our approach is logical, methodical and backed by reasoning.
We use science, and craft brand criteria for you based on your own feedback so you know the strategy and elements used to put together your brand actually do represent your corporate vision and ideas.
Our strategy service delivers the following phases of our brand development process:
You can choose to include Phase 1 only, but for a thorough solution we suggest both phases, as the second phase includes the visual components of your brand.
Consultation and survey with you
This might mean sitting down with you one on one over a coffee, or a meeting with your board and decision makers – depending on your scale and size of business.
This is the most in depth part of the process – and the most critical.
At this stage we go through a very in-depth serious of questions or a brand survey with you (either as a management team, or as individual stakeholders) and we gather insights in to your values, business, and vision in order to craft your brand criteria.
Questions you get asked here might be something like – who are your biggest competitors, or what makes you different to your competition, or if your brand was a person – what would they look like.
This might sound daunting. But it wont be. We step you through it all and there are no wrong answers.
How much involvement we have here is up to you – we can take you through each insight and put the answers together for you – or we can provide you or your executive team with a survey link and you can fill it out in your own time.
Brand Criteria – STRATEGY PHASE 1
The next step, is we craft together a brand criteria based on your feedback in the consultation.
This is where we present back to you in very concise and clear points on things like your top key values, recommended brand style (design style, naming style, positioning, architecture etc), corporate culture and voice (what style of communication you should use) – all of which best represent your business.
(We don’t have to include all of these elements if they aren’t needed.)
Once you’re happy with the broad strategy we provide here we move on to the next phase.
Competitor analysis and brand design criteria – STRATEGY PHASE 2
This is where it gets interesting.
Based on your brand criteria, we assess your competitors, your market, your values and we craft a list of recommendations for what your brand needs to include – as in visually and creatively to meet the criteria we determined previously.
This might include naming (as in, should you use a single word or a surname, or an acronym to name your business), colour – what will make you stand out in the market and what colours (using colour psychology) best reflect the set of values and criteria we developed earlier, and logo shape &/or symbolism – what should your logo represent or stand for? And what shapes or symbols should you avoid or include to send the right message.
This criteria then acts a checklist for which you can evaluate each of your design concepts against for strength and appropriateness.
From here you can take advantage of our brand development services and we can put together design concepts for your brand, or you can take your strategy and provide this to your own in-house designers or marketing strategists to craft your own identity.