The Branding Process

How it works, what to expect and where the hell do you even start.

We’ve talked about the importance of branding, rebranding, and why having a strong brand is key in helping your business stand out and build loyalty with your audience. But let’s take a few steps back and talk about how you even make a brand in the first place.

You’ve created a business, product or service, and now it’s time for the fun part: making it a brand – the combination of things that come to represent your business in the minds of your customers and the world at large. But what’s the first step? Well, if you’re here reading this, you’re off to a good start. Seeking out an experienced branding agency (like us) will help you navigate the process, consult on strategy and be the creative technicians to build out all your brand art and language. As a branding agency, we ask a ton of questions, get to know more about you and your capabilities, then we get to work. That’s the quick and easy explanation to the “first step”. Obviously, it’s a bit more complicated than that, so we’ve broken down the entire process here to empower and educate you when you’re ready to bring your brand to life. 

Before we jump in though, it’s important to note that you’re not just taking the business you’ve worked so hard to establish and wholly placing it in the hands of an agency to mold. The branding process is a very deliberate, planned process that requires collaborative effort. There will be feedback, discussion, pushback, deliberation and a round or two of revisions – all of which will take some time. As nerve-wracking as it may sound, it’s equally exciting, too. After all, you want to make sure you’re making all the right choices and pushing some of the boundaries beyond what is expected. But by working closely with branding experts, your brand starts to take shape, creating a coherent identity that will benefit your business and leave you wanting to plaster your new logo or tagline everywhere…including a potential tattoo. No, really, it’s happened. 

Every agency does things a little differently, but here’s how we do things, and what you can expect.

RESEARCH

First things first, we need to know more about you. This goes beyond doing an online search and checking out your current website. That’s just barely enough for the first call. Once engaged, we go deeper, usually through a series of intake steps where we listen to your concerns, hear about your history, find out what’s currently happening with your business, why you came to us and what your intended goals are.   

Just when you think we’ve squeezed every bit of information out of you, the questions keep coming. If possible, we’ll conduct brief internal surveys to get a better idea of other brands you and your team are inspired by, which ones you don’t really like, and why. We’ll also ask what kind of emotion or feeling you want your brand to exude, what customers are drawn to about your product or service and a run down of the history of your company. This all helps us understand requirements, preferences, or specifics that are important to you and could be the building blocks of your brand. The other thing we’ll ask you to provide is your company’s current mission, vision, target markets, brand values, personality, perceived strengths, known weaknesses, direct competitors and your unique selling proposition. It’s also important to share any findings you have about what your intended audience thinks. If you haven’t done that research yet, don’t worry. We can help you out using some of the tactics we discuss here.

All of this information gives us insight into how your business operates, what it values and who it seeks to connect with. From this we can uncover what you have to tell the world, and what makes your story unique. It also helps you learn if stakeholders and decision makers are all in agreement with that assessment and your business’ desired trajectory. Once everybody is aligned, we’re ready to take the next step – strategy.

STRATEGY

Now that we’ve uncovered specific company objectives and are armed with plenty of market research, it’s time to take things to the next level – building out your brand strategy.

After the research has come in, our team and your team analyze the findings to help develop a broad strategy on which direction to take your brand. This is one of the first steps in developing your brand positioning – or how your brand will present itself, what niche it will carve out against competition and what will come to mind when consumers think of your brand. The job of the strategy is to create a foundation that will set the tone of your communication and provide a compass that your team can always refer back to, ensuring consistency and solidifying your brand positioning. It also helps set boundaries and guidelines as we go to the next stage – creative development and design.

CREATIVE & DESIGN

We’ve got a plan. Everybody’s on the same page. Now it’s time to make it real.

With a strong foundation, we begin creative development by translating it into a visual and verbal identity. Over the course of a few weeks, the creative team takes all that information and starts designing what your brand will look and sound like. This comes to life in the form of a brand identity – the symbols, signals and characteristics represented by logo design, fonts, color scheme, icons and a voice that gives your brand a personality and turns it into an experience that customers can interact with.

Of course, this could come together in many different ways. So it’s not surprising that in the first-round presentation you’ll see 3 or 4 creative interpretations that include different logos, color schemes, fonts and taglines, each sticking to the strategy in their own distinct way. From there, we continue to work together, discussing the merits of each direction, narrowing down to one execution and tightening up visuals and voice until they’re seamlessly connected and offering a unique, yet grounded expression of the brand.

LAUNCH

The day has arrived. All the research, planning, ideating and creative sweat has been transformed from strategy into a living, breathing brand that’s ready for market.

But before you go showing it off to the world, the most important place to introduce it will be inside your own business. Your company’s employees are its greatest brand advocates and need to understand its vision, identity and beliefs to fully support it. With a clear grasp of where the brand is going and the whole team backing it, it’s time to release it into the wild with something we half-jokingly call “Brandslation.”

Brandslation — a word we invented just for this occasion — is how we outwardly translate your strategy, visuals and a voice across different points of audience contact. The look, the feel, the brand voice – all the creative development – comes forward through your website, presentation decks, advertising, social media, signage, packaging, vehicles, uniforms, invoices, swag and your office environment. And because we’ve stuck to the strategy, everything is consistent and hangs together delivering crisp messaging, and clearly identifying your position and value in the market.

And that matters, because consistency is perhaps one of the most important-yet-simple ways to build and maintain your brand’s identity, especially once it’s left the nest and is in the hands of partners or vendors. If assets are used incorrectly by others, it can result in inconsistent messaging and a sloppy representation of your brand. Over time, this can dilute and distort your brand, what it stands for and how it’s perceived by your audience. So how do you keep that from happening? By sticking to the brand guidelines we create for you, of course. 

BRAND GUIDE

When the work is done, approved, blessed and/or signed off on, we hand off a brand style guide that lays out explicit and precise direction on how partners, new employees or anyone working with your brand should handle all these elements so lovingly crafted. It’s like a rule book on how your brand’s logos, color schemes, design elements and voice should be used. It’s also a really great onboarding tool to give new employees a deep understanding of what makes your brand tick so that everyone stays in sync.

Seems pretty simple, right?

It all makes logical sense. But like we said, creating a durable brand that can flex as needed over the course of years and maintain its power across a number of touchpoints is a thought-out, lengthy process.

And though this outline may seem like it could be rolled out in a matter of weeks, you should expect, at minimum, 4 months to commit to the steps outlined above. As exciting as it is, and as badly as you may want it, trying to rush through everything will not produce the outcomes you are looking for or make your brand as strong as it could be. But by taking the time to focus on research, strategy and creative design, a comprehensive brand can be created. Then with an implementation plan in place after launch, you can continue to nurture your brand and invest in its growth, all of which will pay you back for years to come.

Which leads us to the big, important questions:

Are you ready to brand your business but not sure where to start? Step 1: Find yourself a good branding agency (nudge, nudge). 

How is your current brand performing? Is it not firing on all cylinders and in need of a refresh or even a rebrand? The rebranding process is similar to what we have outlined above, and just as essential in how we help companies jumpstart their existing brand.

What about growth? Are you expanding your market presence and not sure how to adjust your brand to meet new targets? The right research and a few adjustments can help steer you in defining your brand as your business grows.

And finally, as you can tell, we like asking a lot of questions – knowledge is power. But we’re also interested in your questions. So what branding queries can we answer for you?