What is a brand?
A brand consists of the visual assets and styles that come together to form one cohesive image. Although aspects like the logo and name are important, branding can be anything that has the power to affect the way the public views the business.
Strong branding will enable you to differentiate your business from your competitors. It will also enable you to make more of a connection with your audience. By creating a positive impression, retaining existing customers and attracting new ones will become easier. This can even result in organic marketing for your business as your customers will want to advocate for your brand.
1. Brand Research
At Storm12, our first step when creating a brand is the research. This research will consist of analysing several factors: the age of the business, its industry, competitors, target audience and business goals. The aim of this research is to define strategies that can enhance your brand and give you an advantage over your competitors. By benchmarking your current brand perception, equity, loyalty and preference, we can determine the areas where we can improve the brand, monitor those areas and identify success.
2. Brand Positioning
This process can only begin after thorough research. Brand positioning defines who you are and why consumers should buy from you rather than someone else. The key to your brand position is a positioning statement that describes you in a short phrase or a few words that talks to your potential customers, at Storm12, we refer to this as the value proposition. We can then create a strategy that targets engagement with your customer, defines your sales channels and sets you apart from your competition with key differentiators.
3. Brainstorming
After our research and brand positioning, we can start brainstorming. Whether it’s to come up with a new brand name, a logo or an entirely new branding strategy, our creative team works with you to define your business’s new approach. This is a particularly fun and creative process, we like to get as many opinions and ideas as we can before deciding what’s going to work best to enhance your business’s success.
4. Logo and Brand Identity
This step is another fun, creative and innovative part of the process. Using our knowledge on your business and research from the previous steps, we will create logo concepts that fit your business and accurately represent the brand. We can also design and determine your typography, tone of voice, brand colours, fontography and more, ensuring every aspect of your branding aligns with the business’s values, goals and target audience.
Check out one of our previous blog posts, outlining the eleven elements that help build your brand and why you should use them: What makes up a brand?
To find out more about our design process click here.
5. Protection and trademarking
This step can seem a bit daunting for a small business, but we can help and advise you on how to go about it. We do preliminary checks to make sure there's nothing obvious, such as a name that is already taken by another business, but an expert would deal with the actual trademarking process. Protecting your brand through a trademark is definitely something to think about, particularly if you are a larger business or sell your own products. Trademarking ensures no one can infringe upon your intellectual property. We can refer you to excellent trademark and intellectual property attorneys who specialise in this field and will be able to guide you through the process.
6. Brand activation
Brand activation is when we bring everything together; the logo, colours, personality and research, to create your complete brand. Our marketing team will work with you on a brand activation strategy to launch your new brand successfully. Our brilliant web team can build a new website for your business to target customers and our super smart digital team can define an engagement plan. All whilst the innovative creative team defines messaging that engages with your audience.
7. Brand management
Discovering how your current brand is perceived by the public enables us to determine how the brand should be perceived in order to meet your objectives and business goals. This is an important step which helps us to keep your brand looking up-to-date, consistent and exciting. It also enables your business to continue attracting customers whilst maintaining your current customers.
As you have discovered, there really is so much more that goes into branding behind the scenes! Our creative team at Storm12 are here to take your branding to the next level, not only through creating the visual elements but by doing the thorough research beforehand to ensure every part of your brand is designed specifically for your target audience and optimised in order to enhance your business and achieve its goals.
If you are looking to rebrand your business, or simply need some help with your brand, be sure to have a chat with us to find out more about our creative branding process.
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