Effective design will help support one of your business’s assets: your brand.  When it comes to your own brand and how this is nurtured, have you considered the fundamentals?  In this post, Cheshire design consultancy, greensplash, looks at the basics of effective brand development for businesses.

For businesses, branding should be regarded as a very powerful tool that can deliver a differential.  As well as communicating the ‘personality’, your brand also tells customers about the functional benefits and the performance of your brand.  Over time, brand equity can be developed.  This is very beneficial, as a strong, recognisable brand gives customers a reason to choose your company, product, or service over your competitors.

Businesses, with its limited resources, should still think how it is investing in its brand

Building a successful brand can take considerable investment, both in terms of time and money.  For all organsiations, time and financial resources are finite.  It takes business acumen and skill to effectively allocate resources to create that all-important added value.  These limited resources have to be allocated diligently - especially for small-to-medium businesses.  Most SMEs simply cannot afford to spend tens of thousands on branding related exercises – and, to be perfectly honest, nor should they spend huge amounts.  Nonetheless, it must not be forgotten: a brand is an asset, and should be nurtured.  Sound design can support this process. 

Knowledge is crucial

As a professional design consultancy, we understand the importance of adopting a structured process to brand identity/logo development.  To be successful, knowledge is crucial.  Time should be invested into understanding where the brand is and where it wants to be.  This understanding then drives the creative development process.  As creatives, this is the part that we particularly relish.

Key questions for all brand owners

Want to make the most of one of your company’s assets?  Thinking of rebranding?  You can help yourself by considering the following:

- Are you being too short-sighted?

Your brand should transcend fads and trends, and be relevant to your business and the market for a long period of time.  Of course, how long is ‘long’ is dependent on various factors, such as the industry you’re in, and who you are targeting.

- How can you develop a unique positioning concept? 

Think about what your brand offers your customers that is unique to competitors, and then let people know about this. You might need to think laterally about this one – we can’t all have the ‘best’ service or price.   Identity the positioning your competitors adopt and seek out any gaps that can be adopted by your brand that offer positive benefits for both brand and customer.  Importantly, ensure that you can achieve expectations as customers will always remember unfulfilled ones.  It’s not enough to declare it.  Demonstrate it!   

- Are you supporting your brand?

We live in a branded world with lots of opportunities for customers to ‘see’ the brand.  Make sure all these ‘touchpoints’ are consistent in their messaging.  Whatever your strong idea is, talk about it over and over.  Strap lines can be very useful to make clear statements on the ‘who’, ‘why’, ‘when’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of your brand.  A creative agency will help you to spot opportunities and maximise these for the greatest level of consistency across all brand ‘touchpoints’.

- Does your brand speak to hearts and minds?

Customers engage with a brand along a number of dimensions.  In addition to the functional benefits associated with a brand (e.g. engine size of a car), brand owners must consider the emotional benefits (e.g. ‘fun’ feeling of driving a MINI).  Emotional benefits are less tangible in nature, but are definitely powerful. Explore how you can speak to the hearts and minds of customers.

- How effective is the brand logo?

The brand logo should be a visual distillation of all the research and analysis.  This can be a complex task as it requires imagination and design/technical excellence to ensure the final solution is memorable, durable and flexible.  It’s a task that requires a number of skill sets – not just access to Adobe Illustrator (or CorelDRAW or similar!).  To make sure your brand logo is effective, consult a professional creative design agency who can offer advice and guidance in this area.

Interested in knowing more?  Contact greensplash

Contact us to find out more about our full brand development design services.  We would love to hear from you.

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