Brand Strategy, Design and Creative Agency Auckland
Brand strategy allows for intentional design which has an equatable value
We’ve outlined this tried and tested sequence below to show you how we can quickly and effectively arrive at a solid point to kick off your rebrand. If you have tried to skip these strategic steps, launching directly into design, we may not be on the same page as you or even worse, your customers, leaving the creative process diluted and ineffective resulting in safe choices and mediocre designs that don’t embrace the company’s unique offerings or clear differentiators when comparing with their competition.
Given the demanding job a brand needs to do, to carry the company name and values through visuals, text and all communications well into the future, having a clear set of guidelines and rules to ensure consistency, the rebranding process is not only recommended, it’s a time and cost saving necessity. And this is how it’s done…
Step 1
What's on your mind?
It’s best to start with an informal “chat” preferably with the CEO and CMO. Here we can discuss the rebranding process and more about your needs and goals. This is a FREE consultation.
Based on your requirements and details from this initial discussion , we’ll send you a proposal detailing deliverables, SOW, costs and timing.
If you want to contact us for a no-obligation chat, click here or else keep reading to see how you can increase your brand value with a few simple steps.
Step 2
Shallow Dive - finding your pulse
We conduct one on one interviews with a few of the c-suite team, management, ground staff and customers. For this we use a feedback tool whereby we ask you questions through personalised and curated videos. You’re able to provide feedback through video, audio or text and remain anonymous if you so wish. These are insightful and fun as many of the questions are multiple choice and image based to keep it light and engaging.
Step 3
Deep dive
We unravel your input from the shallow dive feedback and create a deep dive set of questions to better establish the details to achieve the following goals and more:
- The company purpose – why are you in business?
- Values – what value do you offer that differentiates you from others
- Client personas – who are you serving?
- Collaboration – who do you or could you work with to improve your brand
- Innovate – what do you need to do to consistently show up as your best brand offering
- And more – there’s many more revelations to be made from this deep dive which we have the experience to identify, assess and consider its value.
Step 4
Finding your beat
We analyse all of your feedback and add to it, the company research we do on our side, not only of you but your competition. NOTE: We do not research the company beforehand as we need to remain unbiased and impartial so as to not influence our questions. What we’re aiming to do here is establish a number of things:
- Your purpose as a company
- The value you bring to your clients
- Why it matters which is very important to unravel to better establish your brand
- Customer personas
- Your archetype – are you a hero, adventurer, and innovator etc
- Your category and if possible, we can create a new category entry point for you
There are many other revelations that will show themselves once we’ve looked into your deep dive answers which carry us swiftly and efficiently into the next stage.
Step 5
Stylin the scapes
We design a stylescape to best align with the discoveries and revelations we’ve made in the previous steps – the interviews and analysis phases. Using this, we can discuss, identify and suggest the most impactful solutions and ideas influencing aspects of your rebrand including but not limited to:
- Logomark
- Wordmark
- Tagline
- Palettes
- Typefaces/fonts
- Imagery/photography styles, usage, purpose, colours, cropping, environment and appeal.
- Mock campaign concepts
- Graphical/vector styles and icons
- Tone of voice
- Mission statement
This acts as a precursor to your brand guidelines documents.
Step 6
Refining your beat
Based on the above feedback, we refine these elements to solidify these elements that are to best define your brand. The starting point is to address you logo redesign or refinements. It’s worth noting at this point that we will have arrived at a very solid point on which to build your design assets and concepts. With this process we get clarity, team commitment and solidarity but most importantly, an understanding as to how we arrived here having been involved from the start. This gives everyone who contributed a sense of pride and buy-in mindset, committing to and ensuring that they are great ambassadors for the brand moving forward.
The future profits and success of a company is largely dependant on the brand reputation as brand equity values repeadly show.
“With clothing brands, people will generally say they’re better. You have a $5 shirt and a $20 shirt, and the only difference is a label even if they are the same. People tend to think the brand is a lot better, which is not always the case.” – Marty Neumier in his book Zag.
Step 7
Capturing your beat
We create a digital guideline document which is available online and can easily be updated. Brands do evolve as tech and trends shift, and so we don’t recommend a printed version as they can become redundant with outdated versions floating around, especially confusing for external marketers and may do your brand some harm.
Step 8
Making your startup, a stay up.
We help you to take your brand into the future. The discoveries you will uncover during these sessions will also contribute to areas such as campaign management, target audience, marketing platforms, social media marketing choices, SEO, analytics, UI and UX.
