Since our inception, Faith has helped countless businesses develop their brand; that is, how they choose to put themselves forward into the marketplace. For many people, this starts and ends with the visual elements of the business: logo, hero colours, fonts, templates, etc. But here at Faith, when working with businesses on branding development, we constantly trying to always bring it back to a strategic underpinning. This strategy is developed in part with the business ensuring that everything written out is agreed to by both parties to ensure that there are no complications down the line.
Working with a business, this strategic underpinning is made up of 4 steps:
- Competitive Analysis
- Goal Setting
- Audience Selection
- Self-Assessment
Competitive Analysis
Typically, when working with a business to develop their brand, first we want to understand the marketplace for similar competing businesses. Whether these competitors are direct (similar businesses) or indirect (businesses that offer alternative products but may still compete for eyeballs), it’s important to understand who you’re up against and what their branding says about them, so as to position your brand accordingly. If your marketplace is heavily crowded but full of older, less well-presented brands, perhaps you want to pitch yourself as a younger, modern brand differentiated by price. There are so many variables that are truly unique to each individual situation.
Goal Setting
Once you have a clear understanding of your competitive landscape, the next step is to develop brand goals. These should be heavily dependent on the key takeaways gathered from your competitive analysis. Ultimately, these takeaways are leveraged into a brand vision: a catch cry that should be informing every single action the business takes, from service, hiring, branding, and marketing. This vision is critical and needs to be embedded across the entire business and bought into as quickly as possible. This vision should essentially outline “what you do”, “how you do it”, and “why you do it”.
Audience Selection
In our experience, this is the easiest part of brand strategy development, as most businesses have a fairly good idea of who they want to target. However, if not, the previous two steps can certainly help to fill in the blanks in terms of who you want to talk to. Competitive analysis should identify who is currently being serviced by the industry, while goal setting can help colour some of the detail around how you want to service customers, which can inform who those customers are. Generally speaking, we rely on the business owners to help understand who the target audience is, as they are the experts in the field.
Self-Assessment
Finally, we take everything we’ve outlined through the previous steps and answer a few simple questions to determine what our brand identity really is. These questions include points about capabilities, brand personality, shared values, self-image, purpose, and internal culture. Being able to speak to each of these points from the perspective of the business allows for a full picture as to who the brand really is.
In Summary
The branding development process is not without its challenges (it’s certainly not as easy as four paragraphs), but at Faith, we work closely with businesses to identify these points. And most importantly, this branding strategy does not need to be run progressively with elements such as creative design and other branding development; they can all be run simultaneously, ensuring that all elements are reflective of each other.
If you need help developing your business’ brand or just want to clarify some of the strategy underpinning your current outlook, get in touch with us today and let’s talk!