Developing a brand for your company, whether you’ve just started out or you’re well down the road, can be a daunting prospect. It’s a scary time, getting the right brand is much more than just picking the right logo, and it can make or break a company’s identity and how their potential customers view them.
Creating and developing a brand doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a delicate process and takes a lot of consideration – here are some of the stages of brand development, and how agencies like us help companies find their identity and their brand direction.
1. Listening to you
When we’re helping companies develop their brand identities, we realise that listening to who you are, what you want to achieve and where you want the business to go is paramount to choosing the right brand that works. One of the main stages of brand development is listening – taking the time to understand who you are, but also look at the bigger picture of where you’d like your company to go.
2. Recognising your challenges
Another important step in terms of recognising a brand direction is acknowledging challenges that face your business – whether that’s in terms of competitors, market forces or factors outside your control. Creating a strong brand with longevity can go some way to circumventing these difficulties – finding out what your competitors and the rest of the market is going is a crucial step – and creating the right brand for your company can cement your position within any particular industry.
3. Developing a strategy
Using learning from your time spent recognising the difficulties and challenges your business faces; one of the next steps is to develop a comprehensive messaging strategy. This takes into account different target audiences, and looks at the kind of tone and voice in your brand that would appeal to each sector. Although your core branding will generally stay the same across all audiences, different people will be interested in different aspects of your brand, and companies generally tailor the messaging within their brand to suit.
4. Website development
Today a brand cannot survive successfully without an extension to their persona being online. Many lifestyle and fashion brands have adopted this attitude to a great extent – an intelligently designed website is your most important brand development tool. A good website is the perfect platform to show off your brand – tell your story, show the world what you do and convey the message you’d like to send. Bear in mind that no matter how strong the brand, if you have a poorly designed or thought out website it can be difficult for potential customers to trust you.
5. Keep making adjustments
A solid, well thought out brand development campaign isn’t a one-time affair – it will need constant evaluation and testing to determine if it’s still relevant and still fulfils what your customers expect of it. There may be a number of times within the lifetime of your company that a small brand refresh is necessary to correspond to what your competitors are doing. As customers continue to get savvier and more aware of their options, getting the right brand development strategy right is paramount to the future of any company, no matter how small.
To discuss how bob can help your company find its voice and direction, visit our brand development page, call us on 0117 973 9326 or email info@meetbob.co.uk