Defining your brand should allow you to correctly position your brand and clearly identify how your brand looks, feels and functions.
Here at Thrive our streamlined branding process and workshops, as well as our other supporting creative services and tools, are all designed to do just that.
Together this process will help give your brand a voice to speak to the audience you want to target.
Discover how each stage breaks down to position and define your brand:
Stage 1
The first stage is to work with you and your team to define the visual aspects you'd like to see in your new brand. We do this by immersing you in imagery from market-leading brands to your direct competitors. We also include imagery that is purely there to provoke a reaction or thought process, for example, we may show images of two cars - one practical, one sporty. Based on your products and audience, you need to consider which is your preference and which would be the preference of your clients - do you both choose flashy over practicality?
This may seem like a simple exercise but straight away we understand how your new brand needs to communicate with your audience on a visual level.
Stage 2
Next, we map out where your company sits in relation to your competitors. It's important to see where your competitors are, but more so to gain insight into how your potential customers rank you against them.
This helps us to see if you are attracting the wrong demographic and if you need to tap into new markets. Through this exercise we can also identify if your service offering has changed, the way you work has evolved and other things that may have naturally taken place since your company's inception.
Stage 3
This is where we have some mind-boggling fun! We've built a specific framework designed to create a clear, concise picture of both how you want to position yourself and how you absolutely don't want to be perceived. This helps us make sure your key messages are being conveyed correctly and to the right audience, in the right place.
Stage 4
Now we're hoping to test your creative thinking, we ask you to visualise - and eventually verbalise - your company's personality and human identity. This helps us understand the very nature of your business and helps us understand how you would like to be perceived by your customers.
Consider this... your current brand may be conservative and bland, but you reveal to us that your business personality is both loud and outgoing.
Stage 5
Our final piece of the process is typically the most challenging, but most rewarding, as it helps us to pull everything together and define:
- WHAT you do
- HOW you do it
- ...and the famous WHY you do it
A) What you do
First we ask you to define WHAT the rational benefit that the customer receives from you is.
For example, I could say:
"I create brands."
But we'd dig deeper to discover the emotional benefit that this tactical effort brings to your customers...
I might say,
"I create brands that add value and create longevity."
This helps us define what your customers really want and how they use your products/services and if your brand is reflecting this.
B) How you do it
The next question is HOW you achieve this for your customer.
For example, "Being creative" or "Being innovative".
The answers to these questions will help us form your brand values, a few phrases and keywords that encompass how your company is positioned above the rest.
C) Why you do it
The last part of this stage will be pulling together the extensive information we've gathered through the whole branding process to finally define, once and for all, WHY you do what you do.
This ideology more often than not becomes the company's strapline - guiding all future marketing efforts.
Conclusion
Each stage of this process is designed to pull out key information to ultimately define your brand.
All together this information can be collated into what we call your brand story. A condensed step-by-step guide that outlines everything about your company.
Your brand story highlights:
- Internal Drivers: Your vision, values and beliefs
- External Proposition: Positioning, support and strapline
- Personality: How you talk, how you look and how you behave
These three points centre around your company's key objective - completing the WHY aspect of your company.
Whether you are looking for a new brand or a rebrand, we immerse ourselves in your company to understand:
- Where it has come from
- Where it is going
- The people that are going make it happen
- The customers that are buying into you
A well-strategised and thought-out brand that is communicating to the right demographic will add tangible value to your organisation.
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