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Introducing the Brand Process for SMEs at Our North East Design Agency

Monday 30 July 2018

10 minute read

By Tom Mather

Here at Thrive, we love a good process, especially if it works.

More to the point, we love brands. Which is why, behind the scenes, we have been further developing our branding process, streamlining our branding questionnaire and introducing new exercises to our branding workshops.

Overview

We believe that your brand should have the ability to evolve and develop with your business without constantly changing your identity to do so. A rebrand is a complex undertaking for any organisation, but planning and forethought can make the whole process an easier experience for all involved.

That’s where our branding process comes in. It allows us to immerse ourselves in your business, conduct in depth research and explore ideas and applications so we can deliver visual impact, effective positioning and a strategy that continues to work for you.

Brief

The early stages of our process are the most critical, as the information we gather at this point forms the basis of your entire brand.

Connect, our first meeting if you are a new client or a catch up if you're an existing customer, is a great opportunity to get to know you and gather an initial insight into your business, as well as understand your objectives, plans for growth and direction for your brand and marketing strategy going forward.

We tailor the branding questionnaire and workshops based on this information, so we can dig deeper and really understand your business essence during the Brief stage.

The questionnaire is designed to get you thinking about your brand, ask questions that you may not have considered and can reveal either a strong, well-positioned brand or highlight missing areas or a lack of focus. Either way, this can/will be an asset to your business and help us fully understand where you are coming from.

Our workshops are a great way to involve the rest of the team. Bring along the people on the front line and get to know your business through their perceptions. Again, this can/will add value to your business as you often find those ‘golden nuggets’ of knowledge from your customer facing staff.

Once we have collated all the information, we Explore this further and start to plan our research for the Discover phase of the process.

Discover

The Discover phase is where we start our research, looking at your business placement and how it sits visually, compared to your direct competitors and within your sector. These are collated on the walls of our office like a moodboard, so we can look at everything as whole.

We look at the visual elements from each brand and take keywords from the questionnaire and workshops, as a starting point for the word association. We can then add visual representation to the words that resonate more with your business and, from here, we can then look for specific inspiration, trends and logomarks for when we to sketch out ideas.

At this stage in the process, we start to question and seek reasoning behind our sketches and ideas, making sure that this not only ties in with our research, but also right back through to the initial discussions. We Analyse the sketched ideas with the information gathered in the briefing phase, helping us carry forward a final idea to creation.

Development

Where your new identity is brought to life! Development begins by working up the final sketch on screen and generating variations of the overall concept. Once we have developed the brand style, we introduce fonts and colours, whilst trying various lockups for how the logomark sits best with the text.

At this stage we consider the rollout and how the logo will work in basic application i.e. with imagery, additional text etc. before we move onto the Approve phase. This is where we analyse the final logo and relate this back to the Brief and Discover phases to ensure we have not missed anything along the way.

Proposal

Once we have discussed and approved the final logo, we start setting out the Proposal document to get it ready to present. We pull together all the relevant information to form the initial section of the Proposal, guiding you through to the concept stage of the document. This consists of the development of the logomark, to the final full colour version.

At this stage, we start to work on the detailed application of the rollout, showing how the brand will work going forward. This can include, stationery, printed material, social media, website etc. to name a few, which are all tailored to you and your business. Once these are added into the Proposal, we are ready to Deliver your brand to you for your approval.

When we present your brand to you at the Deliver stage of the process, we can take you through our research, moodboards and ideas so you can completely immerse yourselves in the branding process and our thought process. This will help your to see where your brand has come from, before we take you through the Proposal document, to unveil your new brand and ultimately open up discussions to share your thoughts.

Conclusion

Our new branding process has been developed through years of experience and positive feedback from our clients, who have been through this process. We have also added more value, with our revised questionnaire and workshops, giving you something tangible that you can take away, while also giving us a good starting point for our research and ideas.

We also love the fact that we have been able to create a graphic that visually demonstrates and defines each stage and help you to understand exactly what it is you are getting from our branding process.

So, if you are looking for visual impact, effective positioning and a strategy that works for you, why not get in touch to see how we can help you.

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