Overall, because branding is about creating and sustaining trust it means delivering on promises. The best and most successful brands are completely coherent. Every aspect of what they do and what they are reinforces everything else.
Wally Olins
When your company is growing, how do you implement changes and build a strategy without losing current brand recognition? Building a brand on strategy as well as visuals.
Building a brand for the future
When building a brand, you need to be aware of where the company is going. Are there any areas of growth that will mean you need to change your language – new audiences, or a new product range? At a dozen eggs, we believe in flexible branding – a brand that moves with you, and ensures any decisions around change are intentional. They key is preparation. Brand strategy is about mapping communication – when do you lead audiences to uncover certain parts of your brand?
Take a rebrand for instance. Depending on your audience, you may want to do a ‘brand launch’ — unveil a new brand identity that feels very different to what has come before. This tends to be the best route if your customers love change, or your company has a major image problem. However, the most likely strategy will be a slow and steady roll out. Could you rebrand without a new logo? What do your current customers like about you? Work out what a successful brand rollout would look like and begin to implement it.
As a branding studio, we tend to ask clients to be vulnerable with us around business decisions. If a short term goal is to ensure most of the business is online, you will need a logo thats recognisable small, a colour palette that has been developed to steer people to calls to action as well as be brand led, and other brand elements that are strong enough to allow the logo to hide. A theatre with a young audience who love the arts will be able to take more risks with their visuals than the Royal Shakespeare company – so a brand that can be adapted every season and stretched to its limits maybe a way to go.
Sub branding is a perfect example about the need to plan for growth. Research groups tend to need systems developed for sub branding; a structure that can be adapted and is robust enough not to suffer from long project names or complex ideas. Charities who work alongside a wide spectrum of audience types need different ways of communicating their brand – often sub brands are developed to do just that, but the overarching brand needs to be flexible in its form to allow for sub brands to slot into place.
Whilst the actions around branding for company growth tend to be implemented by branding agencies, unearthing the company plan needs to be done by the stakeholders involved. A lack of information in this area can result in failed or short lived brands.