The agony of brand ambiguity can impact many areas of business performance, including slow decision-making, team apathy, poor communication and transactional customer relationships – and even leave the marketing department hamstrung from influencing the business.
If you think your business could be suffering from brand ambiguity, our Brand Foundations Health Check can help – in just 5 minutes, we’ll provide you with a personalised report that scores you on four key elements of solid brand foundations.
As a financial services marketing agency, we’ve designed an innovative and proven brand transformation approach that could help take your business on a 90-day journey to achieve authentic and motivating brand foundations and inspire business growth.
We go through five key phases, at the end of which you’ll have a brand that’s clear on its purpose and values, differentiates from market competitors and, most importantly, emotionally connects and resonates with your target audience. Here’s how:
Full brand development process
Phase 1: Brand Discovery
The first step is to make everyone internally feel part of the process and identify the insights that can drive the business forward. This will include:
- Stakeholder interviews
- Employee surveys
- Customer and prospect interviews – we often conduct these with Behavioural Science experts to make sure we understand their real drivers and issues
- Market and competitor reviews – to gain valuable insights into your strengths and weaknesses, allowing us to identify opportunities for your brand differentiation.
We then present distilled findings, discuss and agree on key considerations to be included in the
strategy stage.
Phase 2: Brand Strategy
We’ll then use these insights to present a proposed brand strategy and value proposition to key stakeholders in a workshop environment.
Your brand strategy
Who you are – your brand story
- What you do – services provided
- How you do it – your differentiators and proof points
- Why you do it – your brand purpose
- What you stand for – your brand values
- What you want to achieve – your vision and mission
Your value proposition/s
- Meaningful audience segments
- Audience:
- Responsibilities
- Pains
- Gains
- Single-minded value proposition/s
- Reasons to believe proposition/s
- Articulations that bring the proposition/s to life
We tend to get the brand strategy and propositions about 80-90% right in the initial workshop – and then use the collaborative environment to get everyone to refine and agree on the final direction. We’ve also got another handy blog that goes into a few tips about developing your brand strategy – or check out our case study on how we went about this for My Home Move Conveyancing and Benenden Health.
Phase 3: Brand Identity Refresh
This is where we manifest the agreed brand narrative into something that looks and sounds like you – and helps you differentiate and connect with your audience. This is often the fun and exciting part after all the heavy lifting is done in the discovery and strategy phase. This stage can actually be surprisingly easy (especially with our amazing designers) once everyone is aligned with the brand vision and you’ve agreed on what changes are in and out of scope in the discovery phase.
Phase 4: Testing and refinement
Just because you love the fresh new look or tagline doesn’t always mean that your audience will! Here, we go back to the research desk and double-check that what you’ve developed aligns with the insights you’ve found. And if budget and timings allow, we’ll test and refine in focus groups.
Phase 5: Brand guidelines and moments
This is where we define how to use the different brand components to establish the right balance between consistency and freedom to bring the brand to life across different touchpoints. Guidelines will never be set in stone and should be constantly reviewed to make sure they work for all parts of the business and each channel.
And before it launches, we’d always recommend holding an internal launch day where you roll out the new brand with the team and celebrate together! When the entire team is aligned, they collectively contribute to building a powerful brand experience for your customers.
Ready to secure the foundations for growth?
Clear brand foundations mean no more messaging negotiations via email, no more mediocre creative (because no one can agree on the approach) and no more marketing being seen as a sales support function.
Let your brand and marketing department lead the business to growth by embarking on a 90-day journey to rejuvenate your business both in the short and long term. And the results will speak for themselves – such as our event stand with Benenden Health, which attracted significantly more footfall compared to the previous year and lead to increased interactions and potential leads, and our service campaign with more2life which achieved an increase in market share from just over 20% in H1 2022 to just over 31.3% in Q1 2023.
Last but not least, if you want to chat with us about starting your brand revolution journey, be sure to get in touch!