When it comes to branding, there are core concepts we need to cover to ensure a robust and customer-focused marketing plan.
Mission: What does your business want to achieve?
Mission Statement: How is it going to achieve its mission?
Values: What rules will it play by?
Vision: What will the world look like when you achieve your mission?
Business Viability: Will your business actually work? Looking at opportunities, risks and business landscape.
Statistical Analysis of the Business: Interpreting internal and external data, how to highlight trends within the business and how that affects branding and marketing.
Market Validation,Target Audience and Personas: What is your market, who is in it, and what are their triggers and fears?
Personality: Tone, Voice, Opinion, to help entice your target audience to use the business.
Benefits: Why should your customers use you?
Physical Branding: The traditional side of branding such as logo, colour scheme, style, brand guidelines. Decisions made here will be based on all the work done throughout the business.
Branding is about what your business stands for – its mission, values and priorities. There’s a physical side of branding too – messaging, benefits, logo, colour scheme, personality, tone of voice and more.
Within branding there is also the understanding of who your customers are and what they want. All branding should be for the benefit of the customer, not the business.
We start by scoping and defining the brand, understanding where it needs to be and formulating a strategy for delivery. Then understand how to adapt to changes in market and customer appetite so you can deliver on that strategy.
We also look at how to combine research, marketing reports, market testing strategies and more. And then pull these things together alongside a full positioning strategy, including tone of voice, physical branding, and mission and vision statements.
Underpin Marketing (and our book The Five Step Marketing Plan) focus extensively on creating truthful and disruptive company identities. We have worked alongside organisations from across the spectrum, from traditional players to new market entrants looking to make a splash.
By building on a solid customer-focused mission, we help create a brand that customers respect and value. This is a sustainable model, as opposed to trying to hoodwink or outright lie to the customer about the company’s benefits – or provide them with a service that doesn’t match the branding.
