Every specialist brand development agency will have a comprehensive methodology based on a similar process.

That process should always start with Insights. Research to understand your audience, what motivates and defines them relative to your category, and research to understand your competitive environment, who your competitors are, how they are positioned, their brand value propositions, and what they look like.

The Insights phase leads into the brand strategy process where we establish the most effective positioning and differentiated value proposition for your brand. We then need to develop the layers of brand definition required for an organisation to truly understand how they must behave to deliver on their brand promise, but also how they must look.

The strategy directs the design process, setting the framework for creativity. The role of the brand identity and visual language is to engage with the target audience and subtly communicate the brand proposition, brand story, and brand personality through the power of visual language. Creating a palette of visual assets to be leveraged across all brand touch-points.

This leads to the final phase of the process; implementation of your new brand identity.

Click here to view a more detailed breakdown of our branding approach.

As obvious as this may sound, most branding processes fail to involve the perspective of those people most important to your business success; your clients and customers. Our agile branding process has been designed to provide for inputs from your audience as part of the creative development process. We can provide specialised audience research (qualitative and/or quantitative) that targeted to your needs and designed to address any insight gaps. For some clients this involves integrating their most client-centric staff into the feedback loop, for others it is about adding customer/client feedback on design directions into the creative process.

Click here to read a case study on when ING Direct in the US failed to get their brand strategy aligned with their audience.

Sometimes it seems like every marketing agency is pitching themselves as a branding expert. However the process of separating the specialists from the generalists is relatively simple: Advertising agencies are best at advertising, Marketing agencies best at marketing, Graphic designers best at design, Web agencies best at building web sites… you get the picture. The first and most obvious proof point is answering the simple question; ‘Does the agency have an experienced and dedicated, brand strategy professional?’

Click here to view a detailed approach to selecting the right branding agency for you.

The critical first factor in successful brand development is ‘consideration’. Driven by that mindset, there are no real shortcuts for a branding process to be executed effectively.

Every project and client is different, with some projects taking as little as two months and others lasting for a year or more. However, the average timeframe from kick-off to delivery is around four to six months. If there is research or more comprehensive stakeholder engagement, the timeline will likely be longer.

If you have a pressing deadline we suggest you get on the phone asap and let us see if we can develop a brand development plan to meet your requirements.

Whilst choosing an agency without a specialist competency in brand development is clearly the largest mistake you can make, there are other pitfalls to ensure you avoid. These pitfalls include: Making sure you have the Board and Management Team onboard before embarking on brand development; Wanting to implement a new strategy before the business is ready; Not securing the required budget for implementation; and wanting to take slices of different creative ideas and mesh them together.

Click here to read our detailed list of 10 of the biggest brand development mistakes businesses make.