A process of discovery,
codification,
and expression.
Clean, clear expression.
Your brand is your promise to those you serve of how you help them. It’s not about you, it’s about your audience and their aspirations. Brand discovery is a unique opportunity for you and everyone in your company to review your promise—your purpose—and how you express it.
I start where you are. Are you clear on your audience and their needs? Do you understand how you fulfill their needs? Some of my clients can answer these questions easily. Others need to uncover, review or affirm their assumptions. All seek clarity that they can share both internally and externally.
❶ Clarity is the goal. Listening is the strategy.
I call my approach “Listen First”. I start every project by listening. I facilitate group workshops and one-on-one interviews. I seek to understand the organization’s history, and its audiences. I learn directly from stakeholders—team members, leadership, board members, donors/investors, industry influencers and even competitors—about an organization’s services and the features and benefits these services provide.
I listen to the ecosystem the organization lives in. I note the trends that are affecting the industry. I survey competitors and how they present themselves. I monitor social media to understand what others are saying about the brand and the industry.
Such careful groundwork ensures that subsequent brand articulation work is predicated on an accurate reading of and—very importantly—a shared understanding of the organization’s position in the marketplace.
Photos by Maureen Bridget
❷ A map to guide us
At the heart of my process is an essential document I call the Clarity Brand Study. This is my secret sauce. During Phase 1 we listen. During Phase 2 we synthesize.
Typically presented to your whole team as a slide show, the study connects the dots to identify, protect and leverage existing brand equity, and to envision brand-building opportunities.
Based entirely on what I learn during Phase 1, the study recommends a clear and defendable positioning strategy, and it identifies related messaging strategies that will support this brand promise.
The Clarity Brand Study also identifies specific communications strategies that will both promote the new positioning strategy and correct any market misperceptions.
It’s often said that people don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan. This is a plan for success.
❸ Find your visual voice.
One of the biggest misperceptions in branding is that your brand is a logo. It’s not. Your brand is your purpose and your promise. But your logo, and the entire visual identity system that supports it, is one of the easiest and most effective ways to express your brand.
So we spend a lot of time articulating and expressing your visual personality. We create mood boards to help you express feelings you may never have named, or even recognized. We explore myriad ideas about how those feelings might be conveyed as a mark, colors and typefaces.
Then once we find that unique and special representation of your voice, we codify it in a clear style manual. This important document defines and records the core visual elements of your brand such as the logo, additional logo orientations, iconography, use of illustration and/or photography, colors and typography. This ensures that anyone who employs your carefully crafted identity system does so consistently and accurately.
Notice that I’ve started to use the plural “we’ rather than the singular “I”. Once we start expressing your brand—everything described from here on—this is a team effort. To execute creative projects I build dedicated teams of experienced writers, designers, producers and digital whisperers. They know me and this process inside and out. All of the work shown in this website was built by creative teams that I assembled and managed.
❹ Concept, copy, design and production
When you truly and accurately understand your audience and your promise to them, you are ready to design and produce some world-class creative.
No matter the size of your budget, the most effective tools in your communications tool box are clarity and repetition. The steps we practice in Phase 1, 2 and 3 ensure that you will have clarity of point of view. You will be able to confidently describe your positioning and the messaging that supports it.
Repetition is making sure that this positioning and messaging is clearly visible and understandable wherever you come in contact with your audience. From the first time you share your card or an email with someone, to their experience of your website, to your use of paid and earned media, coordinated print and digital communications provide you a powerful means of expressing your unique, one-of-a-kind brand.
And because this process is rooted in clarity first, conceiving, writing, designing and producing these materials—materials that act as an integrated system— is fun, even liberating.
❺ Growth starts here.
A message that is clearly understood by everyone in an organization, and by the people the organization serves, has the catalytic effect of aligning everyone’s intentions and energies toward the same goal.
This brand clarity is a priceless asset. The easiest way to grow this asset is to spread it liberally and generously. We help clients express their brand wherever they touch their audience. These points of contact include, but are certainly not limited to, digital and print advertising, intelligent content marketing, and packaging and environmental graphics.
And purpose and promise give digital tools and media the rudder they need to allow us to find, measure and grow audiences efficiently and effectively.
