Making a successful and effective branding or rebranding is like to prepare a good meal. You make a plan, read the recipe, write a shopping list, get the ingredients, prepare them, set a time frame, start, execute, taste, change, taste again, change, taste, finish, put it on the plate, eat. Sounds easy, right? Yes. Is it? For some, yes, for others, not so much.
If you cook for yourself a Sunday lunch, you have to do it the very same way as the top chefs are doing it in restaurants with Michelin stars. The basic principles are the same, the difference is how it is executed. Chefs train (and often fail, try again and succeed) for decades to create their own guidelines of harmonizing tastes, they do and try all over again to experiment with combinations of ingredients, spices, textures, colours, looking for the perfect experience.
When you go to a high-value, 5 star restaurant, your visit will not be only about the food. Of course that is the primary reason why you go out, but at the end, if the meal is great, but the service is awful, the music is loud or not fitting to the overall ambience, there is too much light or none at all, or simply your drink is warm when you like it cold, you will most likely not going to have the best memories of the place. Or if that experience was so disappointing, you might not go back again.
Lets stop here for a second. Disappointment. In branding it is very important to highlight that it does not sell products, it sells a promise. A promise of being healthy and live long, to be practical and ease life or to give high-value and represent status. If your brand promise is not in accordance with your service, oversells or undersells, your customers might be disappointed, which brings a very high chance of them leaving.
One of our speciality is sports branding. The tendencies show three very strong trends of brand development. One of them is the achievement-centered brand. This direction promises to reach your goals, to be competitive and win. Like in the Olympic slogan: Citius, altius, fortius. If the brand promises this, but delivers only average solutions focused on good enough, but not the best, it fails to fulfill it, therefore it is not anymore authentic.
The other trend is the healthy-lifestyle brand direction. It promises personal develoment through the joy of sports and an inner-outer, body-soul balance. If the brand communicates health, fun and harmony in sports, it can cause disappointment, when the product is not well designed, the service in not user-friendly. In this case the brand will mislead the direction and fails its purpose. Other common mistakes brands can make in this trend of they bombard the consumers with information. This category is all about feelings and well-being, not numbers, charts and facts.
In the third case the trend is all about sustainability. This trend is very popular among outdoor brands, where there is a strong connection between the sport itself and the environment, they are interdependent. If the brand promise says that it is sustainable, eco-friendly, fair trade and stands for various social cases, but turns out that their factory facilities does not support these, it can cause some disappointment for the customers, who might question the authenticity of the producer company itself.
As we said previously, the principles of cooking are the same if you prepare your own Sunday meal at home or you go out to a restaurant with Michelin stars. But the knowledge, experince, way of execution behind and the result are obviously different. Well, same with branding.
If you want to be sure that your brand is in good hands, and your business will prosper, let the professionals do their job and deal with your corporate visuals and express your worth the best way, through the eye of your customers. We all know that there are always instant and budget-friendly solutions to make a meal: powder soup, deep frozen pizza and co. But you will not make that to your spouse on your wedding anniversary, will you? Why? Because it counts. Well, think about your brand again. Your business matters to you, so as your customers.
But your brand is not how you see your own company, product or service, but how your consumers perceive it. If you are sure that you have the most innovative products or services on the market, but have a generic, average logo, boring communication assets or playing too safe on your design, guess who will notice that you are outstanding? The problem with instant solutions is that they are not fitting fully to you. They are replaceable, interchangeable and not communicating a distinctive brand personality. They can be anybody's, not only yours.
Lets play a little game now! Next time when you go out on the streets (please, not while driving; if you walk, also stop for a second) and see a billboard, imagine the advertisement without the logo on it. Close your eyes and tell yourself what you see? Do you recognize the brand? If your answer is yes, you can be sure that they did their work and did it well. Now lets look at your own product! Imagine it without the logo! Can you replace your logo to your competitor's? If so, you need to think to be more distinctive in your product design. By the way, this game can be continued throughout all your visual platforms and it is worth a check.
But now, lets see the ingredients.
1.) An authentic story.
2.) Clear and objective view on the world, industry, product, customers and competitors.
3.) Philosophy.
4.) Logo.
5.) Colours.
6.) Typography.
7.) Stationery, product branding, merchandise.
8.) Digital platforms.
9.) Event and retails communications.
10.) Multichannel or omnichannel campaigns, promotions, PR.
11.) Content and imagery.
12.) Permanent review, revision and occasional rebranding or repositioning.
In the coming weeks, we will go through all of these ingredients individually to give you some in-depth insights on what to be aware of, when you manage your branding tasks. After all the ingredients are explained shortly, we will bring some real-life examples from all the stages of the brand development process.
But if you want to get deeper in the first ingredient, which is an authentic story, you can get a hint on the topic of how to tell your audience who are you.