Brand Development Strategy and Implementation for your Small to Midmarket Company             

Your brand could and should be your company’s strongest and most recognisable asset, both at functional fit and psychographic attachment basis. It pays to focus on this and ensure that all that your business does enhances, protects and defends your brand and Iconify’s mission as a creative consulting agency is to recognise and ensure it’s a business imperative for all competitively focused businesses to build, strengthen and establish resonant and powerful brands. Let’s discuss how.

A quick note on Brand vs Branding

Brand differs from branding, in that while branding represents your visual identity and recognisable visible cues, marks and straplines, your brand represents an idea and story founded in the needs of your target segment and the messages in your story that position your brand as the offering that meets those needs the best. Note, your business or service need not be the best in its class by features or function. Your target segment just needs to perceive it as the best fit for their stated and unstated needs and benefits versus rivals in your market.

Brand Strategy Definition – the end of uncertainty

Brand Strategy Definition – the Creating and having a brand strategy with Iconify, consists of defining and articulating your brand purpose, principles, positioning, proposition and promise in an integrated and powerful way that enables the development and crafting of compelling communications that can be used to interact with your customers throughout the customer lifecycle. We are geared up to provide holistic creative consulting services that ensure that we can assist with any potential requirements or blockers to building a strong brand.

The Process: This a multi-step approach that uncovers the brand pyramid, purpose and the who, what, where of your business in a competitive landscape.

Brand Strategy Underliers: We run discovery and deep-dive workshops to understand your business and its goals, your people and stakeholders, as a precursor or in parallel to the research we will be doing on your industry, competitors and opportunities.

• Brand Strategy Enablers: People and Team structures, workflows and information flow that would affect your promise or proposition delivery.
• Brand Strategy Components and Maintenance Framework: We consider how your current state business model and where gaps, issues, risks and opportunities lie to make improvements in people, practices, policies and organisation-wide tools that would impact on the strength of the brand strategy implementation.
• Branding Collateral:  The foundational part of creating a brand, as outlined above drives everything. Once that is complete, we help you prepare the collateral to underpin the image decided on through the previous phase and consider how that is translated into your visual identity using branding rules.
• Logos: Using creative and methods, we brainstorm with your decision-makers and marketers on the ideation for your company logo and other marks for different channels usage.
• Design: With the brand truths documented, we work with our graphic designers to build out the brand look and feel of your business or products and services. This will be a prerequisite for creating your website, social media and other communications.
• Rules: We provide in-depth planning and consultancy of the rules of naming, logos, and brand design and positioning including colour and shape cues most appropriate to your brand, and your tribe.

Brand Strategy Implementation

Brand Communications is a critical part of any implementation.

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• Brand Communications: Digital Communications and Marketing are absolutely key to the brand communications process as are developing strong brand aligning messaging appropriate to all digital marketing.

Step by Step Guide to Brand Strategy Implementation

Through the brand strategy consulting process, we  have a strategy and plan. What now? We execute, within a tight and tracked project management structure. The steps will differ depending on the business type, challenge and stage in the lifecycle, but will broadly follow the following process.

1.Create or revisit the brand architecture

Building a brand pyramid helps to discover purpose and values for the brand and ascribe a personality, voice and emotional aspirations to your brand.

2.Define and refine differentiation and proposition

. Understanding business objectives and then taking the steps necessary to differentiate your offering and find a position to lead in and fleshing out the business plans and operating models to achieve this.

3.Research

Core research on your area, competitors, industry and consumer profiles to map key offering features to positioning objectives and underserved needs and isolate viable segments to target as closely and tightly as possible to enable customer capture and growth.

4.Discovery and Current State Analysis where applicable

We begin the process of aligning your brand strategy to your business strategy by deep diving into your organisation and its workings.

5.Workshop the relevant candidate target segments

Using primary and secondary methods, we investigate further the motivations, fears and desires, pain points and possible gains and other psychographic elements within audiences and finding overlaps that can be exploited.

6. Determining and your tribe and the various target segments

There comes a time when all the research is in, the interviews are complete and the picture is clear as to whether your brand has a tribe and the different demographic profiles that make them.

7. Determine Market Position – for the offering and for the brand

Linked to differentiation and the by now tightly defined customer profiles, based on what we know about the market, how you are different and who your tribes are, work can begin to delineate a credible, ownable position, one that your brand can lead in.

8. Brand Communications

The pivotal dimension to brand strategy implementation is brand communications. Messaging

We start with a story –the story that everything your brand will ever do or say or imply will hark back to, anchored to your purpose, values. Digital and content marketing

Website Design and Development leveraging the power of great Brand Communications

Your website anchors your image and your message and once developed your brand identity too. It’s a crucial source of information and should form part of your brand extension strategy.

9. Internal brand engagement

Precious People. It’s one of our catchphrases here at Iconify, and a real thing for us. We like to think that people are top of mind for our efforts. But there are precious people on both sides. Sure, your customers generate revenue and help build visibility but so do your staff. It is every bit as important to engage your staff as your front line clients, train, equip and empower them to help propel your brand’s message, visibility and reputation.

10. Brand Risk Management

All of the above is to say that as we build your brand and implement your strategy, but mostly beyond, significant Brand Risks exist and we run some exercises as part of implementation to ensure that there is a framework for outlining the risks your brand faces through its delivery process.

11. Brand Collateral Creation

With brand positioning in mind, with its references to target audiences, it is almost always a strategy implementation imperative to make changes to verbal and visual branding.

• Logos
• Design
• Rules

12. Project Management and Delivery

Project Management is the discipline and process that ensures that a book of work is started for the implementation when the initial works are discussed, to ensure that it is planned, resourced, approved by the relevant stakeholders and monitored to ensure a concerted and quality delivery.

Business and IT Change Delivery  and Project Management

Businesses are beginning to realise that transformation is necessary and indispensable, not just nice to have. Complexity, volatility and speed of changing customer tastes and expectations mean that formulating a transformation solution, ideally across the spectrum of your business is not a choice so much as an urgent service to your business and its stakeholders. All business goals boil down to winning, thriving, driving in business. Transformation gives your business the capability to confidently perform and keep doing so.

Reach out to us for business transformation consulting when some part of your business needs to undergo fundamental change. You may already know that it’s a long term plan to build a sustainable and responsive business, able not just grapple with the scale and daunting pace of change, but can contend and increase business and brand power not just now, but at an ever-increasing rate in the future.

We recognise that successful approaches to transformation depend upon and are led by your business’ values and ideals. Consequently, we do not advocate or seek to implement myopic strategies, bringing instead long term lenses to potential solutions. This is a key reason that our creative consulting services can take you further.

Software Development Services and IT Consulting

More and more businesses are looking for the right software consulting firm to help them with their strategic IT objectives and develop software solutions integrated with their existing technology and legacy systems.

Is that you? Are you realising that you need a software consulting firm that is more than just techies, but who knows the secret of high-quality software? Iconify Transformation Technology Consulting and Practice specialise in enterprise architecture and Software and App Design and Development, providing IT and Software Consulting. With a dedicated development team, we are a software company supporting the full software development lifecycle, from requirements and architecture design to development and testing services, and we can help to enhance or replace existing technology and tools.

Digital Strategy and Innovation Consulting

Most creative agencies design for the present but our creative consulting agency will build your business up as the brand you hope to be. Digital considerations are critical because digital platforms and social media offer clients logical and virtual proximity to customers, so marketing and organisational thought should increasingly be directed to channels and technology that enable access to all possible interaction points with customers. We help clients counter the challenge of making this seamless, constant, progressive, positive and relevant. We ensure that all efforts must map back positively to showing and sharing clients’ purpose and meeting the needs of the customer. To grow, your business needs to stay relevant. To stay relevant you must be dynamic, requiring a connection to purpose, reliability and responsiveness to customers and stakeholders. 

Iconify Innovation Advisory is delivered as part of our Transformation and Technology practices and we help businesses evaluate aspects like, what value can be captured within your agreed strategy and what’s the smartest, fastest, most effective and in short, innovative way to can do it. We help leaders determine risk appetite and understand your innovation profile and consider which new ideas when implemented will deliver the highest impact, made possible by the cross-functional teams that deliver our creative consulting services.

Create Boss Branding and transform your visual identity

Most creative agencies are known for work that starts and ends with branding and creative. As a creative consulting agency, we bring strategy and transformation to the forefront of brand mindset and the sustainability of your business. Defining your brand might start here but it’s only the beginning for businesses with long term goals.

Brand Strategy Collateral

The aim of our creative consulting services is to help you span the entire process of brand building, communications and the operating model to live the brand.

The foundational part of creating a brand, as outlined in Brand Strategy, above is important and ideally, a prerequisite preparing your brand communications materials and once that is complete, we help you prepare the collateral to underpin the image decided on through the previous phase, and consider how that is translated into your visual identity using branding rules. Brand collateral is the development of the brand assets that comprise your visual and verbal branding designs, marks and music, and as part of this stage, we can help with naming or renaming, logos, straplines, colourways and signature tunes.

Logos

Using creative and methods, we brainstorm with your decision makers and marketers on the ideation for your company logo and other marks for different channels usage.

Design

With the brand truths documented, we work with our graphic designers to build out the brand look and feel of your business or products and services. This will be a prerequisite for creating your website, social media and other communications.

Rules

We provide in-depth planning and consultancy of the rules of naming, logos, and brand design and positioning including colour and shape cues most appropriate to your brand, and your tribe.

Verbal Branding

We can help with naming and taglines through brainstorming with your stakeholders, on the basis of the outputs of the brand pyramid and brand strategy principles.