When a company enters a market it is often entering a highly competitive environment faced with a great deal of threats and challenges.
There are many ways organisations tackle this however, creating a distinct brand can not only be one of the most effective but in terms of long term value it can be one of the best investments a company can make.
At StudioBand®, we help businesses achieve this by building intelligent, smarter brands that allow you to stand out from the competition, increase marketing effectiveness that generate sales, and meet business objectives.
Of course, this requires a comprehensive brand strategy.
A good business strategy adopts evidence based frameworks and tools to align research, critical thinking and decision-making with action and long term strategic goals.
The same applies to good brand strategy: it understands the ideology of the organisation, the competitive landscape and the market’s needs and wants in order to define the necessary foundations of the brand and the goals that are to be achieved, long term.
A strong brand strategy sets the course for the success of a brand to allow for both short term and long term value to be built.
According to the well known marketing book, ‘How Brands Grow, What Marketers don’t Know’, branding originally came about as a result of something we did to clearly identify what was ours.
Pre industrial age this would’ve been on items such as cattle, horses or livestock. We would use a ‘branding iron’ and burn a mark into the items we owned.
This probably worked well in more simpler times but now, if you think of a brand only in terms of a mark or a logo then you are only partly correct.
Whilst having a distinct mark or logo is critical and, if done well, it can be the backbone of a successful brand strategy, it is only one part of a strong brand.
At StudioBand®, we believe there is more to building a brand than just the visual identity. There are many other intangible factors that are just as critical as the visual identity.
Herein lies our specialty: we seek to empower leaders, visionaries and change makers with visionary brands powered by smarter design, ready for tomorrow’s world.
Visionary brands are designed to last, to endure. They are authentically aligned with the vision and the values of the organisation. They have a deep understanding of the competitive landscape, as well as the target audience it is designed to engage with.
These factors are critical to the success of the brand strategy. Not just because we need to understand these to be competitive, but also because often these factors don’t change a lot over time. This ultimately means that the brands we develop are prepared for long term, enduring success and growth.
We embed these factors in our thinking to ensure we have an in-depth understanding of what challenges need to be overcome and what opportunities need to be taken advantage of in order to create a strategy that is accurate and effective.
How successful the brand strategy process is will depend a lot on how much these factors are considered as a part of the brand strategy framework.
Much like and other form of strategy, brand strategy is a long term plan aimed at helping a brand grow in a specific market. The brand strategy helps the company to set clear guidelines for building and maintaining the brand over time.
As a part of any successful brand strategy, brand guidelines are developed. These often assist with consistency and messaging across multiple touch points.
All marketing activity that are necessary for successful brand messaging with the target groups should take place with the use of brand guidelines.
This includes not only logos and trademarks but can also include language, communication, execution, marketing materials and product policies.
In short, the brand should represent and align with the DNA of your business. This is something we have made a craft of developing at Studio Band.
We do this from the bottom up, capturing every nuance of your company’s vision.
Defining a strong brand strategy makes it possible to:
Yes, it’s easy to claim that you’re the “Airbnb of that…” or the “Tinder of this…” but in the current Adelaide business ecosystem, the probability that a similar idea is being developed in Australia — or abroad — is quite high.
Distinctiveness is key to this. Creating a brand that is distinct will allow you to be easily remembered by your audience.
Focussing on good, smarter design will allow you to stand out even more, as the majority of your competition are happy to settle for mediocrity when it comes to design and branding.
StudioBand’s comprehensive list of brand related services can assist in not only developing your brand but also executing it as well. This is all critical to helping you stand out from the competition.
In most cases, there are many firms thinking about a business concept almost identical to yours. This means, you need a strong brand strategy to help achieve a truly unique brand positioning.
It’s not just what you know or do, but also how you present it to your market.
This can help your target audience (customers, investors, beta-testers, incubators) understand why they should choose your brand and its products or services over the competition.
A brand can be much like a person: They can have a mix of characteristics and personality traits that are unique and distinct that can attract the attention of your market.
By understanding consumer behaviour and how we, as humans, make both rational and irrational choices, we are able to determine what is required to create a successful brand that your market will engage with.
StudioBand® has developed a unique brand strategy framework that centres around the knowledge of heuristics and the role they play in the consumer’s mind when choosing brands.
This helps your brand and your offering to be more distinct, more identifiable, and more appreciated once adopted.
Nothing is more counterproductive than a brand that does not align with the vision of the founders and long term business strategies.
At Studio Band we seek to immerse ourselves in your vision. This enables us to make decisions that are informed by you and your goals, removing assumptions and guess work that often lead to substandard outcomes.
Just like a good business model, a good brand strategy federates and enables your team around a common objective. Likewise, it is critical for your external stakeholders to understand your vision so they too can align with your objectives and move towards a common goal.
At StudioBand®, we develop branding strategies that set out to align with your vision. This enables clarity and coherence ensuring greater engagement for all of your stakeholders.
A good brand strategy helps to lay a strong foundation that can help you make effective decisions. It should capture the essence of your brand – the why, what and how of your business.
With this strong basis, we can develop unique and distinct branding that fits with your strategic objectives.
What good is it if you don’t reach the people who will benefit from your product or service, who see value in what you deliver to the market? What if you keep getting requests that aren’t right for you?
We always want to reach the right people – and an effective brand strategy helps you do exactly that.
Our brand strategy framework will help you identify who your target market is, what they need vs what they want, what is important to them, and what problems you should solve for them.
A well considered and effective branding strategy helps to filter out the essence of your brand. This will allow you to stand out from other brands and ensure that your brand is remembered. We want to create a brand that is as unique as possible, that stands out and is memorable, brand distinctiveness is key to this.
A Memorable brand will allow your customers to easily recall it at the time of purchase. If it is easily remembered, the chances they will select your brand over your competitors is significantly higher.
In reality, when making choices the consumer seeks out quick and adequate solutions to their problems. They want to avoid having to navigate a slow and complicated path to a decision.
Positioning is something that should be simple and void of complicated, strategic processes and frameworks. According to Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the way we think about brand positioning is back to front. Unlike marketers, the brand is the last thing consumers think about when making purchasing decisions.
As a result, positioning shouldn’t be considered to help drive purchasing decisions, it should act as a practical and powerful tool to help focus thinking, and compete with the competition.
So, if we can achieve clarity about what your brand offers and how it is distinct from the competition, the brand identity can be designed accordingly.
You’ve invested in blog posts, but your customers can only be found on YouTube. Then your efforts may be in need of some adjusting.
By learning what your customers’ ideal buying journey looks like, we also define the right marketing strategy and tools for your business.
This helps you to conserve your resources and put in more work only where it makes sense.
People don’t buy what you do or how you do it. They buy why you do it – some refer to this as your ‘brand story’. We tend to think about this through a different lens.
As previously mentioned, your ‘brand’ is often the last thing your consumer thinks about, if they actually think about it at all. This means that in reality, to the consumer, the ‘brand story’ is often overlooked and not really considered in the way some brand strategists and marketers like to think.
Where we see the opportunity to consider your brand personality is centred around distinctiveness. If we consider personality when associated with people, everyone’s personality is unique or distinct.
The same goes with brands. It gives us the opportunity to use your brand’s personality as the foundation to the strategy in order to create a brand that is unique and distinct.
We help you incorporate a personality into both your brand messaging or verbal brand as well as letting this inform the visual brand. That’s why it’s very important for us to get to really know you and your brand values.
A great brand strategy can unlock the potential of your business. To achieve this properly, it requires detailed consideration of many factors including but not limited to:
Your brand is the visible face of your company, it is critical that it aligns with your vision, is unique and distinct and ultimately more competitive than your competition.
Smarter design enables this, it empowers your business with stronger, more effective branding in order to be more competitive.
If you are currently facing a strategic challenge or looking at building a brand from the ground up, we have all the tools, knowledge and experience to assist.
StudioBand® has achieved branding success across many industries and 500+ companies seeing consistent and enduring growth with all the companies we work with.
Start laying the strategic foundation for your business by contacting us. We are based in Adelaide, South Australia, and we understand the Adelaide and Australian business culture.
We look forward to your inquiries. Get in touch.