“Products are made in the factory, but brands are made in the mind.”
Walter Landor
Does your brand need a strong brand positioning, personality and vision? Or perhaps you have an existing brand that needs repositioning? SO create powerful and emotionally engaging stories for niche luxury brands worldwide, including family businesses, UHNWI and royalty.
Branding is intangible. It is what people will see or have in mind when they think of your business. No successful company has ever left its branding to chance and to be successful your brand must be different and recognisable from all others. Differentiation and uniqueness can be created through your brand positioning; a combination of personality, values and the brand story behind why your brand exists, all of which need to be decided by the brand itself. It’s these elements that will touch every part of your organisation, from what it does, to how it speaks to the world and behaves.
“Products are made in the factory, but brands are made in the mind.”
Walter Landor
Undertaking a brand strategy exercise to determine the internal character of your brand will be the foundation to creating an emotional bond with your target market. It will also inform the process of creating a powerful visual brand identity. It’s these elements that will differentiate your brand from its competitors, as well as giving direction to everyone who works for you and helping create a seamless, consistent brand experience at every stage.
On all our new brand development briefs – whether creating new brands or repositioning existing brands – we always recommend initially immersing ourselves in your company culture and ethos to achieve a strategic understanding of your business, customer and competitive context. This exercise helps us develop a strong brand story and brand positioning, which feeds into crafting creative that will be powerful, consistent and ultimately more commercially successful for your brand.
We can do this at two levels: Fast Track or Insight Driven
Our fast-track, story-driven approach is especially recommended for smaller, niche brands and start-ups. We firstly meet with a brand’s key decision makers to discuss your structure, personality, culture and existing branding and marketing strategies. Following this we conduct a desk-based analysis of the market and competitive landscape to determine the positioning of different brands in the category.
From this, we develop a unique brand story, personality, tone of voice and vision to identify a brand positioning that differentiates you in the market, creating an honest and persuasive argument why people should buy from you. These elements form a starting point in developing a compelling brand identity that will communicate your brand’s values in design, words and images.
Our Insight-Driven approach is recommended in mature, complex or new markets, where the environment may be more sophisticated, the consumer more marketing-literate, the competitive differences between products more subtle or non-existent, and competing brands harder to differentiate between.
For this more in-depth approach we are partnered with Anew – an independent team of specialist marketeers. Strategic development begins with gathering insights from within the organisation, using a panel of relevant industry experts and opinion formers in an internal workshop session. They gain qualitative research from moderated focus groups, as well as conducting individual in-depth interviews with current and potential customers as well as brand rejectors.
They amass their insights into the product’s offering, delivery and likeability, as well as the rational, emotional and psychological levers of brand attitude and behaviour, exploring potential propositions and creative routes. You’ll gain a clear, compelling definition of your brand, a winning competitive proposition, a clear tone of voice and guidance on how the brand can be communicated consistently.