Brand strategy provides the long-term roadmap for your brand. It need not be as challenging as it sounds.
It’s all about defining and successfully communicating your purpose, so that your customers fully understand the benefits of your services.
Positioning
Brand Identity
Marketing Communications
Environments
Experience
Brand Governance
Aligning with your business strategy, we use our five-step approach to develop a detailed brand blueprint. This honestly and accurately reflects who you are and what you do, to help attract business growth.
1. Positioning Strategy
What makes you unique and what’s your position in the market?
Some honest soul-searching is required here!
Looking to all stakeholders, we tease out the who, what and why of your brand to create a long-term brand blueprint. This supports your business objectives and communicates your offer in the most compelling way.
We help you to look back in your history, forward to your future, inwards to your employees, outwards to your customers and sideways to your competitors.
The intangible essence of your brand is captured:
- Target audiences and persona profiles
- Where you sit versus your competitors
- Unique selling point (USPs)
- Value proposition
- Brand purpose, vision and values
This blueprint provides the backbone to strong decision-making and articulates your brand personality so that you can carve out your unique space in the marketplace.
2. Brand Identity
The visual and verbal expression of your brand strategy
Brand identity goes way beyond logo creation. The skill lies in capturing your intangible brand personality into a unique visual representation and creating an iconic style and voice for your brand. Drawing on your brand blueprint, our design team develops creative concepts that will really differentiate you from your competitors.
Your logo sits at the heart of the design, but your identity also comprises many other elements:
- Name
- Logo
- Strapline
- URL
- Narrative
- Personality & tone of voice
- Key messages
- Visual style
- Fonts
- Crops/Shapes/Patterns
- Graphic Standards
- Photographic Style
- Colour
Each element is documented into detailed Brand Guidelines.
We translate your brand into real-life touchpoints and experiences, helping you to engage with your customers online and physically.
3. Marketing Communications
How do you deliver the right messages to the right people?
The next challenge is telling your story in the most compelling way. We help you to articulate your offer and to reach your target audiences cost-effectively.
Not forgetting your employees – they are your biggest brand ambassadors.
It’s important to express your brand in terms of both clear functional and emotional benefits. We help to develop short and snappy marketing messages that accurately portray your offer, to the right people, using a well-defined angle.
The careful selection of channels will produce the right marcomms mix. We draw upon a variety of communication disciplines – advertising, digital, SEO, PR and sales promotion – to reach your audiences.
We also develop a variety of inbound and outbound brand marketing tools:
- Print – sales sheets, case studies
- Digital – website, email, blogs
- Sales pitches
- Direct mail
- SEO
Each is carefully designed so that you can both reach out to, and draw in your customers.
4. Environments
Places and destinations – the physical & digital manifestation of your brand
How and where your customers interact and experience your brand will involve numerous touchpoints, all of which require detailed application guidelines.
We develop technical specifications, drawings and work to strict design principles to ensure your brand can be implemented consistently across all environments:
- Environment
- Customer Experience
- Employee Behaviour
- Brand Manifesto
- Brand Guidelines
- Stationery/Collateral
- Signage/Wayfinding
- Physical Environments
- Vehicles
- Packaging
- Trade Shows/Events
- Marketing/Advertising
- Online & Mobile
- Website & Email
- Video
- Social Media & Apps
- Word of Mouth
- Public Relations
We know your brand must be agile to stay relevant. Experience has taught us how the right approach to brand governance means that you can achieve global consistency and impact, but also maintain local relevance.
5. Experience
How do you deliver consistent brand experiences and customer journeys?
It’s proven that the better the customer experience, the higher the loyalty and the greater the opportunity for long term relationships and premium pricing.
From bricks to clicks, we work with you at every point of your customer journeys – from the first search on Google to making a purchase in-store.
Our customer-centric approach relies on data captured from customers to continuously improve and keep brand alignment between each individual touchpoint.
6. Brand Governance
How do you maintain control of your brand and keep it on track?
For larger international organisations, with thousands of brand touchpoints, this is a one of the greatest challenges in developing a successful global brand.
We start by defining your philosophy – what sort of approach is best for your brand?
- Brand police or brand enabler
- Centralised or regional decision-making
- Tolerance – do you seek brand consistency or coherence
- Is local adaptation acceptable
Once defined, your rules of engagement are captured into a framework – a set of systems, processes and tools that will ensure your brand is represented accurately worldwide.
This includes setting up the right teams and decision-making, supported by backbone systems such as Digital Asset Management (DAM) to house your brand guidelines and help you to manage your physical assets.
The right approach to brand governance will ensure that your brand can breathe and evolve but be aligned with your brand strategy wherever you are in the world.
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Case studies
Coca cola
The team came up with comprehensive branding solutions for our office refurbishment, creating a vibrant and cohesive welcome space. From large scale graphics to finer details such as choice of furniture, the thought that has gone into the design and execution has been impressive at every stage.
Moscow Jewelry
The new retail concept has provided an incredible boost to our brand’s image. Our customers and staff have truly welcomed the flagship concept and this has been reflected in our sales, which grown by 30-35%. The combination of planning, product display and digital presence has helped us move our offer beyond what we had anticipated.
Mander Centre
Their innovative ideas were readily translated into signage and lighting solutions that have dramatically transformed the Mander Centre, making it the retail destination of choice for the people of Wolverhampton.
Getinge
In a fragmented company structure, based on a long history of mergers and acquisitions with limited consolidation and strong local leadership, GLIMMA was instrumental in the success to implement a new shared signage profile globally, creating a much desired visual identity alignment and unification of our company.