Corporate Branding
Your corporate brand identity is what people know, think and feel at every point of connection with your business. Some of that is created organically in the hearts and minds of your audiences.
We help you create the rest.
Logo
The visual way in which you present your company matters – in ways that go well beyond the development of graphics and type treatments. Your logo needs to be unique, recognizable, and flexible enough to represent the essence of your brand, wherever it appears on line and in print, on everything from business cards to billboards. That's corporate branding.
Messaging
You can talk about your business all day long – but your audiences don’t have that kind of time. You need an easy-to-follow message platform, with a clear hierarchy of essential points to communicate in consistent language and tone. Likewise, you need a concise brand story that reinforces not only what people need to know, but how they should feel about your brand. That's what good corporate branding does.
Brand Standards
What are the exact colors of your logo? What are your standard fonts? How should – and shouldn’t – your brand appear? And what metrics will you use to ensure that all communications reflect your defined messaging? Brand standards provide clear guidelines for everyone who will communicate about your brand, ensuring that all of those questions are answered for absolute consistency. That's quality corporate branding.
Brand Activation
You don’t want your brand to sit on the proverbial shelf. Instead, it should actively express and reinforce your identity at every point of contact – formal, informal, in person or through your many communications channels. Everything that brings your brand to life is part of brand activation. Turn on your corporate branding today.
Brandfluence™
A Deeper Dive
Brandfluence is our proven process for creating a brand identity that authentically represents your organization, its products and how customers, employees and other stakeholders should perceive them. This is how we do it:
Situation Analysis
Brandfluence starts with a comprehensive intake session that we conduct with your marketing and brand teams, as well as an assessment of your current brand, communications and competitors. In it, we ask questions that get beyond what you may consider to be obvious or common knowledge. The result is a clear-eyed look at what your brand represents today, as well as opportunities to enhance, improve and strengthen brand perceptions going forward.
Focused Conversations
You live and breathe your business every day. Which means that the way you see your brand may not match the perceptions of your customers or even other members of your corporate leadership. We conduct focused interviews with members of these audiences and often discover beliefs and insights that may have been impossible for you to see from your internal position.
Brand Workshop
The centerpiece of our Brandfluence process is a workshop in which we conduct an interactive exploration with a key group of your stakeholders about your brand identity, operations, customers and competition. Our questions often open new windows on the everyday experience of interacting with your business. And our process, specifically designed to prevent “groupthink,” enables a clear, authentic examination of your brand strengths, challenges and opportunities.
Brand Plan
The Relish Marketing team examines the results of all three initial Brandfluence stages from multiple perspectives to identify gaps between how you see your current brand, how your external audiences see it, and what you need your brand to represent going forward. From there, we develop and deliver a clear brand analysis and plan to close gaps, as well as the brand components you will need to achieve results. Deliverables may include brand name, logo, brand story and key messaging, brand standards guide and brand activation plan.
Engagement
This component of the process includes brand activation as well as clear metrics for monitoring and evaluating success. Brand activation includes communicating your brand across every administrative, online, internal and external point of contact with your audiences. Monitoring and evaluation may include metrics, surveys, focus groups and other ways of assessing brand engagement with your most important stakeholders.
What is
Brand Activation?
Ever notice how some brands seem to radiate their identity, everywhere they’re seen? It doesn’t happen by accident. It happens through brand activation. That’s what brings your brand to life. It includes consistent communication of your logo, identity and messaging, wherever people engage with your business – formally, informally, in person, in writing, on paper and online.
If that sounds like a lot, it is.
But don’t worry – we’ve got you covered with a thorough Brand Activation Checklist that identifies more than 50 essential brand activation channels, organized in a way that encourages clarity, accountability, and timely completion.
Want more on corporate branding? We’ve got a lot to say.
You’ve Redefined Your Brand – Now What?
You need a deliberate, objective process to define – or redefine – your brand. And you need a plan to support you going forward. In this part of our “Brand Jumpstart” series, see how we helped one of our clients execute on their plan. Read more.
Brand Standards: Your Identity Playbook
Why do organizations spend so much time and energy on brand standards? Ask most people about branding and they’ll think you’re talking about logos. Logos contribute to a brand in a big way, of course, but a logo is only part of the story. An organization’s brand is more. It is the visceral, emotional response people have at any point of contact with that organization. Read more.
A Simple Definition of Branding
Just for fun, I recently typed the word “branding” while on Amazon’s website. Believe it or not, there are 3,736 books on the subject! I’ll bet there are also several thousand definitions of branding. So if you’re thinking of embarking on a branding campaign for your organization and you’re not quite clear on what it really means, how can you know the path to take? Read more.