Some brands consider brand development an expense, a fancy PowerPoint presentation, whereas, its the foundation of their marketing campaigns. Just like when you’re building a house, you make sure that roof and pillars are strong to withhold the storm, you need to make sure that people carry an ‘experience’ of your company’s product or service before spending onto your marketing campaigns as it’ll only strengthen the process.
Further, here are 4 components, a brand must satisfy.
Brand Platform Development
Brand Development on the foundation level includes the creative design, strategic, architecture of a brand based on the consumer, market, and business factors. Treat it as the blueprint of your house; You’ll be creating the foundation in the form of guidelines & rules, even before you lay off the first brick. You’ll be defining,
- Who you are
- What you stand for
- What you do
- Who’s your competitor
- Why you’re doing it
- How you do it exceptionally or better than your competitor
These all might seem like a simple question, but here’s the take, exploration is the driving force behind finding the right answers to them. The visual and strategic representation of your brand would also be made on the foundation of these answers.
A brand strategist/marketer is responsible for creating the brand platform. A creative director/graphic designer designs the visual identity system. The strategic and creative resources work in concert to ensure that the visual components are correct. Often, the visual identity creation system rules will lead to vital elements from the brand platform to show the symbiotic relationship between the two. Yes, you can’t effectively create a visual identity system (logo, its various use cases, colour palette, imagery, layout etc.) without first defining the key elemental structure of your brand. So, you need to account all of this before going forward with the work.
Not many brands publish their visual identity system online, but here’s an example of Toyota Visual Identity system that you might refer to.
Brand Expansion
Expansion accounts for getting your message out. Literally, it’s like, grabbing the megaphone and shouting it loud in public using assets/ funnels like PR, advertising & marketing. In this phase, you plan the distribution methods of your business, brand goals, and company objectives.
Based on your brand development and Brand Expansion plans, your brand expression is the external evocation of your brand. It includes but is not limited to website content, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media ad banners, brochures, TV ads, radio spots, billboards and pretty much everything. Simple to put, a brand expression is a way of communicating your brand to the intended target audience.
Brand Authority
This is the phase where you get the chance to build your authority, dominance, and provenance in the industry. Brand authority is generally measured by your market dominance or the success you’ve gained as a result of your business’s work in your particular sector. (Related: professional logo design agency in delhi)
Brand authority is about establishing that you are aware of what you’re talking about and are speaking from a place of experience and success. When a company is successful at brand strategy, consumers know who they are and what they do as well as the brand’s outlook and feel of it, and they’ve also now formed a perception about the brand. To achieve this, generally, a brand strategy plan is employed.
