BRAND POSITIONING
+ IDENTITY
+ DESIGN
01
BRANDING
Originally a term for burning symbols into trading goods, the concept of branding evolved over time. It is now used to describe a set of recurring behaviors a company will intentionally repeat over time to create an easy and distinguishable brand to highlight itself among its competitors in the market.
A brand offers clarity of what your business aims to be, and also a promise of consistency in quality and expectation. You may enter a Starbucks store anywhere on the planet and you know you'll get exactly the same coffee and food experience. The same goes for B2B brands like Adobe, which maintains a singular experience across all its products and services.
The ROI (Return Over Investment) of a well-crafted brand goes beyond premium pricing. It also includes the everlasting loyalty of your clients, as they will be connected to your business on an emotional, rather than rational level.
02
POSITIONING
Positioning is the strategic act of defining your company's strengths and weaknesses against your market niche. It offers you greater clarity on how you compare to your competitors so that you can focus on your strengths and opportunities while creating contingencies for your weaknesses and the threats your company will face.
A uniquely-positioned brand will give your company clear USPs (Unique Selling Points) to work with. It will also help you define your ideal clients, as well as make it harder for them to find a suitable replacement for your services.
03
IDENTITY
Also called a logo or a mark, identity is the first layer of a brand's identification with the world. It can be a symbol, illustration, or simply a wordmark, and, contrary to popular belief, it doesn't need to describe or represent a company's products or services.
The main function of a logo is to be simple, striking, and memorable so that people can easily recognize it under any circumstance and across multiple media.
That's because an identity's purpose is to be thoroughly and repeatedly exposed to the public, gaining meaning and association with a brand over multiple years. Therefore, it is important for the identity to be unique, clear, and distinct from any other logos in the market.
04
HOW I CAN HELP YOU:
With all relevant terms defined, we can cover the steps of my flagship service.
01 - Whether you're starting a business (Startup) and need to define a brand strategy, or...
02 - you're at a transition point (Scale-up) and need to bring your brand to new heights,
I can help you translate your vision into a clear, powerfully positioned brand with a strong identity design.
My work process can be divided into 05 comprehensive steps:
I. INCEPTION
We start with an interview. I want to know how you see your business and how much you know about your competitors' landscape.
This inception process can be extended to your company's stakeholders and, depending on the company size, your employees. In which case I will send a questionnaire via google forms for them to answer.
The idea here is to get an overview - as unbiased as possible - of your company's culture: how it is seen internally and which behaviors are already present and should be enforced in order to start building your brand from the inside out.
II. RESEARCH
After understanding how your company views itself, I want to find opportunities for those ideals to flourish with a strong and clear position in the market.
For that, I will deep-dive into your market, looking for direct and indirect competitors, understanding their brands, and using that information to create strategic maps which, in turn, will allow me to find the best opportunities for your values and USPs, further establishing you as an exclusive, hard-to-replace service provider.
III. STRATEGY
Pairing your corporate vision against your competitor's positions, I can now make a better analysis of your brand's strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities.
It's in this phase that we create or adjust your positioning, mission and vision statements, your company's values, the story / message you want to convey, as well as your corporate colors (which are determined by market opportunities, instead of artistic inspiration).
IV. IDENTITY DESIGN
With a defined strategy, it is now time to create - or update - your company's identity. My main focus will be on designing an Iconic symbol, that is easy to recognize and strong enough to bare the meanings it will gain over time, as it gets more and more exposed to the world.
I understand that your company's logo can have a very personal weight to it and that is absolutely ok. In order to make this process smoother for you, I will usually create 03 logo variations from which you can choose the one that more accurately fits your vision.
V. BRAND BOOK
The final phase is documentation. This entire process culminates in the production of a brand book: a digital PDF with your brand's strategic positioning, identity design, and visual system. registered and documented.
This will be your go-to instruction manual for anything brand-related, serving as a clear definition of what your company stands for. You may share this with your employees, clients, prospects, business partners, and any agencies that youl work with.