How to Improve Your Branding Strategy and Design?
Branding is an important aspect of every business. The tasks related to successful branding can be complex sometimes; this is the reason that companies hire a brand strategy design consultancy to develop an effective branding strategy. Several types of branding strategies suit different types of companies. These strategies have different benefits to the business for which they are implemented.
The immense market competition has only increased over the years. The competition can be for similar products, alternative products, etc. Every company in the world wants to grab a bigger section of the consumer’s basket. To achieve this target of the businesses, it is important to become a “brand,” which the targeted customers recognize as valuable and reliable. By hiring the services of top brand strategy consulting firms, businesses can realize key marketing and sales goals.
Branding is among the most important set of activities that businesses worldwide engage in, often with the help of a brand strategy consulting firm, to enjoy higher revenues. Designing and building a strong brand helps the businesses to retain existing consumers and acquire new ones.
The concept of branding is so important that businesses consult top agencies and media planning services to have competitive advantages. These brand strategy firms provide careful planning and smart strategies to the businesses that are guaranteed to create specific outcomes like an increase in online and offline inquiries, or increased visibility and brand recognition.
Before you brainstorm about branding design, you might find it interesting to know about different types of branding strategies.
Different Types of Branding Strategies
Corporate Branding Strategy
This is about the core values of the businesses and the philosophy that it has embedded within itself. Brand strategy firms assist businesses that aim for corporate branding to showcase, market and communicate the company’s rich history, the company’s mission, brand personality, and core values. Here the brand is the company that evokes trust, appreciation, and goodwill within its ecosystem of partners, suppliers, investors, customers, etc.
Rather than the utilitarian aspect of the products, the company tries to display the trust that potential customers should build on the company.
Product Branding Strategy
This is the most common type of branding used by businesses. They hire a good brand strategy consulting agency that works toward developing strategies focused on a single product, to increase its visibility, perceptions, and saleability.
A good brand strategy design consultancy incorporates symbols or designs to help the company’s customers recognize the product easily. For example, the packaging and color of Coca-Cola make it easily distinguishable from Pepsi that is the immediate competitor to the company.
Service Branding Strategy
In this type of branding, the brand strategy consulting firm focuses on leveraging the potential customer’s needs. The companies that provide their customers with services try to use service branding to increase the awareness of their offerings.
These companies use excellent customer services also to create value for their customers, and align it with their branding. The customers prefer the brand for their reliability, making the concept of excellent service synonymous to the brand.
Brand Extension Strategy
The companies practicing this kind of branding use the name of their established products to move into a different category of the market or to a new product category.
For example, companies like Honda had leveraged the reputation and brand name established in the automobile market to make their mark in the lawn mower market. Now it is a prominent name in this sector as well.
Personal Branding
Personal branding focuses on individuals rather than the company. A brand strategy consulting agency carefully designs the campaigns to highlight the character, personality, or work of an individual who owns the company or is associated with it. For example, celebrities, thought leaders, and industry leaders associated with the organization are projected in a manner that trust in the organization increases.
The success of such activities depend on the strength of the strategy. A brand strategy consulting firm with expertise in personal branding frames excellent strategies to enhance personal branding and market penetration.
Internet or Online Branding Strategy
Online or Internet branding is essential for business success today. The online presence of a company plays a significant role in enhancing its market presence, as most consumers will be looking for services, products and solutions online. Online branding helps businesses to position themselves strongly in a wider marketplace, and reach out to a million more customers.
Private-Label Branding Strategy
Many consumer product brands prefer this type of branding to compete with the big players of the market. Private Label products are manufactured by a contract by different producers but sold under a retailer’s or distributor’s brand name, and not the manufacturers.
Private label products are found across a broad range of sectors, such as personal care, cosmetics, pharmaceutical, apparel and fashion, food and beverages, etc. Branding strategy for private-label products need to be planned with the retailer’s marketing and sales objectives in mind for a particular market.
Enhance Your Branding Designs
You would have realized that the impact or outcomes from improving branding strategy and design is immeasurable from certain angles like goodwill, reputation, and trust. On the other hand, great branding strategies and designs lead to huge and measurable gains too such as increased revenues, customer loyalty and retention, and more new customers.
Here are some tips and suggestions to get the best results from branding activities – by improving the strategies and framework through which they are planned.
1. Upgrade Your Brand Imagery and Identity Design
An important part of enhancing the brand designs is upgrading the brand imagery and identity design. The identity of a brand is the collection of all the elements that contribute to portraying the company’s right image to the users.
The terms brand image and brand identity are quite different from each other, though many times the terms are used interchangeably. Building a brand identity is a prerequisite for creating a good brand image. An experienced brand strategy design consultancy works towards improving the brand identity to improve the image of the brand.
The activities involved include running campaigns for marketing, sales, brand promotion, business development and promotion, account management and retention, etc. Branding design here refers to not only the design work done on materials used for these campaigns but also in the way they are created to approach different customer groups. And to get this correct, experienced branding design experts are needed. This is where a brand strategy design consultancy could make a difference.
2. Enhance Your Visual Brand Personality
Messages are an important part of improving the brand strategy, but it is the visuals that grab the attention of the audience the most. Using visual effects is the most effective way to catch the attention of potential customers and build strong brand recognition.
Several elements contribute to visual brand strategy, and companies hire media planning services to take care of these elements.
- Getting the logo of the company right
- Creating a consistent color palette, which suits the overall brand
- Choosing the right typography
- Using visuals to bring out emotions
- Perfecting the layout
Selecting the right images that reflect the brand to the audience is crucial to making a huge impact. Brand imagery demands a great combination of market knowledge, design skills, and expertise in leveraging psychological aspects associated with colours, hues, graphics, typography, etc.
Through the services of a brand strategy consulting agency that also offers media planning services, you could achieve superior outcomes for building and promoting your brand.
3. Improve Your “Brand Voice” Through Visual Content
The brand voice is representative of the brand’s personality. It is particularly important to have a distinctive voice in your brand messaging. The voice of your brand should be different from other companies and similar brands. Some practices to enhance your brand voice are mentioned here. The key messaging should be delivered through powerful visuals.
- Reviewing the brand promise, as the brand promise is the essence of the brand itself.
- Carrying out audit sessions to purge the existing content that does not comply with the brand.
- Interacting with the audience.
- Describing the brand in three words.
4. Develop Visual Brand Storytelling
Stories help people understand things with much more clarity and make sense regarding their surroundings. A story provides the framework for understanding the concepts and creating emotional connections.
Combining the brand story with visual identity creates a powerful duo, which impacts the business greatly. Media planning services help the companies to visualize the amazing stories that resonate with the brand and present these stories to the audience to build a deeper emotional connection with the audience.
This further enhances brand loyalty, and customers relate to the companies as a person rather than an organization, which develops the emotional connection.
5. Redesign Your Website
Having a phenomenal website is important for the growth of the company. It helps develop a strong online presence for the company.
A good brand strategy consulting firm puts a lot of emphasis on developing the right website design that successfully markets the company and its brands. Website designs need to be redesigned to work with changing market trends and perceptions.
The redesigning can incorporate several aspects of the website design:
- Tweaking the website colour theme and redesigning graphical elements
- Enhancing the presentation and visual and written content organization
- Revising SEO to keep pace with current content marketing trends.
- Updating visual branding to align with changing trends.
6. Consider Brand Repositioning
Sometimes it happens that there is a need for complete repositioning of the brand, especially when a company is planning to diversify or undergo business transformation. Companies often hire top brand strategy consulting firms to carry out this major task. They carefully examine the brand’s existing position and come up with strategies that align with business transformation and diversification.
A competent brand strategy consulting agency will use different methods to reposition the brand in the minds of the people without losing the value, trust, goodwill, and benefits from the earlier branding.
7. Ensure Consistency, Clarity, Coherence Across Branding Designs and Initiatives
Maintaining consistency in different modes of branding is extremely important for the success of overall campaign designs by any brand strategy consulting agency. This coherence and clarity across the branding designs and initiatives will create a continuous stimulus, eventually resulting in increased value and demand for products and services.
If consistency and coherence are not maintained, it will create confusion in the minds of the customers. This will compel them to switch to the products and services offered by the competitors, negatively impacting the overall buildup of the brand, resulting in lower revenues and profit.
How Språk Design Can Help?
Sprak Design is a company offering brand strategy design consulting and media planning services for over 11 years. We are among the top brand strategy consulting firms offering services to organizations from different industries.
When it comes to developing and designing efficient brand strategies, we have won the appreciation of 100+ organizations, who trust us with their diverse branding service needs. From strategy planning and branding design to creation of brand assets, website design, marketing and promotional material design, and product packaging designs, our solutions have helped clients build a wider client base.
Our client base covers manufacturers, retailers, professional services firms, hotels and restaurants, not-for-profit organizations, advertising and digital marketing agencies, tech startups, among others.
If you are seeking the services of a top brand strategy consulting firm, you would definitely be delighted to work with us!
