Brand Development Guide

This is a step-by-step guide to brand development for your business or non-profit organization. This process is used to help build your organizations’ identity and lay the foundation for how you will communicate your story moving forward. This process can be used for new or start-up organizations as well as existing companies looking to re-brand.

Phase 1:

In marketing your business, the early stages of brand development require engaging in the process of discovery. In your future endeavors, the discovery of your company, customer segments and the value you bring to them is crucial.

Step 1: Getting to Know Your Company

Getting to know your company drives your present and future success in many ways. Understanding your company’s culture, values and what makes you unique will help to determine brand direction, messaging and design.

Exercise: Write your brand copy. The Definitive Guide to Writing Brand Copy

Step 2: Getting to Know Your Customer

Recognize the most important and valuable part of the discovery is identifying your customer segments. Segmenting customers into separate groups helps you to identify their likes, interests and values. Developing a better understanding of your customer segments will help you to tailor your messaging and design efforts to something that will speak to them and grab their attention.

Exercise: Who are your main customer segments? Identify 3-5.

Step 3: Creating A Value Proposition Statement

The overall importance of a value proposition is to establish value in your product or service. Establishing value is important for your potential customers to justify your worth, usefulness and importance in terms of money and time to the client.

Exercise: How to Write A Value Proposition Statement

Step 4: A Business Model Canvas

This discovery tool is tailored to display key qualities of your business. The model has open building block areas to enter descriptions for analysis.

Exercise: Use this to Create Your Business Canvas Model...

Phase 2: Visual Brand

Using what we’ve learned from phase 1, let’s start to create a visual brand that is in line w/ your companies culture and principles and will appeal to your target markets.

Step 1: Color Pallet

In computer graphics, a palette is a finite set of colors. Palettes can be optimized to improve image accuracy in the presence of software or hardware constraints. In other words, the colors you choose for your project enhance the visual for the viewer. Learn more about the role of color in marketing here. 

Exercise: Create your own color pallet… https://coolors.co/

Step 2: Logo Design

A logo is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name it represents. A logo drives your brand and is the link consumers have to your product.

Exercise: Five steps to an effective logo design

Step 3: Style Guide or Brand Book

A brand style guide is a document containing the rules and guidelines for the composition, design, and general thematic look-and-feel of all a brand’s collateral. It helps with the direction of much of your marketing material.

Exercise: Select headline, sub-headline and body font from Google Fonts

Step 4: Images and Graphics

Now is a good time to start gathering images and graphics for future design projects. Consider hiring a professional photographer to capture unique images, product photos, staff photos, etc. or begin to stockpile stock photos you can use as well.

Exercise: Explore stock photo options

Phase 3: Designing Your Brand

Now is the time to pull all the elements together that you have been working on in the discovery and design phase.

Step 1: Print Collateral/ Packaging Design

Print collateral is a term that includes business marketing items such as business cards, letterhead, capability brochures, fliers, postcards, folders, signage, and more. In today’s online, paperless world one could make the case that printed material is unnecessary and a low priority for a small business. On the contrary, a physical representation of your marketing efforts is always warranted.

Exercise: Start gathering and creating the necessary content for your first and most important collateral pieces and begin the process of searching for a designer

Step 2: Web Development

Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; interface design; authoring, including coding and proprietary software; user experience design; and search engine optimization.

Exercise: Find at least three examples of websites that you like in terms of layout, design and messaging

Step 3: Video Production

Nowadays we would suggest that every company or organization has at least one video professionally produced to tell their story. Whether it be a simple company overview video, product demonstration video or something more creative, video is an engaging marketing platform.

Exercise: Identify a few videos examples from other companies that you think might work for your company