Why Brand Strategy is crucial for Brand Design
You may be wondering, what even is Brand Strategy? Why do I need it? Shouldn’t the design as a visual be enough?
Designing with no Insights - win or fail?
To make an impact nowadays just creating anything visual without any thought & research behind it, is fruitless. It’s like having the goal to get fitter and eat more healthy and then being told to run everyday and sticking to raw food as a prescription. Some might thrive on this, the majority probably not.
Everybody is different, so is a brand. If we want to embark on a sustainable food & fitness change, we need to look at our behaviour towards food, current fitness levels and the climate around us. All the factors combined have an impact on energy levels. With all these different factors assessed, a motivational strategy for our health journey can be devised so that we are motivated to start taking action.
The difference between brand & business strategy
Our food and fitness problem needs to be solved with a unique strategy. Brand Strategy does the same, it looks at the core of a brand. It includes your positioning in the market, mission, values and voice, how you want to come across to the audience.
“Brand Strategy is one step closer to an authentic relationship with your specific audience.”
As in the triangle above, to build or grow a business we need to look internally first. From these insights we can then present the solution externally.
The difference with brand strategy to business strategy is that the latter is about the actual sales & marketing, how you communicate your brand to your audience.
Holistic design
We already know that a brand feeling doesn’t come across only from the logo (check out my previous blog on that topic). Focussing on the whole experience of a brand is the goal:
- The competition should be studied no doubt, in order to see what others are doing but nowadays in a saturated market we also have to deal with a sea of sameness out there. Because of the research we can create something different to stand out.
- Finding your audience is key. For existing brands the audience could have shifted or keep moving away. So knowing what they need and expect is important.
- Does the brand actually align with your goals and brand values?
- Looking into the positioning of your brand as a unique offering in the market with clear & consistent messaging
Let’s all get on the same page
So Brand design with a meaning behind it requires brand strategy.
How do we achieve this?
Through the insights of a discovery session.
This is where you as a business owner comes in, because you have the knowledge of your industry. Me as a designer, I come in with an outside perspective to listen & connecting the dots.
Brand strategy is about being honest, sharing openly and having the will to implement change based on the outcome. Because we are looking at all the angles of the business in order to solve a problem.
The couch idea: A Brand session in an environment to freely explore ideas
