Branding: What is branding, and why is brand strategy important?

I was recently at the pub and my friend walked in wearing a swanky new designer jacket. When I commented on it he said, ‘Thanks, it’s part of my 2022 re-brand’. When people talk about branding they usually mean the recognisable design elements that make up a company’s identity; logo, typefaces, colour palette and so on. My friend’s new jacket would sit in this camp. However, the value of branding goes far beyond visual identity.

Max Ottignon from London-based agency Ragged Edge said, ‘Branding has the power to distil complex ideas into a single thought. It has the power to change perceptions, and change behaviour. It can be the difference between business success and failure. It can reinvigorate organisations and redefine industries. It can be a powerful force for good. We can use it to help others change the world.’

Sounds pretty impressive. However, despite its undeniable importance in the world; from industry to company and even to personal branding, many are unsure of what the branding process looks like or why a strong process is essential when creating brands that will stand the test of time.

In this blog we will take an in-depth look into branding and answer the following questions:

• What is branding?
• What does the branding process look like?
• Does my company need branding/rebranding?

What is branding?

Jeff Bezos said, ‘Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.’

If this is true, then the job of branding is to shape how people perceive a brand and how they feel about the product, company or service. When you work with a branding agency or engage with a brand designer, our job is to create and implement a framework (brand strategy) and set of tools (visual identity) that brings the idea of your brand to life.

At Noise, we have a strategic approach to branding and we use creativity to solve problems. We don’t ever assume that the success of a brand lies in how good the logo looks. We dig deeper to tease out the ‘why’ behind a brand. It helps to think of a brand as a living and breathing thing; What is this brand’s purpose? How would it sound if it could speak? How would it dress? Where would it live? What drink would it order at a bar? A strong, meaningful and useful brand strategy transforms a useless deck sitting dormant in a marketing folder into a shared dream, ambition and goal for a company to strive towards, and something for customers to truly believe in and buy into.

So, this is how we define ‘branding’.

Brand Strategy

• What is your story? How did you get here and where are you going?
• What is your purpose? What are you here to achieve?
• What is your promise? What are your mission and vision statements?
• What is your voice? How do you behave and sound in a voice and personality that is uniquely you?

Visual Identity

• Logo
• Typography
• Colour Palette
• Iconography
• Illustrations
• Animations/Motion Graphics
• Art Direction
• UI Style

Brand Rollout / Brand System

The outcome of a branding project is dependent on the industry, creative brief and deliverables set by you as a company when engaging with us. This includes but is not limited to the following.

• Brand Guidelines
• Landing Page
• Merchandise
• Marketing Materials
• Business Collateral
• Posters
• Digital Ads
• Social Assets

What does the branding process look like?

No two agencies or designers will have the same process, however, if the approach to branding is driven by strategy, then it will probably be a variant of this. At Noise, our branding process is as follows:

• Definition & Creative Brief
• Research & Discovery
• Ideation & The ‘Why’
• Naming & Personality
• Visual Identity & Logo Design
• Brand System & Brandbook
• Brand Assets & Roll Out

Definition & Creative Brief

The first stage of branding is to understand the product or service, target audience, and your company as a whole. During this stage we will ask ourselves as designers and you as a company; What problems do we want to solve? What might get in our way? Who is our audience? What are you really looking for? and more. The key tasks that sit within ‘Definition & Creative Brief’ are:

• Kickoff Meeting
• Interviews
• Creative Brief

In the kickoff meeting we ask you a tonne of questions, and vice versa. It sets the tone of the collaboration and provides the content and information needed to write a creative brief for the rest of our team. This may spin off into individual conversations where we can dig deeper into understanding what you want to achieve and how we can help you reach these goals.

Research & Discovery

In this stage we will gain important information about your industry, market and target audience. Making sure we know the context of the product, company or service and who will be using it will ensure we make knowledgeable, educated, smart design decisions further down the line. The key tasks that sit within ‘Research & Discovery’ are:

• Target Audience & User Research
• Creation of User Persona
• Market Research / Competitor Research / Landscape Mapping
• Market Trends

Target Audience & User Research includes user interviews, putting together surveys asking specific questions, or focus groups/workshops where we can observe audience behaviour. This information gives us a second opinion on what problems we are trying to solve in the branding process. Sometimes you don’t even realise what users really need or want until you hear it from them. We take this groundwork and create user personas, which are based on target audience demographics and provide more colour and depth around routines, motivations, desires and needs. Strong, realistic user personas are essential when creating a brand because they drive every creative decision, ensuring the strategy is meaningful and the design is desirable and relevant to the actual target audience.

Market Research helps us understand who the competitors are, what the demand is for your product or service, and standards or trends that are being set within the industry. We usually start by mapping out the competitor and market landscape to find areas of opportunity to stand out visually or strategically. In this stage we take a ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ approach, thinking outside the box of how to capture uncontested market space.

Ideation & The ‘Why’

Once we have gathered all of this knowledge, we want to get to the heart of your brand and uncover your story, or what we like to call your, ‘Why’. In this stage, we want to find the essence of your brand and capture it in a simple, insightful phrase.

• The ‘Why’ Workshop
• Define Actionable Strategy

In ’The Why Workshop’, we set aside a good chunk of time to work through a series of workshops and exercises that help us tease out the core of your brand together with you. We define what you do, how you do it and why you do it. We really want to understand what your purpose is as a brand. Once we have uncovered the ‘Why’, we start to build out the character and personality of your brand. We do this through a combination of exercises from the emotional to the fun to the mad. By the end of this workshop we hope to have built the foundations to be able to develop an actionable strategy.

Each project requires a different framework for strategy, and we never apply a one-size-fits-all approach to any part of any project. Sometimes it is worthwhile to follow the established structure of mission, vision, tagline, manifesto, tone of voice and personality. Occasionally we throw out the rule book and do something totally different. It all depends on what problem we are solving, and the ‘Why’.

Naming & Personality

Depending on your stage and needs, at this point we might engage in a naming process. Perhaps you don’t have a name, or during the branding process you’ve realised that your name doesn’t resonate with your ‘Why’ any longer. Whether we do naming or not, at this point we want to shape the personality of your brand in order to set the foundations for the visual identity. For example, if Patagonia was a person they would live in a tent in Joshua Tree and rock climb all day. Therefore it is no surprise that their clothes are usually inspired by natural colours and textures, designed to be technical, durable and comfortable, and made to last as to reduce waste and protect the planet that they love and live in all day long.

• Naming Workshop
• Personality Workshop
• 3–10 Concepts

As with design, we like to begin naming and personality with a collaborative workshop. This ensures that the heart and soul of the branding comes from you. We take these thoughts away and mould them into solid ideas which we present back to you as concepts to choose from.

Visual Identity & Logo Design

So we’ve finally got to what most people think of as branding. (Enter my friend and his ‘2022 re-brand’ jacket.) As you can see, it’s taken us a long and fruitful time to get here. It may be helpful to think of brand strategy as the foundations of a building, and visual identity as the materials, windows and interior design that helps bring the idea to life.

• Creative Brainstorming
• 3 Concepts
• Final Identity

When it comes to designing a visual identity it is important to be playful, uninhibited and collaborative, especially at the beginning. The first idea is rarely the best, and great ideas are usually a combination of many minds, so brainstorming exercises and open conversations tend to bring about the best solutions. Depending on the project, brand, problem and strategy we will use a range of different brainstorming techniques. Some of our favourites are ‘Crazy 8’s’, ‘How Might We’, ‘Lotus Blossom’, ‘6–3–5’ and ‘6 thinking hats’. (Comment below if you would like us to write a blog about ideation techniques!). We would aim to have about 100,000 ideas after this. That’s a joke, but we would have a lot. We will then discuss and vote as a team on the 3 most relevant ideas that we want to develop further.

Depending on the duration of the project and your needs, we will present these 3 concepts to a varying degree of completion. This could simply be in the form of moodboards, or it could be 3 developed visual identities centred around 3 different logo designs. After presenting these concepts, we ask you to choose one route for us to move forward with. You then pick one and it’s as easy as that.

PSYCHE. It is very very very rarely that simple. Usually, we will be asked to merge styles, colours, layouts, design elements and everything in between from the 3 concepts to create one hybrid unicorn visual identity. Please note that there is a reason we’ve used a mythical creature in this analogy. This chop-up-and-stick-back-together approach will likely dilute the concept and create a fragmented visual identity. If there is uncertainty at this stage, it is always beneficial to go back to the strategy and ourselves, ‘Which route best answers the problem we are setting out to solve? Which identity feels most aligned with our values? Which logo speaks most directly to our ‘Why’’.

Once a decision is made, we will take this one concept and iterate on the brand and design elements until you are 100% happy. Then it’s time to take this design and run with it. Still working with the brand strategy at the core, we will think about how the final logo, typography, colours, icons, illustrations, animations, motion graphics, photography, art direction and digital design can be best used to communicate the brand’s ‘Why’.

Brand System & Brandbook

Once the final visual identity has been signed off by you, we will want to make sure that the branding is easy to implement. We will also want to make sure that no one messes around with it and f**ks it up. A brandbook is a document of guidelines that outlines the strategy and visual language of the brand and how to apply it. This step is usually a particularly exciting and rewarding moment — and if you’ve reached this far in the blog you’ll know that to get here was the cumulation of a lot of work! This is what we usually cover in a brandbook, however, every set of guidelines we produce is different and bespoke to the partner and project in question.

• Strategy & Messaging
• Logo Guidelines
• Colour & Accessibility
• Typography & Layout
• Illustration Style
• Motion Graphics
• Art Direction
• Iconography
• Brand Roll Out

Brand Assets & Roll Out

It is usually helpful to show branding in the form of roll out. Roll out are ‘real life’ examples of how the brand will exist in the world. Roll out should be well-considered and relevant to the industry you operate in. For example, if we are creating the branding of a sports company, it would be relevant to show the branding applied to merchandise, stadium advertising, storefronts, in-store materials, event props, etc. If the creative brief outlines that the brand roll out is purely hypothetical to showcase how the branding could be applied, then we as designers will make the decision on what examples to design. However, you as a company can also request certain assets to be designed at this stage, or even engage in a new scope of work where the branding can be applied to a campaign, digital product or landing page, for example.

Does my company need branding/rebranding?

Maybe you started reading this blog because you were flirting with the idea of redesigning your logo. Thanks for sticking with us. However, we hope that you’re now asking yourself, ‘What is my company’s ‘Why’?’.

If you don’t know the answer to this question, then your company needs branding. If you do know the answer to this question but your employee sitting next to you doesn’t, then your company also needs branding.

Design and particularly branding can often be hard to validate; a lot of its worth seems intangible, hard to measure and based on gut instinct. However, we hope you can see that as strategic creatives we use meaningful branding to help brands and businesses thrive internally and externally. We share our creativity as a tool to unlock success, recognition and progression. We also create designs that look pretty cool too.

If you are a brand or business experiencing major change or rapid growth (or if you’re just doing something pretty awesome), we would love to hear from you.

Written by Georgia Watt, Brand Strategist & Designer at Noise

Noise Studio is an international creative agency working at the intersection of digital and branding. We create unexpected design solutions for some of the most exciting names in sports, outdoors and sustainability.

🖥️ www.noisestudio.co | 💌 hello@noisestudio.co