Our Brand Strategy Process: A Comprehensive Approach to Intentional Design

When you book one of our Brand Design Packages, we always include Brand Strategy as part of your experience. Brand Strategy is the foundation to every design—it’s the starting point for everything we do. Because brands aren’t just designed to be aesthetically appealing… they’re designed to establish visual communication.

Your brand should communicate something to your ideal clients: a feeling that resonates with them and inspires them to work with you.

“Design is thinking made visual.” – Saul Bass

As we sketch and conceptualize ideas, we’re always connecting back to the overarching question: how will this design resonate with your ideal client?

To develop intentional designs, we begin every project with extensive Brand Strategy. Every client receives a 20+ page brand strategy presentation along with a 40-minute video of detailed insights. Take a peek at what’s included when you become one of our clients:

Creative Brief

We start every project with YOUR insights. You know your business best—so we want to know about your vision, goals, and challenges. The first step to each project is a Creative Brief: a guided questionnaire to prompt deeper thought about your business and your ideal clients. Some questions are concrete and specific (i.e., What challenges are you facing in business right now?), but many of the questions are open-ended to help us get a feel for your style (i.e., If your brand were hosting a party, what would it look like?).

The Creative Brief helps prompt thoughtful consideration of your brand, and starts our project on a collaborative note.

Many of our clients have said the Creative Brief was instrumental in shaping their rebrand before they’ve even received any designs:

“Some questions I already have answers to, and others I hadn’t even thought about. So already it’s been such an important process in synthesizing and making important decisions about which direction I want to head with my business. So thank you, for putting together such a thoughtful document.” – M

*If you want to explore these prompts for your own brand, you can actually get access to the exact Creative Brief we use with our clients! Feel free to download our Creative Brief here.

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After gathering your insights, we get to work developing our own research and strategy to support your goals. These are the sections included in our Brand Strategy presentation:

Ideal Client

Your Ideal Client is the key to every part of your brand. Understanding your Ideal Client allows you to speak to them in a way that addresses their values, hopes, and fears. Everything comes back to the Ideal Client: every aspect of your brand design, voice, and imagery should be considered from the their perspective.

We’re always looking for the emotional threads that tie your Ideal Clients together. This isn’t about a generic demographic (i.e., women age 30–40). This is about key emotions and values: “Has sophisticated taste, but never acts pretentious about it. A timeless aesthetic and effortless sense of style. Has a general idea of what they want, but doesn’t have the expertise, time, or creative vision to execute it cohesively.”

We also outline a few key characteristics about your ideal client:

• Fears (problems they’re facing)
• Desires (solutions you offer)
• Who they are / are not

Next, we take a deep dive into your business: what are its unique strengths and challenges?

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SWOT Analysis

Strengths / Weaknesses / Opportunities / Threats

A SWOT Analysis is often used in advertising and media agencies as an overview of a brand’s current successes and challenges. It helps us build a comprehensive and targeted overview of your brand’s ability to relate to its ideal clients. This analysis helps identify your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

A SWOT Analysis can be used for the brand as a whole, or for individual objectives and projects within a business. We recommend conducting a SWOT Analysis of your business annually as a constructive method of understanding your brand’s current successes and challenges.

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Differentiating Offerings

What makes your business uniquely qualified to serve your ideal clients? Differentiating offerings are the qualities that set your business apart from competitors. These are the unique benefits you offer to your Ideal Client: the ways in which you speak to their values and solve their fears with a simple solution. Your differentiating offerings are the distinctive selling points that make your brand the perfect fit for your Ideal Client.

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Next we move into a few thoughts about other components of the brand (beyond the visual identity we will create): imagery and voice.

Signature Imagery

Imagery is another key component to your brand visuals; consistency in your photographic style and subject matter helps lend another layer of cohesion to your brand. Look for common threads in your imagery to define a signature style that speaks to your brand.

Brand Voice

Voice is the final component of your brand; it refers to the words you use to communicate with your ideal client. Your brand voice is the way you talk and write, including the tone and vocabulary you use.

Together with your design elements and photographic imagery, your brand voice builds a recognizable and cohesive feel for your brand.

Implement Brand Voice via:

• Website Copywriting
• Collateral Print Pieces
• Client Welcome Guides
• Social Media Captions
• Social Media Videos
• Brand Phone Calls
• Merchandise

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Keywords

Lastly, we summarize all of this Brand Strategy into a list of thoughtfully selected key words:

I love this part of the brand design process… research and strategy feels like a puzzle to me, where we just need to figure out how all the pieces connect into a big picture that makes sense. My formal degree is in Creative Advertising set the tone for a strategy-driven approach: I love unearthing valuable insights about your business and what makes it unique—and then translating those insights into a visual representation of your brand.

If you’re considering a rebrand, be sure to incorporate Brand Strategy into the process: you want a brand identity that appeals to your ideal client and sparks a particular feeling or emotion for them. Powerful visual design is capable of communicating that message with just once glance.

And if you’d like to work together, you can learn more about our Brand Design packages here. You’ll note that our custom design work always includes thoughtful Brand Strategy, so we can ensure a timeless, distinctive brand identity that resonates with your dream clients. We would be so honored to dive into brand strategy with you!