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Branding

What is Branding

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Our branding guide will cover the subject of branding; what it is, how it works and how you can use it to help improve your business and perception of your service or product.

We are often asked to explain what exactly branding is and means. The simple answer is that branding is an effort to increase value by building and communicating differentiation…. got it? Read on, to learn in depth…

What do we mean by the term, brand?

The words brand and branding are thrown around by people who often have a lot of misconceptions. Let’s start by dispelling some myths:

  1. A Brand is not a logo
  2. A Brand is not graphic design
  3. A Brand is not a product
  4. A Brand is not a visual identity

The simplest answer is that a brand is a perception that a person (or group of people) have of a product, service, company or organization. The perception cannot be controlled, but may be actively influenced through communication, marketing and corporate identity. When many people have the same perception of a company, it can be said that the company has a brand. For example, let’s look at the Coca-Cola brand.

Coke is essentially just a soft drink, not unlike many others, the difference being if Coke were to lose all of its production-related assets in a disaster, the company would still survive. By contrast, if all consumers were to have a sudden lapse of memory and forget everything related to Coca-Cola, the company would go out of business. Why? Without the Coke brand, the glass is half empty.

Coke is the a world’s top Global Brand for good reason. Coke’s brand value is $120 billion, just over double the market cap without the brand value. Coke’s success is guided by its 2020 Vision goals around innovation, focus, and creativity, and it achieves impressive global presence through standout ad campaigns, bold design, digital savvy, all of these promoting their simple, universally relevant theme that weaves throughout all brand communications: happiness.

What is branding?

As we now know, a brand is a perception in people’s minds. It’s a gut feeling about a service or product. Therefore, branding is an effort or program that works to develop, define, influence and encourage these perceptions, which will help the business perform better and become focused.

We can get very deep and theoretical about branding, its core principles and the process – all of which are very important aspects of building a great brand. But at another level, branding is simply being honest.

Why you need branding

Your brand is your reputation. When customers make a purchasing decision, that decision is based on one thing — does your brand speak to them in a way that encourages the desired perception of your organization? Branding can help you stand out from your competitors, add value to your offering and engage with your customers.

Brand differentiation

Branding is a way of clearly highlighting what makes you different, and more desirable than the competition. Effective branding elevates a product or organization from being just one commodity amongst many identical commodities, to become something with a unique character and promise. Take Dyson for example, they put forth the idea that they were revolutionary, provocative and aggressive. Dyson as a company managed to draw attention not only to its proposition, but also to the entire vacuum cleaner category. Before its appearance, hardly anyone would have considered the design of vacuum cleaners as something to get excited about.

Differentiation is an innate human response. Our brain acts as a filter to protect us from the vast amount of irrelevant information. Brands need to S T A N D O U T and be bold to be noticed. You don’t need to have an exciting product or service, you just need to have courage and imagination. Companies and brands are constantly battling to claim the leadership in their category. But even though every brand wants to lead, most end up doing things that are very similar to their competitors.

In their book Welcome to Your Brain, Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang wrote that, ‘Most of the time, your brain favours speed, interpreting events based on rules of thumb that are easy to apply, but not always logical.’ This idea is based on concept in psychology called dual process theory. Its basic idea is that when weighing-up options individuals use both an unconscious (emotional or gut-feeling) process and a conscious (rational and structural) process . Psychologist Daniel Kahneman labels the two processes System 1 (intuition) and System 2 (reasoning).

System 1 (intuition) thinking is fast and automatic and often relies on emotional cues. Kahneman notes that intuition is based on well-established habits and so is very difficult to change or manipulate. System 2 thinking (reasoning) however, is slower and much more volatile, based on conscious judgments and attitudes. It is suggested that when people are choosing a brand, they tend to make decisions based on intuition and then rationalize those decisions afterwards. They do so because the human brain favours speed: people want to decide as quickly as possible.

This is why we believe it’s so important for all businesses to understand the intuitive rules of thumb people use to choose one brand over another.

Connecting with people

Along with differentiation, is engaging with your customers. Branding is also about building a relationship between a brand and its audience, creating a strong emotional connection. A meaningful connection is what will give a brand longevity in the marketplace.

When brand’s communication come through intact—crystal clear and potent— it goes straight into people’s brains without distortion or the need to think too hard about it.

Defining your brand

If you’re thinking about how to become an extraordinary brand or if you want to assess where your brand stands at the moment, you’ll need to consider:

  • What makes you different?
  • Why do you matter?
  • What do you believe in?
  • Where will you end up?
  • What motivates you every day?
  • How do you want to come across?

If you can start to answer these questions with clarity and consistency then you have the basis for developing a strong brand.

Branding for different sectors

Start-up Business Branding

If you’re launching a new business, you’re in a unique position. You’re small, responsive and adaptable. It’s much easier to look at a market from the outside, assess the competition, opportunities or gaps in the market. This allows you to launch a brand that challenges and shakes up the conventions of the sector. It takes guts, but you can often reap huge rewards!

Service Company Branding

In essence, service brands are built on the people who deliver them. Generally companies and organizations are providing a service of some sort. For service brands, customer service is the dominant part of the offer. For this reason, it’s critical to reflect the brand in the way the service is provided and the way staff interact with customers.

Business to Business Branding

B2B Branding is about trust. If you’re looking for a professional to help you invest money you may choose a company based on what you’ve seen and heard or if the company seems like they could help you make good decisions. But in order for you to choose them (and not their competitor), you also must trust the individuals who will be advising me, not just the company.

B2B branding often include stakeholder touchpoints that have little or no visual presence in the market, but can have a huge impact on your company’s reputation. The list includes things such as CEO vision, employee training, pricing strategy, customer relationships, and sales force communications. Each of these items are an essential part of a company’s brand, but because they’re not visible, business leaders often overlook them. The principles of effective branding apply in just the same way in the B2B sector as elsewhere.

Design and branding

You can have the best graphic designer in the country working on your brand identity, logo and website, but without a solid brand behind it, it will not work. The design firm should know what the brand actually stands for (the big idea). Only from there can they develop a visual identity that is meaningful, strong, simple and works across all the company’s communications.

 

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Focus Groups – Are they useful for your brand?

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At our branding agency we’re often asked by clients about using focus groups to determine critical brand decisions, such as selecting a name, deciding on a logo or analyzing package design or brand collateral.

In our experience, focus groups rarely deliver any of the consensus-building clarity needed to make informed and correct decisions. Focus groups were originally invented to FOCUS the research, and not BE the research. When used as a decision making tool, they cast ordinary people in the role of professionals, and tend to elicit the received wisdom of only a handful of dominant consumers who see themselves as critics and who would probably behave differently in a real-world situation.

Focus groups can be a good starting point for quantitative research, but just don’t use them to gauge sales, determine pricing, choose a new brand name, product packaging, a new logo or marketing collateral. Focus groups are particularly susceptible to something called the Hawthorne effect—the tendency for people to act differently when they know someone is watching. In groups, it seems, some people just want to show off, control and lead and that causes other less dominant people in the group to follow along.

Two notable authors; Marty Neumeier and Malcolm Gladwell both discuss that it’s common for brands that test poorly in focus groups, to actually succeed in the marketplace. Neumeier remarks that these poorly testing brands are initially too unique, but the market’s perception changes as “unique” soon equates with “good”. This creates the potential for a strong, profitable brand. Nuemeier’s theory is there is risk and, at the same time, reward in being different, even when focus groups reject your ideas . In other words, sometimes people don’t know what they don’t know.

What is a better idea for my brand?

Don’t second guess your gut reaction, or the advice from your branding agency. A better way to judge a new offering is to focus on solving a need or problem for your target market. To build a real profit-making brand you need to start with radical differentiation. In other words, when everybody is going left, go right. Your unfettered passion will almost always win.

Try to avoid getting hung up on specific predictions or creating me-too brands. You won’t find answers in a book. Instead, look across the brandscape with unfocused eyes—powerful trends are easy to spot when you stand back far enough.

Are you an early or late-stage company that can benefit from an investment in brand building? If so, Request a Proposal

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Brand, Identity, Logo: Explained

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A logo is not your brand, nor is it your identity. Logo design, identity design and branding all have different roles, that together, form a perceived image for a business or product.

Source: A Great Article from Jacob Cass.

What is branding?

Hundreds of books have been written on the topic, however to put it in a nutshell you could describe a ‘brand’ as an organization, service or product with a ‘personality’ that is shaped by the perceptions of the audience. On that note, it should also be stated that a designer cannot “make” a brand – only the audience can do this. A designer forms the foundation of the brand.

Many people believe a brand only consists of a few elements – some colours, some fonts, a logo, a slogan and maybe  some music added in too. In reality, it is much more complicated than that. You might say that a brand is a ‘corporate image’.

The fundamental idea and core concept behind having a ‘corporate image’ is that everything a company does, everything it owns and everything it produces should reflect the values and aims of the business as a whole.

It is the consistency of this core idea that makes up the company, driving it, showing what it stands for, what it believes in and why they exist. It is not purely some colours, some typefaces, a logo and a slogan.

As an example, let’s look at the well known IT company, Apple. Apple as a company, projects a humanistic corporate culture and a strong corporate ethic, one which is characterized by volunteerism, support of good causes & involvement in the community. These values of the business are evident throughout everything they do, from their innovative products and advertising, right through to their customer service. Apple is an emotionally humanist brand that really connects with people – when people buy or use their products or services; they feel part of the brand, like a tribe even. It is this emotional connection that creates their brand – not purely their products and a bite sized logo.

For a more thorough understanding of branding, in simple terms, I recommend Wally Olin’s: The Brand Handbook which I quote is “an essential, easy-reference guide to brilliant branding”.

What is identity design?

One major role in the ‘brand’ or ‘corporate image’ of a company is its identity.

In most cases, identity design is based around the visual devices used within a company, usually assembled within a set of guidelines. These guidelines that make up an identity usually administer how the identity is applied throughout a variety of mediums, using approved colour palettes, fonts, layouts, measurements and so forth. These guidelines ensure that the identity of the company is kept coherent, which in turn, allows the brand as a whole, to be recognisable.

The identity or ‘image’ of a company is made up of many visual devices:

All of these things make up an identity and should support the brand as a whole. The logo however, is the corporate identity and brand all wrapped up into one identifiable mark. This mark is the avatar and symbol of the business as a whole.

What is a logo?

To understand what a logo is, we must first understand what it is for.

A logo is for… identification.

A logo identifies a company or product via the use of a mark, flag, symbol or signature. A logo does not sell the company directly nor rarely does it describe a business. Logo’s derive their meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes, not the other way around – logos are there to identity, not to explain. In a nutshell, what a logo means is more important than what it looks like.

To illustrate this concept, think of logos like people. We prefer to be called by our names – James, Dorothy, John – rather than by the confusing and forgettable description of ourselves such as “the guy who always wears pink and has blonde hair”. In this same way, a logo should not literally describe what the business does but rather, identify the business in a way that is recognisable and memorable.

It is also important to note that only after a logo becomes familiar, does it function the way it is intended to do much alike how we much must learn people’s names to identify them.

The logo identifies a business or product in its simplest form.

Summary

What is brand? – The perceived emotional corporate image as a whole.
What is identity? – The visual aspects that form part of the overall brand.
What is a logo? – A logo identifies a business in its simplest form.

How would you summarize brand, identity and logo design? Comments and thoughts are welcome, as always.

Learn More about Straydog’s Vancouver Branding Studio [+]

 

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Turn Customers Into Brand Advocates

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Best practices for turning customers into brand advocates

If you build it, they will come. Before rallying advocates, you’ve got to first identify who they are. And surprisingly, a brand’s best advocates are not always the customers who buy the most. They are the customers whose word-of-mouth brings the most profitable new customers to your door, regardless of how much they themselves buy. Identify those advocates by sending inquiries to your CRM database on their likelihood to recommend your brand. You can also scan the social web for evidence of brand advocacy — like testimonials on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks.

Once you’ve identified your advocates, give them what they need to go out and spread the word. Keep in mind, though, not all brand advocates are alike. Some are willing to create content, while others may prefer to share offers and still others may only be willing to give a testimonial. Develop a learning system that identifies what your advocates are willing to do. — And by all means, don’t annoy them by asking advocates to do something multiple times they’ve not responded to in the past.

Create community from within. You can’t think about your customers without first thinking about your own people. Your employees are your first advocates and the best marketing tool you have. They understand the brand culture more than anyone. Find ways to involve employees in reinforcing the brand through customer engagement, such as talking about the brand, catalyzing conversation and connecting with customers through online and offline networks.

Be people–centric and personalize.

Find ways to identify with individual customers and their experience and build a strong sense of community between the brand and its audiences — customers, employees and key stakeholders. Reinforce the brand experience and reward brand engagement by showing genuine appreciation for the work your advocates do on your behalf.

If you want social media, have a social mission.

Use your expertise and influence to push beyond the pure self–interest of the brand and focus on a social mission that complements the business model. This engenders goodwill with core audiences and builds brand loyalty. Within the context of the mission, define a muse and a monster — and offer an alternative to the monster. This gives brand advocates a focus for their activities that helps to strengthen their sense of community and identification with the brand.

Transparency is key to authenticity. The growth of the Internet has given consumers a more transparent and trusted marketplace for exchanging information with their friends and peers about the merit of a product or service. Brands, then, have no choice but to be transparent in their dealings with the customers. Filtering? Come on. Your customers are already talking about you all over the Web. You can’t control what they say, but you can use it to your advantage.

Embrace technology. Brand advocates have been around forever. Today, though, thanks to the growth of social networking and its enabling technologies, companies are creating brand advocate programs that are on a scale not possible years ago. A decade ago the largest programs were engaging a few thousand brand advocates. Today, they can potential involve millions. The sheer size of these programs requires companies to use new technology that helps identify, energize, and track brand advocacy results.

This has been Part 1 of brand Summit Best Practices,  from Marty Neumeier

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WAVES COFFEE – 2018

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Is it Christmas already? Well not quite, but the end of summer means it’s time again to create some stunning Holiday cup designs for our great friends at Waves Coffee House. Waves Coffee houses are your place to connect. The Waves mission is to connect with great people who share their passion and ideals so that together, then can create great neighbourhood coffee houses that enrich the lives of everyone they meet.

So on that note, the aim was to come up with a design that speaks to connection and community. We love the result and so does Waves. They’re sure to have the best looking holiday cups this winter!

What we did:

  • Graphic design for Coffee cups,
  • Graphic design of menu boards,
  • Graphic design for gift cards,
  • Graphic design for food tags and “Pairs Well With” tags,
  • Graphic design for window custom, 2018 Holiday season window decals,
  • Art Direction and on-site photography for photo shoot for the 2018 Holiday coffee and tea drinks.

If you’re looking for award winning brand strategy and design work, give us a call at 604-913-7936 or drop us an email, we’d be happy to perk up your brand’s presence.

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STRAYDOG IS AN AWARD WINNER IN THE GRAPHIS BRANDING 7 COMPETITION

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Straydog is excited to announce that we are a Silver Award Winner in the Graphis Branding 7 Competition for the SOJI Brand.

Graphis is an international bastion of excellence in design and visual imagery and they are committed to presenting and promoting the work of exceptional talent in Design, Advertising, Photography and Art/Illustration. As a award winner in the Branding Design category for 2018, Straydog’s design of the SOJI brand was recognized as a Silver Award, chosen among thousands of entries.

At Straydog, we work tirelessly to develop and design world class brands, packaging, websites and corporate collateral, and although we don’t do this for the recognition, it sure is nice to receive it.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Soji is a geek chic boutique with an online store in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. As purveyors of designer toys, collectables, unique gifts, apparel and home & office products, Ariel was looking for a fun and unique brand identity and logo that would stand out from the crowds and represent her passion for playful, collectable and designer toys and clothing.

ACTION

To create the SOJI identity we looked to Asian pop culture for inspiration, drawing on its sense of playfulness and whimsy. The result is a congenial, bubbly brand design that aptly reflects the collectibles market segment.

The SOJI wordmark itself is intentionally minimal. While its primary form is simple black-and-white, it can also act as a container for colours, textures and backgrounds, extending the visual language of the brand.

Part of the brand language is the Soji “glyph”, a stylized octopus seal that functions as an unofficial mascot. The glyph is used as a visual device to add depth and personality to various brand applications.

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STRAYDOG LAUNCHES THE PRESS ROOM BAKERY & CAFE BRAND

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Straydog has just completed the design and launch of The Press Room Bakery & Cafe brand. The Press Room will be opening in North Vancouver, BC in the Spring of 2019.

The Press Room Bakery & Cafe serves high quality, fresh coffee & wholesome, delicious baked goods in a cosy, relaxed environment. It will be a place to reconnect, form communities and celebrate life’s simple pleasures. With a warm, cosy, urban feel, The Press Room brand and coffee house evokes feelings of relaxation and comfort. The Press Room experience will be memorable, bringing the exquisite into the everyday and providing an environment for nurturing community and celebrating the human condition.

The Press Room logo is a classic serif font, reminiscent of newspaper headlines. Quotation marks, linked together to symbolize, news, conversation, authenticity and connection. The first shape is also a latte finished with artwork that reinforces the message of connection, community, health and love. As well as really good coffee!

Help us celebrate the grand opening of The Press Room Bakery & Cafe, in North Vancouver, BC in Spring 2019…more details to come!

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TOP 10 TIPS TO FOLLOW FOR GREAT BRANDING

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Branding is a very important process you should start thinking about from the moment you decide to turn your idea into a business project. In this article I listed some of the principles you should keep in mind when working with a design agency on your branding:

1. KEEP IT CLASSIC


Trends change fast, which is why great brands tend to choose more classic solutions for their logos, brand colors, inscriptions, etc. Remember that classic doesn’t mean boring – it means that designers should use more traditional fonts, shapes, colors and imagery that will stay popular for a longer period of time.

2. MAKE SURE YOUR BRANDING REFLECTS YOUR CHARACTER

This is usually among the first and the most basic instructions you receive from branding experts. Company mission and statement should reflect on brand design, which means that if you are making a logo for a law firm, you won’t use vivid colors and dynamic shapes. On the other hand if you are designing a logo for a beach bar, making it too plain and square definitely won’t attract people in a need for cocktails and relaxing music.

3. STAND OUT

The worst thing that could happen to a brand is to get mixed up with another one. Sometimes this happens unintentionally, but in a lot of cases entrepreneurs intentionally copy rival brands in order to imitate them and dig into their customer base. This is never a good idea. Copying trademarks can lead to cease and desist letters and lawsuits. Even if you don’t end up in court, copying other rival’s branding will definitely affect your reputation.

4. DON’T USE MORE THAN THREE COLORS

This is one of the main design rules. Even if you are making a logo for samba dance troupe, don’t use more than three colors. There is also a financial reason for this, because you will need to pay premium prices for additional colors, when printing office and promotional material.

5. MINIMALISM ALWAYS DOES THE TRICK

If you look at some of the best known brands, you will realize that they don’t splash users with huge set of vivid colors and don’t contain dozens of different lines and shapes. Successful brand logos are simple, easy to draw and remember.

6. DON’T WRITE LONG SLOGANS

A slogan is a very powerful branding tool, especially when it is short and easy to remember. Some of the good examples are: “I’m loving it!” and “Just do it!”. These slogans stay in consumer’s mind for a long time and they characterize the brands they represent. Good slogans are timeless, and they can be repeatedly used in advertising.

7. CHOOSE A MEMORABLE NAME

Company name is very important, which is why the process of choosing the right name tends to be very frustrating. Your name should be memorable and it shouldn’t be inspired by short–lasting trends. Another very important thing to have in mind when choosing a company name is the domain-name availability. Today we can’t imagine a business without an official website, which means that you should try to find a free domain before making a decision.

8. CHOOSE COLORS WISELY

Choosing colors is not easy. You need to select the ones that will create the right psychological response. This is very important for online brands, because if you want to draw traffic to your website, you need to engage visitors from the start. If you want to draw attention you should use high-contrast color-schemes, and if you want to give consumers the feeling of peace and serenity you should choose light and peaceful color combinations.

9. LEAVE SOME BLANK SPACE

Blank space is designer’s best friend. It emphasizes the important parts of websites and it makes your branding breathe.

10. PERSONALIZE YOUR BRANDING

Add a little bit of “you” to the mix. Choose something you like and add it to your brand no matter what designing experts and guidebooks say. This will show your audience that your brand is unique and that you personally stand behind it.

CONCLUSION

Branding is not as easy as everyone thinks. Logos made in online logo-makers, rewritten slogans and poor selection of colors can hurt your company image. Companies that don’t give branding enough attention are not taken seriously and they tend to have a lot of trouble with attracting customers and business partners.

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The Business of Launching a Brand

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Launching a new business is hard work. Each day your tasks include landing new customers, clients or investors, answering the flood of emails and phone calls and managing clients and contractors — all the while having cash-flow-related panic attacks.

With all these daily tasks continually eating up your precious time, it leaves little room for focusing on developing your brand strategy, brand identity and your vision. At Straydog we see this predicament on a daily basis — here’s a brief overview of the process for new business branding…

The most successful strategy for developing a brand is to do it prior to launching your new business. This doesn’t always happen, but it’s not too late! If your business aims to last and grow at a healthy pace, you need to make time for developing a defined brand and identity. The branding process is fairly straightforward in itself, but includes difficult and complex discussions about who you are, what you want to achieve followed by how to express that through language, interactions and graphic design.

Who are you?

The majority of entrepreneurs have a clear idea of what they’re aiming to accomplish, however, when asked what their new company does, most entrepreneurs will respond with a confused garble of abstractions, conceptual solutions and often a little tech jargon thrown in for good measure. …That’s not a good thing when you have only a moment to capture the interest of a prospective client. The language of your brand must be refined, or you are dead in the water.

The key to successful brand communications is a blend of brevity, clarity and consistency.

Then we at Straydog talk about brand language, we attempt to avoid lofty super-pretentious proclamations, and rather define a simple honest truth about what you do and how you do it. Simplicity is king. Distilling everything down to one sentence is incredibly hard and takes hours upon hours of word picking, white board discussions and fine-tuning. Certainly that one sentence is not going to tell the whole brand story, but that’s not our intention. We teach you how to discipline yourself to achieve brevity and clarity while communicating your brand. Doing this will provoke your target audience to ask how and why.

Let’s differentiate your Brand.

The ultimate goal of any brand effort is differentiation. Setting your product or service apart from its competitors is an essential first step toward creating preference and loyalty.

Carefully choosing the most powerful benefits you will communicate will not only result in brand preference, but brand insistence. Meaning, the brand will be perceived to be the only viable solution for the customer’s need, and customers would rather temporarily go without than choose another brand. If you don’t believe brand differentiation goes beyond price, you’re wrong, take bottled water for example.

Let’s design your Visual Identity

Once you’ve organized the more existential facets of your brand, now comes the visual identity: logo, graphic elements, website, fonts, colours and stationery. The great thing about graphic design is that if applied correctly it can make your business instantly emit the values you want to communicate, such as; innovation, fun, quirkiness, luxury whatever your brand essence is. However, creating design that reflects the essence of your brand is not an easy thing, you must seek a professional graphic design firm with the experience and skill.

Brand Anxiety is normal

Developing a brand requires spending an unhealthy amount of brain capacity strategizing, brainstorming, and planning. This is the essential brand building phase, where you look at your brand from every angle and continually polish your idea. All of this intense work means sometimes you lose all judgement of what exactly you are trying to achieve. You question if it make sense, if everyone else will see the value as you do and sometimes, if you’re crazy!

Don’t worry, this brand anxiety is normal. If you’ve hired a professional branding and graphic design firm, you should trust their work and take a breather. Try expressing your brand essence in the established language on a few random people, show them your brand identity design and see how they react. Doing this will bring back a sense of perspective and ease.

Learn More about Straydog’s Vancouver Branding Studio [+]

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