Which matters more - brand design or brand strategy?

When most people think of branding, their mind leaps forward to an iconic logo design or a stand-out website design. But if you think only at this visual level, you’re missing a world of opportunity…

What if we considered the brand development journey as an opportunity to do business differently? What if we laid all of our biggest, wildest ambitions and laid them all out on the table? What if you could use your brand as a strategic tool to engineer a business which built value into your offering, enabled you to win higher value work - and, as a result, gave you time back to pursue life outside of your business?

It’s all possible. Let’s start at the beginning

Thinking big

The exciting, anything-is-possible bit: what would you love your business to look like if nothing stood in your way? Forget logistics, budget constraints, time and all those other boring bits for a minute. Dare to think outrageously big about what you’d LOVE your business to look like. This forward-focus helps to build your confidence to make bolder moves and creates focus: if one of your goals is to win higher paying engagements, how do you need to position your business to get you there? Suddenly, you can see that your brand needs to do more than look smart, but really help to support the value and credibility of your work.

Reveal the strategic brand positioning for your service business

There are three key areas to consider: What your strengths are, what your target clients value, and what makes you uniquely positioned to serve your clients. Interrogate these points as objectively as you can, enlisting the help of someone who knows your business well if you can. This process will hopefully be really illuminating, but requires some deep thought to cut through the noise and arrive at a really compelling proposition which is genuinely different.

Building a meaningful brand proposition

Your brand proposition is simply your promise to your clients - it’s what your offer is; what you’ll deliver, and the outcome they’ll experience as a result. The previous step will have delivered some clarity around your strengths and unique advantage - now you need to package that up into a client-facing message… which is really all that your brad proposition is. I can’t stress how important it is here to focus on the end goal that your clients have in mind when they engage their services. I’m yet to meet anybody at all who hired one business over another based on their framework, model or approach, no matter how clever it might be. Clients care about one thing: the end result.

Developing an iconic logo and brand identity

A brilliant brand strategy and knockout brand proposition doesn’t mean much if you can’t bring it to life through your visual your brand identity. When you consider that humans use how things look (that’s your brand identity) and sound (that’s your proposition) to decide how they feel about them, we can see that your visual identity has just as much heavy lifting to do as your brand strategy.

An iconic brand identity will be original, cohesive and use a variety of visual elements (typography, colour, imagery style, illustrations etc) to influence how your brand feels.

Relentless consistency

Your job is to make your business unforgettable to your target market. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you need a Nike-esque tag line (‘Just Do It’ is genius, isn’t it?), or have terrified your accountant by spending a small fortune on a visual identity. It means showing up in your clients’ world consistently. Same proposition. Same visual identity. It’ll feel repetitive to you, but to others, this level of consistency helps to build familiarity and trust. And you know what trust leads to? Sales. Find creative ways to deliver your message across all of your marketing channels, and don’t stop.

Hannah Belton is a brand consultant and creative director at Kent-based branding agency Ditto Creative. She specialises in helping clients founders and business owners to build high end brands through strategic brand positioning and visual brand identities, working with clients across professional services, lifestyle brands and not for profit organisations. To enquire, please click here.