Brand Development
Position your brand to win with a brand strategy that helps you understand who you are and how to communicate it in a meaningful way.
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To outshine your competition and win people’s hearts and minds, you need to share an authentic story about who you are and what you’re here to do. Whether you’re a growth-stage startup or an established brand, our brand development services give you the tools you need to attract lifelong customers, align your team, and build a brand that lasts.
Brand Core
Align your business, brand, and story by identifying and articulating the core principles that make up your brand.
Why Your Brand CORE Matters
Brands have the power to change the world with strong communities behind them. But to attract a strong community, you need to be transparent about who you are and what you believe—and communicate it consistently across every touchpoint. Knowing your core is the secret to doing this effectively.
How a BRAND CORE Helps Your Business
Your brand core is basically the blueprint to build a brand that lasts. With a strong core you can…
Tell stories that earn lifelong customers.
Communicating your beliefs authentically and consistently helps you attract like-minded people who share your ideals. In a competitive market, telling these types of stories is your last remaining competitive advantage.
Make better business decisions.
When facing a challenging business decision, your brand heart functions as your North Star, guiding you in the right direction. Operating with your values front and center also cultivates trust, keeping you accountable to the people you work with (teammates and employees) and for (existing and potential customers).
Create a stronger, happier culture.
When employees are invested in a shared vision, they’re more collaborative, committed, and engaged, creating a healthier work environment that helps you attract and retain the talented people you want.
Ultimately, your brand core influences every aspect of your business, helping you grow inside and outside of your company walls.
How We Approach Your Brand CORE
Through a collaborative process, we guide you through a powerful self-exploration to surface your brand’s core principles, identify your connecting themes, create shared definitions, and distill your thinking. Then we translate those beliefs into simple, powerful language, giving you the foundation you need to share your brand story with the world.
Brand Guidelines
Preserve your brand integrity with beautifully designed and easy-to-use guidelines that keep your content on brand at all times.
Why Every Brand Needs Guidelines
If you want to cultivate brand recognition, you need to communicate consistently and cohesively. Everything from your blog articles and tweets to your website and packaging should reflect your brand. Unfortunately, without proper direction, it’s difficult to maintain strong brand integrity. You’re likely to see logos misused, the wrong colors, and other inconsistencies throughout content. (This is especially true if you’re working with outside content creators who may not be as intimately familiar with your brand.) Over time, this inconsistent presentation can dilute your brand—and even hurt your credibility. To protect your brand, you need a comprehensive guide that empowers your team to tell your brand story effectively.
What Guidelines Should Include
A brand guide provides all the info content creators need to confidently produce on-brand content, no matter the medium. This includes detailed directions on how to apply brand elements, style guidelines, dos and don’ts, etc. While some brands may include additional elements (depending on the type of content they create), guidelines should cover brand basics, such as:
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Brand messaging (tagline, value proposition, messaging pillars)
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Brand essence (voice, tone, personality
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Logo
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Color palette
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Typography
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Illustration
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Iconography
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Photography
What matters most is that your guidelines are thorough, accessible, and easy to apply.
Your brand guidelines should be simple and intuitive to follow.
How We Approach Guidelines For Your Brand
We design custom, comprehensive guidelines that include all the practical information creators need to apply your brand identity consistently and cohesively.
We focus on ease of use, including tips, examples, and real-world use cases to make things as clear as possible.
Even the guidelines themselves are written in your voice and designed in your visual identity.
With your complete guidelines, you get peace of mind knowing your team can create beautiful content that accurately reflects your brand.
Consistent and cohesive
Your brand guidelines will ensure that your employees and customers can make sense of your identity and value proposition, regardless of their journey through your content.
Visual Identity
Bring your brand to life with an expertly designed identity that makes you stand out from your competition.
Why a Visual Identity Matters
Every brand needs to stand out, and a beautiful visual language is one of the most powerful ways to do it. By presenting your brand cohesively and consistently through a unified identity, you can capture your audience and intrigue them throughout their journey.
Build instant brand recognition
The more unique your visual presentation, the easier it is to identify your brand in a crowded marketplace.
Communicate your personality
Your visual identity represents who you are and reinforces your brand story through non-verbal communication.
Create more effective content
Good design targets the brain’s visual processing center, improving comprehension and recall. Whether you’re using data visualizations to clarify complex numbers or creating eye-catching illustrations, a well-crafted identity is the key to creating memorable content.
Provide a consistent brand experience.
The more consistent your brand is, the more people come to trust it. This is the key to cultivating strong relationships.
With a cohesive visual identity, you can confidently tell your brand story across channels and ensure that your brand makes the right impression at every touchpoint.
Elements of a Visual Identity
A strong visual identity gives you the tools you need to communicate through all types of content, whether it’s your product packaging or your newsletter. Depending on your unique needs, our visual identity services include a variety of elements, such as:
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Logo
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Color palette
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Typography
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Illustration
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Iconography
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Photography
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Above all, your identity should be designed with care and customized so that every element complements the other.
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How We Approach Your Visual Identity
We apply design principles to craft a comprehensive identity that is beautiful, flexible, and cohesive. This starts with a deep dive into your brand to understand who you are. Then we can translate your essence into a visual language that effectively communicates your brand story. To ensure it’s applied correctly in the real world, we craft comprehensive brand guidelines that include clear directions, tips, and examples, making it easy for content creators to preserve and promote brand integrity at all times.
Brand Messaging
Make your brand messaging stick with a framework that helps you tell a consistent, cohesive brand story.
Why Brand Messaging Matters
Articulating the core principles that make up your brand to align your business, brand, and story.
To create a strong brand, you need to consistently communicate:
Who you are
What you stand for
What you do
Why you're unique
How you do it
Why you’re invested in helping people
With well-articulated messaging, you can tell a cohesive story at every stage of the customer journey, ensuring every piece of content you create reinforces your brand value and helps achieve your goals.
Elements of Messaging
Whether you’re building a brand from scratch or refreshing your existing messaging, you need a solid framework to communicate consistently across channels. Depending on your needs, this may include:
Brand essence (voice, tone, personality)
Value prop
Tagline
Brand and founder stories
Pillars
Messaging campaigns
Messaging frameworks
Mission critical messaging.
Remember: From your website and packaging to your content marketing and sales materials, strong messaging is the key to making an impact at every touchpoint.
Create flexible, but consistent, messaging frameworks
Deliver customized brand experiences and messaging across different frameworks, but ensure brand cohesion with messaging frameworks.
Ensure that customers moving between business lines and segments will experience a high-quality experience with brand integrity.
How We Approach Your Messaging
Your messaging is directly shaped by your brand goals. Depending on the story you want to tell, we help you distill and articulate key messaging around who you are, what you do, and why people should want to buy from you. To ensure your content is consistent and cohesive across all channels, we also provide messaging guidelines that are easy to apply. With this simple but flexible framework, everyone on your team is empowered to tell stories that reinforce your brand value, whether through a simple tweet or a global campaign.
Employer Brand
Attract and retain the best and brightest in your industry by building an employer brand that people want to work for.
Why Your Employer Brand Matters
To build a lasting brand, you need a strong team behind you. But in a competitive hiring market, it’s increasingly challenging to find great employees—and keep them. How do you stand out? How do you make people want to work for your brand? By identifying what makes you a great employer, sharing it with the world, and continuously nurturing those traits. When you do this successfully, you can cultivate a community of people who are committed to your values, your vision, and your brand for the long term.
Elements of Employer Brand
Whether you’re an established brand that needs some realignment or a new company that wants to grow in the right direction, understanding what makes you a great employer is crucial. This process includes things like:
Employer and competition brand audit
We investigate the status quo of the employer brand as well as comparable competitors' employer brands to assess where it stands and prescribe an optimal path forward.
Employer value proposition and messaging pillars
We align the employer to employee value prop and communicate its essence through interactions and media.
Applicant journey mapping and channel discovery and management
We begin crafting the employer brand at the first employee touchpoint - the application.
Ultimately, the goal is to equip yourself with the tools and understanding you need to tell stories that make people feel connected to your brand.
How We Approach Employer Brand
We dive into your brand to understand how you’re currently perceived by candidates, why employees like working for you, what your unique value proposition is, and how you can translate it into content that connects with the right people. With an articulated employer strategy, you can increase the caliber of candidates, keep your current employees engaged, and discover new outlets and talent pools for growing a diverse team.