Brand Strategy
Relevant, unique and credible: that’s our motto for successful brands. So the first question is what makes your brand relevant: why your target group should choose your brand over the others. Why you matter, and what makes your brand unique and valuable. Difficult one? Not if you ask us. We even offer a special brand strategy workshop where we’ll help you figure out what to aim for.
Practical Brand Strategy workshop
Strategy means making choices. What is the aim of your brand, what do you want to be – and especially, what don’t you want to be? We organize a brand strategy workshop for many of our clients for this purpose. During a half-day session, we help your management team explore your brand vision, brand mission, internal cultural values, external brand values, brand promise, brand personality and brand essence. We also help you to think about your Why, How and What in order to nail down your purpose. This will be used to define a clear brand strategy and brand identity for you in a compact strategic memo. That’s useful for you and for us in order to design a unique look and feel for your brand.
Brand Design model as the basis
Together with you, we use branding to build on your brand’s success. In our view, there are two parts to branding: Brand Design (making the brand market-ready) and Brand Activation (bringing the brand to life). As a Brand Design agency, we’ll define your brand strategy and design its unique look and feel, which we’ll then develop into credible digital and physical brand touch points. And don’t forget about brand orchestration: coordinating all the brand touch points to create visual synergy. Sound complicated? Not to us. We’ve developed the Brand Design model to make it even clearer. It forms the basis for what we do.
Brand Identity model
Our director Ruud Boer RM is a Register Marketer (yes, that’s what RM stands for) and the brains behind the Brand Identity model. It gives you a system for defining your brand identity. We break that down into a mental brand identity and visual brand identity – the brand’s inside and outside.
Brands exist solely in people’s minds and are formed by associations that they have with the brand. Such as colour, scent, sound and tone of voice. That can be defined in the model as well, which is a big help.
Brand Design: the book
Ruud Boer, our director, is the one who put Brand Design on the map in the Netherlands. His book BRAND DESIGN, first published in 2002 and now in its 7th edition / 21st impression, has become the standard work on how to build brands. The book is used in every higher professional education programme in the Netherlands for students in marketing, communications and design. More and more clients have learnt something from the book. We are rather proud of that. Good to know: if you become one of our clients, we’ll be happy to give you a signed copy.
