Chykalophia Logo Color

A Step by Step Process to Attract Right Clients With Brand Design

It may seem obvious, but it’s important to ensure that everything your brand communicates reinforces your brand. This ‘brand-led communications’
approach makes for consistent communication across all marketing channels.

Why do it? Because it serves as both proof of the brand in the application while achieving the specific objectives and requirements of the communications material itself. And it’s a sure fire way to attract more clients. Whether you’re looking for a product, personal or corporate branding, a solid brand design agency can help.

Because a brand is a perception held in the mind, businesses need to make
sure the right impressions are being tailored to their target audiences to turn them into customers. Before approaching external suppliers, such as
advertising and digital agencies, the brand identity must be created and clearly defined. Otherwise, it will be almost impossible to keep all communications efforts coherent, consistent and ultimately effective.

Without designing a strong brand strategy and an accompanying set of
guidelines, organizations risk weakening key messages, especially when
engaging different suppliers who have limited background knowledge of their brand, its history and its aspiration for the future.

What are brand-led communications?

Brand-led communications are exactly what it sounds like the practice of
ensuring the core brand, its personality, values, and its essence are at the heart of all communications.

Building strong, positive and aligned impressions is what it’s all about, and these come to life visually through what you look like, verbally through what you say about yourself, and behaviorally through what you do and how your brand and associated products perform. It permeates everything from product design through to the way people answer the phone.

It, therefore, sits across all of an organization’s marketing activities including any digital activity, marketing collateral, visual identity, and staff behavior.

To engage in a meaningful way with target audiences, organizations must tie everything they do to their brand.

How can an organization’s message become lost?

Inconsistency breaks down and dilutes messaging and is a key reason why
some brands can’t create a memorable, positive and aligned message.

Seeking out an external agency prior to having a strong, well-defined brand can contribute to inconsistent messaging, and potentially results in a ‘creatively-led’ approach rather than a ‘brand-led’ approach. This occurs when a creative idea, rather than the brand message itself, is at the core of the communication.

What exacerbates the problem is the traditional creative pitching process,
where agencies are expected to respond to potential clients with great ideas. When agencies don’t fully undertake an immersion into the brand, they can fail to understand who your business is, what your aspiration is, and what makes you different.

This can result in a flawed pitching process and agencies struggling to reflect the brand’s true intention. Ultimately, being assessed and selected based solely on a creative idea runs the risk of undermining a business’s brand.

Prior to engaging with agencies, it is worth focusing on a clear message, strong brand strategy, defined aspiration, and brand identity.

How can organizations ensure they are brand-led?

Organizations that ensure all communications are driven by their brand have the opportunity to create a compelling and consistent message that runs through everything they do. The way to build a competitive advantage is by ‘switching on the brand’. It essentially increases your chances of being remembered positively by your target audiences.

Getting external assistance is usually a key step in helping business get their head around their brand. Once defined, they can use their brand as a bridge to the creative, rather than the other way around.

If you are going to work directly with creative consultants, make sure you
maximize agencies’ responses by ensuring a detailed brief is in place before requesting pitches. It’s also a good idea to meet with agencies and speak to them face-to-face about your brand and its future, letting them get a feel for your brand. Specifically, tell them who you are and what makes you different within your space.

A brand-led agency is another option for businesses. These agencies start with defining what an organization’s branding message is and how it can be
communicated. The agency is on a journey of discovery and clarification along with the client, rather than feeling obliged to dive straight into creative ideas.

The brand-led agency can, therefore, help an organization define what they
want to say and how to communicate it through different marketing channels. Everything feeds into each other, helping to create an effective brand presence.

Strong branding happens when different people think about you in a similar
way. Great branding happens when everybody sees you exactly how you want
them to.

This article is written by:
Russell Britton is the digital director at uberbrand, Sydney based branding agency. He is an award-winning creative leader with over 15 years of experience in managing the planning and creative execution of through the line brand experiences. His passion drives him to connect with brands to give an experience that will change perceptions and create action.

Sign up for our Next Draft newsletter

Get our top branding, UX and website resources for your business straight to your inbox.

Resources Page Mega Email Signup

This will add you to our Next Draft list where we send out useful content around branding, marketing, and all things website that help inspire growth for you and your business. Of course you can unsubscribe anytime.

Get started on a branding or website project with us.

GET ON A CALLBook a brand, ux, or web audit