Hi there, fellow creatives.
In this episode of LEARN & SELL BRANDING, I am sharing with you what is a branding strategy and how you can conduct a strategy session with your client, step by step.
This is the exact process we use in projects that we sell for over $10,000.
For over 15 years my wife and I have worked together from home as a branding studio, creating brands for international clients.
We founded ARMEANU Creative Academy, which is dedicated to helping creatives like you elevate their skills and make more money.
Let’s kick this off by understanding what a brand is. There are so many complicated definitions out there that you lose yourself in all those technical terms.
A brand is just like a person:
- A person has a name – a brand has a unique name.
- A person has a face – a brand has a logo.
- A person wears specific clothes and colors – a brand has a distinctive visual identity.
- A person speaks in a certain way – a brand has a well-defined voice and tone.
- A person makes friends – a brand connects and builds relationships with its audience.
- A person keeps promises – a brand delivers on its promises through its products or services.
To build a brand, you need to understand its core values, the story behind it, and the passion that drives the people who create it.
Then identify its audience, their needs, and how the brand will meet and exceed those needs.
Understanding the culture of the brand’s audience is essential to creating a brand that connects emotionally.
You also need to identify the rival brands and find a strong differentiator—a unique factor that sets the brand apart from its competitors.
This whole process is what we call a branding strategy—a discovery phase that every designer should go through with their client.”
At the core of this strategy is the Branding Workshop – an interactive meeting that we run online or in person with our clients.”
Let’s break it down now: the entire process is divided into six major steps.
The first one is the brand intro, where we ask a series of questions:
A. What is the brand’s name, or naming ideas?
If the client already has the name, write it down.
If the project includes naming, then write down the naming ideas that your client has had so far, but don’t try to come up with names at this stage.
B. What is the story behind the name or the brand idea?
Sometimes the brand story has a strong connection with its name.
If your client has a name for the brand, make sure that you understand the story behind it.
If it doesn’t have a name yet, move on to the next step.
C. What motivated you to choose this business?
Your mission here is to uncover your client’s true passion and ascertain the emotional connection they have with their business.
And passion goes beyond the financial gain.
D. In the next step you ask your client to Describe the products or services that the brand offers.
You need to understand the products or services that the brand is selling: its unique selling points, what makes it exceptional, and how it sets itself apart from competitors on the market.
Do not move forward until you have gained a comprehensive understanding of the services or products.
E. The next question is What are your goals?
The brand’s goals involve grasping your clients’ short-term and long-term ambitions, such as company growth, national or international reach, social impact, and future trends.
When talking about goals, you have the chance to explore additional services for your client, including presentations, label design, social media post templates, banners/posters, web design, and more. You can do this by asking if they need some of these services to reach their goal.
Rather than framing these as obligatory, approach it as a discussion, laying out the potential benefits for the brand’s growth without pushing for a decision.
After presenting these possibilities, take a brief break, allowing your client to share their thoughts.
If there’s no mention of adding them to the contract, move on to the next topic.
We’ll discuss how to sell more services at this stage in a future episode.
F. The next question is How does the brand help its customers?
You need to identify the specific problems that the brand aims to solve and fully understand the solutions it provides.
This will help you create brand messages that effectively communicate with the audience.
When going through this process with your clients, you will see that they love talking about their businesses.
This will be a fun process for everyone.
The second step is the Brand Attributes
In this next exercise, the client has to come up with single-word attributes that best describe the brand.
You can help by giving examples but never suggest a direction – let the client make the call.
A. The brand culture – How would the customers describe the company?
Here are a few examples: innovative, professional, calm, playful, secure, and so on.
B. What would the ideal customer be like?
Here are a few examples: smart, urban, rich, hungry, impatient.
You can help your client by giving examples like this but remember: never suggest relevant examples for the brand you are building.
C. The brand voice – How would the brand sound to others?
Serious, funny, cool, wise, imposing.
D. The feeling. How does a customer feel after using the brand’s product or service?
Safe, happy, fulfilled, energized, confident.
E. The impact. What does the brand deliver?
If it were a sports shoe company, it would provide mobility, support, performance improvement, and confidence.
It’s not about the products or services that the brand offers, but the impact it has on customers’ lives.
F. The X-Factor – What makes the brand different & special?
What makes this brand the preferred choice over its competitors?
This could be related to a unique characteristic of the product, the buying experience, the brand story, or anything that gives the brand an advantage.
The third step is brand positioning
The client must now vote for a dominant attribute in each category: culture, client, voice, feeling, impact, and X factor.
Have a debate and establish the main attributes.
Choosing an attribute in each category does not exclude the others but establishes the most important one.
Make this clear to your client.
Now, use the chosen attributes to create a sentence that defines the brand’s positioning.
Here’s an example from a bicycle brand that we created a while back:
Ten07 offers bicycles to eco-conscious people, in an inclusive environment,
with a passionate voice, helping them feel well-invested and dynamic.
This sentence gives a quick, overall sense of what the brand is.
In the free product I mentioned earlier, you’ll find a clear step-by-step guide, along with a ready-to-use template that makes the entire process easy and straightforward.
If you find this content helpful, subscribe to our Youtube channel to learn more valuable insights on branding and the business of branding.
The fourth step is identifying the audience
For the ideal customer establish the essential demographics: age range, location, and financial situation.
Then explore the customers’ needs that fit their lifestyle.
After this clarify how the brand helps. How it meets and exceeds those needs.
This will help you create brand messages that effectively communicate with the target audience.
The fifth step is “like & dislike”
The participants in this workshop must be people who understand and work with the brand.
The brand identity needs to resonate with the target audience but also with the people who represent the brand and invest in it.
This exercise helps you understand the collective mind behind the brand.
Ask the workshop participants to come up with things they like and are not related to the brand you build: objects, other brands, activities, colors, anything.
Go through the same process for things they don’t like.
The sixth step is pointing out the competitors.
Ask your client to name the top 3, most relevant competitors.
You will analyze them before moving into design, to better understand the trends and how to create a brand that stands out.
This is the most basic and essential brand strategy for a project that we sell for over $10,000 in our branding studio, working from home. This approach involves the client in the creative process, keeping the decision-making power on your side and avoiding those
endless design revisions.
There are more complex strategies for bigger brands, exploring in-depth core values, voice charts, archetypes, pyramids, brand architecture, multiple consumer profiles, and market research for projects that we usually budget for over $25K and take more than three months to develop. But this kind of project is hard to land. On the other hand, a $10K project is much easier to win if you have a good strategy.
You can get the “Branding Workshop framework” for free on our website.
It contains an in-depth guide of the process that we revealed in this episode, a ready-to-use template, and an example from one of our projects.
You have the link in the description.
Also check out the events page on our website, as we often have free webinars on how to level up your game and elevate your mind!
Have an awesome day!