The Right Approach to Building a New Brand Strategy

When is it time to build a new brand strategy?

Usually it happens when companies merge or acquire one another. Or when a small company or organization that is poised for growth decides it needs to create a bigger presence in the marketplace.

Sometimes it happens when you decide you need a new logo.

A few years ago, I was approached by a potential client who wanted to develop a new brand strategy.  “We need a new logo,” the president and CEO told me. “And we need it now.”

Brand Strategy is More Than Just a Logo

While it’s not unheard of to design a new logo within a two to three-month timeframe, it’s nearly impossible. And it’s the wrong way to go about it if you want to create a new brand strategy that works.

Because a brand is not a logo.  It’s not an identity package. And it’s not a product.

A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization. It’s who you are and what you stand for — all of which is communicated by your logo, marketing materials, products, and more.

A new logo is a by-product of a thoughtful, deliberate brand strategy development process.  It’s the icing on the cake after you’ve mixed all the ingredients and baked it.

3 Phases of Building a Brand Strategy

Here are the three phases of building a new brand strategy:

1. Brand platform development: Includes information-gathering, research, analysis, feedback, and recommendations.  The goal is to create a brand platform document that establishes the company/organization’s market positioning, key attributes, and target audiences.
2. Brand identity development: Includes a creative brief, design concepts, design refinements, and a final logo and artwork/templates. Could also include a new website.
3. Brand roll-out:  Includes elevator speech, news releases, internal presentations, and a long-term marketing plan.

A typical time frame to do all this is 9-12 months, depending on the complexity of the organization and the review and approval process.

Sure, you could start revamping your brand by designing a new logo.  But that’s not branding. Or strategy.

It’s just design.

Building a successful brand strategy that will help grow and sustain your business ends with design.  It starts with discovery.

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