BRAND STRATEGY PROCESS
What does your brand say about you?
Your brand is always communicating something to your customers.
You may not realize it, but you are always communicating with your customers. Your messaging, office décor, email interactions, clothing, products, Instagram posts, and countless other elements are all communicating for you – but are you being purposeful in all those interactions, or are you letting people’s perception of you fall to chance?
After asking the same types of “who are you” questions to many of our clients – only to be left with confusing answers – we developed a process that would help guide our clients to a more clear future. A future where they know who they are, what makes them valuable, where they’re going, and how they’ll communicate that clearly.
We named this process our Brand Strategy Process (creative, right?) and developed a step-by-step workbook to guide you along the journey as well. If you’re still nodding your head and asking yourself how you haven’t done anything like this yet in the life cycle of your business, you’re in the right place. Keep reading.
In-Person Branding Workshops
During the Brand Strategy Process, our team will guide you through 2 days of in-person workshops to dive into your Brand Audit, Brand Identity, and Brand Visuals.
The purpose of these workshops is twofold: for Sidekick to learn you better (therefore making our partnership even stronger on a long-term basis), and for you to leave with better clarity about who you are, where you are, and how to communicate that succinctly. For our 2-day workshops, we choose a creative meeting space and gather your company’s decision makers into a room to brainstorm and discuss your brand. Before these workshops, we’ll give you our brand workbook (pictured below) with some homework that you’ll work through before each workshop day. After completing each section of the process, Sidekick synthesizes the ideas discussed and sends you documents to keep on file and reference later.
Read more about our entire Brand Strategy Process below.
Our Brand Strategy Process
Step 1: Brand Audit
The Brand Audit is our way of evaluating and taking stock of your current brand. This is a “State of the Union” of sorts. It helps us recognize the good, the bad, and the ugly of your current brand. Before you can revamp or revolutionize, you have to know what you’re working with. This is the most foundational step to the entire process.
Step 2: Brand Identity
Discovering your Brand Identity is one of the most vital steps to this process. This stage helps discover and articulate who you are, what makes your business tick – your values, mission, and vision. This stage helps determine the soul of what you’re accomplishing and then explore how to articulate it.
Step 3: Brand Visuals
This is the last phase of our on-site workshops, where we discuss what your brand should communicate visually. We ask questions like, “How can we visually communicate who we are, what our mission is, and what we value?” We discuss what visual signals are appropriate for your brand and its customers, and which ones should be avoided.
Step 4: Brand Guidelines
Once we’ve clarified who you are, and audited where you are, we then create your brand’s visual components (colors, logos, fonts, etc.). Sidekick will create your Brand Guidelines, which is a document that compiles and outlines what we’ve discussed and clarified during this process that you can use throughout your company.
Step 5: Brand Deliverables
This is the final stage, where we take what we’ve learned and use your newly created Brand Guidelines to create deliverables based on the needs we’ve discovered through the process. This stage may include things like a new website, signage, environmental office design, apparel, print design, and countless other potential deliverables. We’ll work with you to create the best plan moving forward with your newly articulated brand.