A logo that you designed yourself on a cross country flight. Packaging you slapped together in powerpoint minutes before the first production run. A brand name that you landed on because, well, the URL was available.
In the startup world, there’s no shortage of accidentally, stumbled upon, or just plain DIY brands. But why have an accidental brand when you can have a strategic one? A well-thought out brand might just be the one thing holding you back from your next big growth phase.
This week on brand builder we talk about the rebrand, and how refreshing your brand can position you for massive growth.
To help us out we enlisted two people who have been there before - Amir Haque and Alysse Burroni.
Amir is a 16-year vet of the advertising business, and a partner at Mistress, an internationally awarded, full-service creative agency based in Santa Monica. Mistress has done work for tons of brands, including Coca-Cola, Sambazon, Campbell’s, American Apparel, and more.
Alysse - aka ABB - is the Director of Brand Marketing at SnackNation. She’s worked for famed branding house Ogilvy & Mather, and now leads brand marketing efforts in-house at SnackNation as the company looks towards the next phase of its growth.
These two branding experts got together to break down the elements of brand, and explained exactly how a strategic rebrand can position you for success, using the recent SnackNation rebrand as a case study.
Here’s a cheat sheet of some of the concepts Amir and Alysse cover in this episode.
The Rebrand Process
(1) Buy-in:
A critical first step is to make sure internal stakeholders understand and are invested in a rebrand or brand-refresh.
Why is it important? For starters, going with a branding agency can get expensive, and strict ROI is hard to track.
The key is painting a vivid picture not of what the brand will be, but of what the brand will do - that might be retaining customers (and increasing revenue), communicating your value proposition more efficiently (and increasing sales), or attracting the talent you need to grow.
(2) Strategy:
This is where the work truly begins. Now is the time for stakeholder interviews, customer research, customer avatar creation, and coming up with your "beacon brands." The brand architectures comes together during this phase.
(3) Creative:
Now the task is translating the ideas from the strategy phase into creative assets - logos, colors, aesthetics, packaging, etc. You really need expertise here, and that’s where a good agency becomes invaluable.
Speaking of brand architecture, there are several misnomers when it comes down to the taxonomy of branding. Amir did a great job clarifying.
Brand Architecture
Brand Vision - what’s the big picture vision for the customer? For the world? Mission - how do we actually make this vision real? Positioning - how do you articulate the benefit to the consumer in a competitive context? Message - what are we actually saying to the consumer? What is the language, tone, and tenor?