FROM THIS

TO THIS

What it takes to brand a business
Adikt Marketing Branding Project
When Lindsay, the owner and founder of Adikt Ltd approached me, she was bursting with ideas and energy but felt that she had little direction in which to focus it all. She initially reached out because she felt uncomfortable in promoting her business due to a disconnect between what she felt her brand was and how it appeared to others. This in turn was hindering her confidence and efforts when growing her brand, coupled with a lack of direction, she was struggling to get things going.
Adikt were at the very start of their brand journey. Aside from making money, the company hadn't really established itself in terms of what their values or mission were to be. This is very common with brands in their infancy and is not a failing of the owner by any means. At first it's better to become operational, then turn attention to developing these things in order for the company to grow.
Stage One
The first stage of any brand building process should be to establish clear and solid foundations. This stage gives the brand much more direction and collection of values that can be used to guide the decision making process going forward. Not just when it comes to design but for the future of the brand too.
Workshop 1: Mission Statement & Company Values
In the first and possibly most important workshop, we'll get right down to the bedrock of your business. The aim is to draft a mission statement and create company values, so your brand can strive to do more than just make money.
Workshop 2: Target Market & Competitors
In this workshop we'll review the decisions made in workshop 1 and make sure things are feeling aligned and correct. Once we're happy, we’ll move on to the aim of workshop 2, creating personas for; your ideal client, your secondary target and clients your want to avoid. We'll also to put together a document regarding what you're closest competitors are doing to see where there could be a gap in the market.
Workshop 3: Design Basics & Preferences
It’s time to talk design. In workshop 3 we'll go over the fundamentals of design, covering the different types of logo, colour psychology, font styles and licenses. The aim of this is to establish your preferences for branding. You’ll also have some homework to do after this workshop: to create a pinterest board of branding and design that you love AND one of the styles you hate.
Stage Two
Now that we have solid foundations to build your brand from, we can get started on the best bit if the process, design! Stage two is all about creation. We'll develop logos, choose brand colours & fonts, and create social media assets. I love this stage! With all the foundation workshops done, you'll be a passenger from here on. Just show up for the regular meetings and give me your feedback on how things are progressing.
Symbolism, Mood Boards & Strategy
The first thing we'll do in the design phase is review the Pinterest boards you've made. I'll want to discuss them with you to make sure we're on the same page. When we're happy, I'll take them away and create some mood boards for us to reference throughout the design phase.
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Using everything that we've worked on so far, I'll start getting creative with symbolism for the logo. As you'll have learned in workshop 3 there are many different forms a logo can take, but it should always be used to identify and represent your brand. We use symbolism to make connections to the brand foundations and find ways to align with the customer persona's we made.
Design... Design... Design...
Now we enter a three phase design process for all the brand assets:
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Phase 1
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Logo concept generation & sketching
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Primary colour proposals
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Primary font proposals
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Phase 2
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Logo variants & refinement
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Full colour pallet proposals
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Font pairing proposals
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Phase 3
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Primary, secondary and tertiary logo marks
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Applied colour pallet
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Full logo lockups
Brand Implementation & Guide
Once the design process is complete, it’s time to put it everywhere! I’ll show you through your new brand and then help you get it consistent across all your platforms. I'll also make a brand guide for future use should you need to set up anything new. The guide helps your brand stay just as shiny without my help. Additionally, you can easily share your brand with new employees or potential investors in one concise document.
So that's the process of branding or rebranding your business. It should be fun and exciting and most importantly, it shouldn't need to be done again. Of course you're likely to make changes over the years to come, but the foundations we build should last forever.
So if you think this process is what your business needs then please do get in touch, I'd love to help your brand thrive!