The link between a company’s business strategy and the execution of any communication is the brand strategy.  A well-conceived brand strategy is a roadmap that informs corporate identity, advertising, public relations, digital content and other marketing communications. KNB will start with a robust discovery process that establishes the context for any branding program. The inputs for this process vary by client and by industry but typically include management perspective, customer research, competitive analysis and industry trends.

The key to any successful branding program is found by identifying a differentiated positioning that communicates a company’s competitive advantage and value proposition. The touchstones of a strong brand positioning are credibility, relevance, differentiation and sustainability. Your organization’s executive team will confirm and buy into these elements to make sure you can deliver on your “brand promise.”   KNB will conduct a gap analysis that will uncover resources you might need to support brand positioning.

In order to baseline current brand performance, KNB will help you to audit and understand how the brand is currently deployed in external and internal communications, with an eye towards consistency and competitive best practices. Insights derived from visual and verbal audits often surprise management, as they rarely see aggregated analysis of branding practices. Audits include both design applications across all media as well as naming, verbal content and marketing communications.

In many businesses branded assets are sub-optimized against a business strategy or sales targets. By examining a full range of brand assets it often becomes clear what the investment priorities should be going forward. Brand assets can include company trademarks, web sites, sales collateral, products, sponsorships and other communications that help to build overall company reputation.

Perhaps the most on-trend part of branding in today’s sales driven business culture, is brand architecture, which organizes the go-to-market alignment of products and services. Often as a result of multiple acquisitions or decentralized marketing, companies find that customers don’t understand the depth and breadth of offerings. KNB will help your organization to arrive at the best brand architecture options that can be modeled for optimized revenue contribution and consequently lead to greater sales, revenue and customer retention.

The days of dreaming up a cool name are long gone. It’s tough to secure legally available names that carry meaning and differentiate your organization in the marketplace.  Both a science and an art, name development requires external expertise to manage the process.  KNB can help your organization develop criteria to evaluate names in a real market context.  It’s the first step toward generating name candidates and establishing an agreed upon set of criteria that management can adopt to evaluate the effectiveness of names in a real market context and move your organization forward.

All creative assignments begin with the development of a written creative brief that references the strategic objectives and clarifies specific goals for the corporate identity design. Considerations include functional criteria such as how the logo will be used and what are the high priority applications, as well as any brand equity retention issues.

Once the written brief is approved, KNB will initiate a design exploration process that covers a broad set of visual concepts.  In a manner much like a funnel, the starting point is broad and narrows through client feedback, market research and numerous refinements to arrive at a single approved solution. Supporting graphics including typography, colors and secondary elements will be compiled into a visual language system for broad use.

Once there is final approval on the logo and overall design system, the process of codification begins to document usage and to establish guidelines for a variety of print and digital solutions for every application from business cards, to signage to mobile applications. Rather than being a printed book that sits on a shelf, KNB will make your brand standards will be available online in downloadable formats for CMS systems and broad use across the enterprise.

In order to successfully deliver a brand promise, it is critical to align your organization around the shared values and behaviors needed to deliver the ideal brand experience.  A successful brand ambassador program will help employees and community and opinion leaders grasp every aspect of your branding program—from brand positioning and brand attributes, to the core messages they’ll want to share with essential stakeholders.

Brand is much more than a logo and marketing communications. Brands are experiences that organizations deliver to a broad range of stakeholders, including clients, customers, employees, partners, opinion leaders and the media.  KNB’s hands- on workshops will help everyone in your organization understand the function and scope of your brand and how they can help deliver on your brand promise.