Before the Logo: What No On Tells You About Branding (Part 2)

Part 2 - Building the Brand Foundation

This is Part 2 of a 3-part series of blog posts providing an in-depth, first-hand overview of what you should expect, and what you need to know, about the Branding (or Rebranding) process.

Part 1: Before the Logo: A basic overview of the early, initial steps of the branding process

Learning the Landscape: Brand Auditing & Competitive Analysis

Before any design concepts are ever created, research is necessary to understand the competitive landscape. If you're going through a rebrand, you'll also need to audit key touchpoints across your current branding.

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Conducting a Brand Audit

All brands go through shifts and changes, and many of these design decisions can get lost in the shuffle over time. If your company is big enough, you could have possibly hundreds of elements of branding out in the wild. Companies undertaking a rebranding need to establish a baseline for the current state of the brand. A brand audit allows you to get a clear picture of all your brand elements in a single place. First, start listing off key pieces of content reflecting your brand elements, then start gathering screenshots.

To ensure you're capturing all the key elements of your brand (and make the roll-out easier later), I recommend creating a comprehensive "Journey Map" that captures all the major touchpoints across different sets of users.

Journey Maps typically are presented as a grid or table, with key touchpoints for different types of users. For example, you might have a Journey Map for prospects through becoming customers, as well as a Journey Map for internal staff, from new hires onboarding, all the way through retirement.

Here's just a few ideas for touchpoints to include in the Brand Audit/Journey Map:

• Website
• Emails (newsletters, product updates, as well as internal communications)
• Social Media
• Print Materials (white papers, one-sheets, thought leadership, sales materials)
• Slide Decks (Internal and externally-facing)
• Tradeshow Booth/Conference Materials
• Advertising Creative (particularly any "evergreen" campaigns, as opposed to one-off campaigns)
• Client Resources/Training Materials
• Internal websites (e.g., Sharepoint or Confluence sites + pages)
• New Hire Onboarding Materials

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Competitive Branding Analysis

A robust competitive branding analysis captures key branding details from the competition and typically is delivered as a "board" capturing tangible examples of branding in the wild. To start, you'll need create a list of your key competitors. While you won't be able to access all of their branding, you can still see how they're portraying their brand in the public eye. Key touchpoints include screenshots of their website (homepage in particular), social media page(s)

I've found success in creating a specific "scorecard" that can be used to generate a numeric value to help better understand the quality and efficacy of branding, but regardless, the exercise is largely visual, and will be useful later in benchmarking any new branding work against the current landscape.

Beyond just analyzing competitors, also look for "analagous" inspiration, from other industries. At this stage of the branding process its best to have a wide view of the different possibilties for branding, which can also serve to help align stakeholders on the overall direction for the new branding.

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Your Brand Foundation: The Core Components of a Great Brand

You've got buy-in from the top for the branding process. You've gathered dozens, if not hundreds of screenshots of various visual brand elements. People are chomping at the bit to see some concepts, but first you need to nail down the foundational elements of any good brand - and it starts with writing some content.

Philosophical Branding Elements

Before a brand’s visuals can connect with an audience, they need to be grounded in something deeper: a core philosophy, defined by a few key elements:

1. Mission Statement: Ideally, this should already exist somewhere, but it's always worth revisiting if it's been a while since it's been updated. This is a piece of text that, essentially, defines why the company (and brand) exist in the first place: it communicates a brand’s purpose, objectives and how it plans to serve its audience.
2. Values: This is typically a list of several bullets that reflect the things your company finds most important. They can vary widely between types of companies and industries, but ultimately should convey the ethics applied to decisions across the brand.
3. Tagline: A brand's tagline should be as brief and succinct as possible, and summarize the value proposition of the business, and exist in harmony with the company's mission, and values.

Authoring the philosophical aspects of your brand can be harder than getting a child to eat healthy vegetables, but the time taken in formally committing to these ideas, and gaining alignment on their language, is absolutely necessary in order to have successful branding. They are the foundation of your branding house, and your brand will come off as hollow and insincere without them!

Tangible Branding Elements

These are the basic elements used to visualize a brand:

1. Logo: Specific artwork files and assets for your logomark
2. Branding Styleguide: This is a document (typically a PDF, but can be a website) that houses all the details of your branding, including the color palette, typographic system, iconography, imagery guidelines, and more.
3. Mockups: These showcase the brand once applied, and typically include examples of key brand touchpoints, such as a website homepage, social media posts, print materials, and slide decks, and/or packaging

One of my favorite ice-breaker activities to use in a branding workshop is to have participants each image the brand as an actual person (typically a celebrity). What are they wearing? How do they sound they talk? How would they make you feel if you met them at a party?

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The "Lost Boys" of Brand Elements: Voice & Tone, and Motion

Sitting on the fringes of the brand process, lurking in the shadows, are the slightly-less tangible parts of branding, like video and voice. While most stakeholders are interested in the "sexier" parts of the brand during the branding process (like the new logo and the mockups), there are other facets of branding that are still just as critically important, but typically require more nuanced attention.

Voice & Tone

One often-overlooked area of branding is how content should adapt across different contexts — the rules for voice and tone. Tonality of a brand can vary a lot between different applications (e.g., imagine the tone for a promotional social media post for a flash sale vs. an client communication about an unexpected outage), and specific guidelines should be created to create consistency. These guidelines are best written by a good copywriter, but Gen-AI tools can help to make them more understandable and help to ensure you're covering all the different instances of content.

At one company I worked for, we discovered a perfect balance for benchmarking marketing content by ensuring it fit the formula of "90% professional, 10% enthusiastic"

Motion & Animation

Another often neglected area of branding is guidelines for motion design. These largely affect video and interactive content, which are a must for most businesses marketing deliverables. But its surprising how often these are overlooked. These guidelines should define Do's and Don'ts, and provide concrete baseline details for animation timing, delays, transitions, and other basic instances of motion.

While working at a major corporation, we stumbled on the need for motion guidelines after building out rich interactive charts and graphs. After viewing the animations in context, we noted how "off" they felt, due to the speed of the transitions used. From that project, we were able to author and solidify guidelines for smooth transitions and subtle delays that ensured all animated content would stay true to to the rest of the company's brand guidelines.

Lessons Learned & Key Takeaways:

• A Competitive Brand Analysis is a great way to benchmark your brand against the competition.
• If rebranding, a Brand Audit will serve as your roadmap for rolling-out the new branding later (more on this in Part 3).
• Dont't jump into design concepts until you've taken the time to nail down the less tangible elements of your brand, like your Mission Statement, as these will serve as the foundation and "North Star" for all visual concepts moving forward.
• Don't neglect guidelines for Motion, as well as Voice & Tone during the process - you will need them later, and working on them in conjunction with the visual elements will help ensure consistency across the entirety of your brand.

Next Up:

Part 3: Brand Activation (Coming Soon!)

Thinking about a rebrand — or building a new brand from scratch? I can help. Send me a message and let’s make your brand unforgettable.