By Gwen Ragno
Why Brand Always Comes First
Before Roger That gets started on any project, we make sure there’s an established brand to serve as the foundation for our work. Whether the project is building a website, marketing materials or a thought leadership campaign, conversations about brand always come first.
Why? Because brand is your way of being in the world. It’s the visual and verbal language through which you relate to your audience and communicate your unique perspective. And as our senior copywriter Todd Davidson put it: “You can’t speak a language until you’ve created it.”
Companies willing to invest in their brand can carve out a space for themselves that helps them last longer, stand apart and really connect with people.
What Can Your Brand Teach You?
Brand work is incredibly valuable no matter what stage a business is in, from start-up to highly seasoned. It helps leaders think long-term about their company’s unique perspective, and can inform a lot of what they do in other areas of the business – especially team-building and culture development.
Sometimes a client thinks they have their brand figured out and wants us to skip straight to building them a website. But when we begin asking questions about why the company exists and how it makes people feel, they often realize there’s nothing backing it up. And more so today than ever before, consumers are wise to that kind of disconnect, as research by our client HawkPartners showed in their Brand Authenticity report.
The Brand Intake Form at the heart of Roger That’s discovery process gets our clients thinking about their business in ways they often haven’t considered before.
For instance, diving deep into your brand’s DNA can help you understand what you truly stand for and what values you share with your ideal customers. Shared values are increasingly important to consumers, so making sure they show up in your messaging — and your actions — can have a major impact on your ability to resonate with the right people.
Speaking of the right people, the process of developing your brand also helps you discover who your audience is and what’s important to them. You may even find that you have multiple audiences with different priorities – which presents the opportunity to create distinct messaging that speaks to each unique group’s wants and needs.
Essential Elements of Brand
Depending on who you ask, you may get a lot of different answers about what elements are essential to a brand identity. At Roger That, we like to focus on the things that help a business stand out, attract the right people and grow.
We start with the verbal expression of the brand, which we call brand voice.
- Brand Personality: How you want to be described
- Brand Mood: How you want people to feel when they interact with you
- Value Proposition: How you create value in a different way than anyone else
- Key Messages: Words and phrases that resonate with your target audience(s)
Then, we create mood boards that set the high-level direction for the brand’s visual expression.
- Logo: An instantly recognizable mark that represents the brand
- Color Palette: The signature colors that appear most in the brand’s designs
- Typography: The style of text that appears in the brand’s designs
- Visual Languages: Things like iconography, photography style and illustrations
If there’s appetite and budget to explore brand identity a bit deeper, we may also craft:
- Positioning Statement: How you define your own unique place in the market
- Mission: Your purpose, or why you exist
- Vision: What you hope to become, or the world you want to create
These visual and verbal elements form a solid and distinctive foundation for everything your company creates, says and does. Whether it’s a website or an email, a well-crafted brand shows up in every touchpoint you share with your audience.
Something with that kind of exposure is worth investing in, don’t you think?
You Deserve to Love Your Brand
Brand identity influences how people feel about the company both internally and externally. A great brand makes employees feel proud to work for an organization and customers proud to support it.
We live for that magic moment when we present brand work to a client and their eyes light up, because they recognize the best version of themselves in it.