Many branding agencies and marketing agencies discuss the importance of buy-in. Successful branding is built on commitment by your organization to consistent use of the visual and verbal systems representing your brand, including your brand name, slogan or tagline, symbols, colours, images, and fonts.
Branding Beyond Buy-In: Build-In
Branding agencies, who work with their customers to develop a brand strategy, will also outline the importance of your organization committing to that brand strategy as part of brand building. We strongly advocate the value of ensuring an organization has buy-in and commitment to its brand strategy and brand systems. However, we believe that true commitment comes not from outside branding experts’ opinions on what your brand should be, but from your leadership team’s involvement in the building of your brand strategy. As a result, we go beyond buy-in to ensure that your brand also has, what we call, “build-in”.
In the Distility Approach to Branding, Build-In Means Three Key Things:
- Your team works with Distility to build its own brand strategy using our Distility 1day1brand workflow.
- Distility builds your brand strategy into the creation of brand systems and brand marketing for your business.
- Distility builds the tools your team needs to stay on-brand.
Brand Strategy with Distility 1day1brand
To permit build-in, we developed Distility 1day1brand as an inclusive, hyper-efficient workflow that combines deep branding experience with a collaborative decision support system to help teams brainstorm, evaluate and distill a compelling brand in one day. Your organization has within it experts on your particular business. Our role in brand strategy development is to facilitate the input from your team, educate your team on the core aspects of brand strategy and be the guardians of branding best practices. The involvement of your leadership team in building your brand strategy, including team members from all areas of your business, allows for the development of an authentic, compelling and competitive brand strategy.
Brand Systems Built on the Brand Strategy
Based on brand strategy, we develop visual system concepts for our customers. Once the client has committed to its visual system, we embody the visual system in brand systems, business systems and other brand marketing deliverables.
Branding Summaries to Build “On-Brand”
As part of our customer engagements, Distility delivers a 1 Page Brand Strategy summary and a 1 Page Brand Guidelines summary. These clear and concise summaries make up the brand building foundation that will keep your brand’s communication on-brand into the future. You will be able to engage your team and your customer more successfully while using less resources because you will have:
(i) A Brand Strategy Framework for Content Review
You will have a framework in place for you and your team to review content effectively to ensure it meets the brand’s objective.
(ii) Creative Campaigns That Build Your Brand
You can instruct creatives and ensure that the creative work builds and reinforces your brand promise, personality and position. Your marketing campaigns will build your brand. Compare this to an unconscious brand strategy that emerges and changes with each campaign.
(iii) Consistent Naming, Taglines, Colours, Fonts and Concepts
Your team will have the tools to create collateral that is on-brand. Consistency is king when it comes to brand building. Your team will be empowered to support your brand if they have a clear understanding of how to use your verbal and visual brand systems.
For more, please see our blog post: Brand Building – The Value of Commitment and our e-Book Brand Scammed!.