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How you build your brand story has a huge influence on outcomes. As marketers, we tell stories all the time. These stories, while creative, are rooted in brand, energized by strategy and made strong through systems.
A well-managed brand should be recognizable in every touchpoint. It's not a slave to personal opinions or subjective wants. That is why brand guidelines exist. Its' success depends on consistency and implementation. Below is a very high-level map demonstrating the brand as the foundation messaging piece for everything else.
Budgets are approved! Let’s get creative! Not so fast…
We are excited! We want to make logos immediately! At this point, a project can go in any, or every, direction if you don’t set objectives, provide direction, audience information and guidance. "Think outside the box" and "I'll know it when I see it" don't apply here. The killer truth is that creative and UX teams need solid information before they start work.
A brief can save you time and money.
Before we can tell any story, brand-level, product level or employee focused, we'll need to know a few things. Take the few days to build a brief and agree on it - it could save you weeks of rework, a lot of money and immeasurable stress. Some questions that brief should cover:
Who is our user? What information do we have about our audience?
Internal objectives? External objectives? KPIs? What is it that we want our user to do? What factors have weight in this environment? Competition? Where and how will they interact with us? What outcome are we hoping to achieve? And many more!
So what’s next? Everything… but in order.
We collected our 30,000 foot data, we’re excited to move ahead! Now let’s put some parameters around this thing and figure out how we are going to build it. What does that process look like? For me, and the teams I lead, it looks a lot like this. Some steps aren’t always used, some steps may be added, depending on the project.
Think about the brands you are committed to - a good brand helps us tell our own story by letting us use theirs. They've done the work for us. They are a way of communicating to others what is important to us and the type of person we perceive ourselves to be. Putting the effort in before we write the story will see a much more successful outcome!
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