Preparation for A Logo Design Project: The Coding Bull Brand Strategy
Crafting the brand strategy can take from one to two weeks. This process is a highly-customized because there’s no template content. We have to research and develop content based on your market situation.
We make sure we cover issues relevant to your company, customers, positioning, and customer experience before developing your brand.
What is a brand strategy roadmap?
A brand strategy roadmap determines the implementation of your brand strategy. It is a detailed route for traveling from your current market position to your desired spot in the market.
It also ensures everyone is following the same set of directions while being focused on reaching the same destination. There may be several routes that require more detours around unexpected obstacles. Again, your brand roadmap helps everyone navigate this journey successfully.
Why Do You Need It?
A well-crafted logo doesn’t build a strong brand. A strong brand is about positioning it for competitive advantage. It should be able to defend against commoditization and to help dominate your competitors.
A brand strategy roadmap can make your company more valuable if the execution is flawless. Hence, we always back up our research with the most recent and well-researched data.
This roadmap drafting process must include discussions and consensus among stakeholders, e.g., customers, employees, investors, and founders.
Market research, interviews, and meetings conducted by an objective third-party like The Coding Bull are often the things needed to make an organization to re-think their brand.
If your business is new or if it requires a revitalization, we can create a brand that is irreplaceable and irresistible to your market.
What does our brand strategy roadmap look like?
Step 1 – Knowing Your Company
We conduct preliminary industry research, meetings, and interviews that focus on your company’s brand vision, mission, and values. We audit existing marketing collaterals. The questions we bring to the table always lead to productive internal discussions. You can read up some of the review or interview questions here: 60 Questions on Our Logo Design Questionnaire
- Business Model Reviews
- Management Team Interviews
- Key Stakeholders Review
Step 2 – Knowing Your Customers
Workshop and analysis of market segments to develop user personas for branding. The process includes customer data analysis, secondary research, and if necessary, surveys and focus groups.
- Target Audience Definition and Research
Defining your target audience is about identifying the demographics of people most likely to buy from you. If you run a plumbing company, your target audience is commercial and residential property owners. If you own a toy store, your target audience is parents, grandparents and anyone else with children in their lives. - Developing Customer Personas
Customer personas (sometimes referred to as marketing personas) are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. Personas help us internalize the perfect customer we’re trying to attract. Personas help all departments, e.g., marketing, sales, product, and services to relate to our target customers as real people. Having a deeper understanding of your buyer personas is critical to driving content creation, product development, sales follow up, and anything that relates to customer acquisition and retention.Here’s an example of a customer persona:
Step 3 – Competitive Research
Knowing your competitors can help you differentiate your business and stay ahead of trends that could impact your business. Once you are aware of the competitive landscape in your industry, you can be smart, which helps you make practical decisions around product development, pricing, promotions, messaging, as well as where you fit in the brand landscape.
Here’s an example:
You can see how we put this research in action in this article: Guidelines for Logo Design
Step 4 – Your Brand Positioning
With the data gathered from our competitive research and a brand pyramid, we can help you develop a unique market position. This market position dictates the branding blueprint for your organization. It also helps you differentiate yourself in a crowded market.
- Brand Pyramid
A Brand Pyramid is a simple tiered analytical diagram that expresses organizational consensus on fundamental questions, for example, describe your business in one sentence. Usually, stakeholders in a company do not have a set of consistent answers to the brand’s fundamental questions. That’s why we use Brand Pyramids to diagnose and subsequently strengthen the brand strategy of an organization and its products. Here are some the most commonly asked questions:- What do customers want that relates to your company?
- What is a problem your customers deal that they need you?
- How is this problem making your customers feel?
- What is the root cause of the problem?
- How did your customer feel about themselves before they engaged your brand?
- Who will your customer become after they engage your brand?
- The Sweet Spot (Your Positioning)
Pinpointing the sweet spot in your marketing is how you differentiate your product or service from your competition and then finding out which niche to fill. Finding your position in the market helps establish your identity within the eyes of the customer. A positioning strategy of a company is affected by many variables from customers’ motivations to their requirements, as well as your competitors’ actions.
Step 5 – Customer Experience With Your Brand
This step is about identifying customer touch points so that we understand when or where there are opportunities to reinforce the brand value, improve brand experience, and increase customer spend.
- Customer Touchpoints
Customer touchpoints are the points of customer contact with the brand, everything from start to finish counts. For example, customers may find your business on Google or in a Facebook ad, see your BBB ratings or Yelp reviews, visit your website, shop at your brick and mortar retail store, or call your customer service. The can be a long list, but the points above are just a few of your touchpoints! So what is the definition of a customer touchpoint? A touchpoint is anytime, or anywhere a potential buyer or buyer comes in contact with your brand. It can be before, during, or after they buy something from you.Finding your touchpoints is the first and the most crucial step toward developing a customer journey. Through the customer journey, you can make sure you always satisfy your customers. - Customer Journey
Customer journey is a process for discovering how your potential buyer or new buyers feel as they interact with your product or service’s sales funnel touchpoints. It is the research that you will prepare and scrutinize, a journey of sorts, from the beginning to the end of your potential customer’s interaction with your company. Here’s a perfect example of a customer journey:
Step 6 – Brand Development
Now that we have all the ingredients to build an effective brand, we will meet with you to discuss our findings and recommendations. Afterwards, we can begin translating your brand into a logo and a set of visual and messaging brand guidelines. These last steps deliver living documents that can evolve as your business grows.
- Brand Strategy Presentation
- Logo Design
- Branding Guideline
- Materials Used In Customer Touchpoints