There’s no shortage of blog posts explaining the branding process.
These often talk about branding a business from start to finish.
But that’s not what this post is.
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This blog focuses on how we approach branding at Canny, and how businesses can work with a branding agency to get the best possible results from their brand identity.
Every agency has its own way of doing things. This is ours.
It’s the branding process we’ve refined over years of client work, and the one we teach our team to follow to keep projects focused, collaborative, and effective.
What you’ll see below is how our brand identity process works in practice.
So, without further ado, here’s a step-by-step look at Canny’s branding process – and why it works.
Step One of the Branding Process: Branding Deep Dive
Every good branding project starts with an in-depth Branding Deep Dive.
Usually, the Deep Dive Session takes place at the Canny office, but we’ve also run sessions in London, Toronto, and Tokyo!
Generally, we prefer to get together in person and really hash things out, but if a digital session is what works for our client, we’re open to that too.
Typically, a Deep Dive lasts anywhere from half a day to a full day. We need plenty of time to dive into your brand in detail.
The more you can share with your agency, the better.
In a branding Deep Dive, we cover three main topics:
- About Your Business
- About Your Customers
- About Your Marketplace
Knowing this information from the outset gives us a good overview of your business and tells us a little bit more about you.
With that said, let’s dig into each of those in a little more detail.
About Your Business
The first of three areas we try to get to the bottom of is your business.
We want to know what your business does, what makes you different, and what benefit you provide your customers.
Only by truly understanding your business can we provide the best branding tips, advice, and guidance.
Here’s a sample of some of the questions we ask when learning about your business.
- Where are you now vs where you want to be?
- What exists in terms of an existing brand identity?
- What is the plan for the next 1 to 3 years?
- What are your goals?
These questions help us understand your frame of mind and what you’re hoping to achieve by going through the branding process together.
About Your Customers
Without customers, you don’t have a business.
This makes them absolutely integral to any branding project.
With branding and design projects, ultimately, we’re trying to create a brand and image that your customers want to buy into!
One thing we like to do with our clients is sit down and build out a customer persona or avatar.
This lets us drill down into each and every aspect of your target audience so that you can tailor your branding to suit.
To build out this persona, we consider things such as gender, age, hobbies, place of work, income, family life, and pain points.
About Your Marketplace
The next most important thing to assess is where your business fits into the marketplace.
Are you the next up-and-comer?
Do you have a never-before-seen type of product?
Is your service revolutionising a certain space?
We need to know this type of information to help us accurately and successfully position your brand.
At this point, we also need to discuss your competitors.
Are there any?
What are they doing?
What do you offer differently?
Once we have all of this information in place, we can move on to the next stage.
Step Two: Visual Branding Research
The next step in our branding process is to conduct the relevant visual branding research.
Once we’ve been through the Deep Dive, we’ll begin to pull together a brand board based on what we discovered.
A brand board is the same as a mood board (not to be confused with stylescapes, which are more specific).
It’s a collection of ideas, styles, and elements, pulled together to form the initial visual research in a branding project.
Once we have around 100 images on our brand board, we’ll quickly sort through them.
If we can remove any duplicates or similar images before presenting the brand board to the client, it helps move the process along more quickly.
Step Three: Visual Research Feedback Session
Once we’ve pruned and tidied up the visual research, it’s time to present it to our client.
Usually, we block out an hour, we make cups of tea, and jump on the call! (The tea is an important piece to the puzzle.)
First, we do a general skim through the board with the client.
Usually, gut reaction takes over, and we’re off to the races.
What we’re looking for when running through the research with our clients is three things:
- Things they like: colours, fonts, style of branding
- Things they hate
- Concepts they think are appropriate or not appropriate
We also discuss emotion on the call. For example, we might hear feedback like “This blue feels super boring, and not at all the way we want our brand to be taken.”
Once the call is concluded, we’ll be left with a clearer idea of direction and a solid starting point.
On to the next stage!
Step Four: The Initial Brain Dump
This step is crucial to the branding process.
What this involves is getting all of our initial ideas down on paper.
For example:
If it’s a travel company, in this stage, we’ll be drawing aeroplanes, suns, suitcases, flip flops, etc.
If it’s a law firm, it’ll be curly wigs, gavels, scales, and so on.
The idea behind this “brain dump” is two-fold.
- To clear your head of all the initial thoughts, essentially, force refreshing your brain!
- To show others in the team, just in case any of these ideas might work when shared around or used in a different way.
Over the years, our brain dumps have been responsible for a lot of laughs, as well as some of the key ideas that have grown into brilliant projects.
At this stage, we’re not spending hours refining things. We’re drawing things down quickly and discussing out loud.
Step Five: Concept Creation
At this point, we’ll begin to work up a list of concepts.
What we’re trying to get out at this stage is what the brand is all about, what it means, what it stands for, and how we can communicate that differently.
Every concept has been explored before. So it’s all about putting our own spin on it and making something effective for the client.
But these concepts acted as starting points for a larger discussion around the brand itself.
Step Six: Team Meeting
Step six is to hold a team meeting in which we discuss both the initial brand dump and concepts.
Between the team, we analyse the brain dumps, and decide if there’s anything we can use, or want to pull out to carry forward in terms of a visual or concept.
Then the next thing we do is discuss the concepts.
By the time everyone’s had their input, and the lists have been refined, we’re usually left with 5 solid concepts and directions.
Armed with our list of concepts, we start the next step.
Step Seven: Feedback Session
The next step in our branding process is another feedback session with the client.
In the feedback session for the first round of branding, we’re evaluating the brand concepts.
We’re looking to assess which of the brand concepts resonate most with the client and the ones they feel best represent their business.
What helps at this stage in the branding process is to consistently tie the feedback to the Deep Dive and the initial Visual Research.
It’s important that everyone stays on the same page at all times; otherwise, the project can go off the rails…
What we want to achieve in this stage is:
- Elimination of 2-3 of the least successful concepts
- Have several strong directions for progression
The idea with our branding process is to start wide and thin the herd as the project progresses.
In a project, we usually have a strong feeling about 2 or 3 of the directions we want to take.
Then the client will usually have the same.
The ones that overlap are where you want to focus most of your time moving forward.
Step Eight: Creation of the First Brand Identity Round
Once the concepts have been refined, we can begin the meat of the project – the design work.
Usually, our first round of ideas starts as sketches. Which we then work up in Adobe Illustrator. Then, we begin to experiment with them and refine them further.
In this period of time, we focus solidly on creating visuals that build on or reinforce the concepts that we decided on earlier.
The creation of the first round of brand identity work is usually a process that takes between 5 and 10 days.
The first round of brand identity work is where we’re really starting to create volume with our work.
We go for volume of design ideas early in the process, so again, we can filter and funnel these down as we progress through the project.
Essentially, round one sees us create multiple branding design ideas for the brand concepts on our list.
We want to focus on getting the fundamentals of branding right here, so we don’t waste time later.
Over the course of several days, we really see some of the brand’s concepts and visual directions come to life.
Once we’ve finished our visual exploration, we wrap it all up in a neat little PDF (usually between 20 and 40 pages) and send it off to our client.
The PDF usually contains multiple design ideas for the concepts we refined earlier.
Step Nine: Repeat Cycle and Iterate
And that’s essentially that.
Once the Deep Dive, Visual Research, Brain Dump, and initial Branding Round are complete, it’s a simple case of iterating and developing things further.
In Step 8, you’ll highlight the directions to progress.
So in this phase, you build them out, experimenting with form, typography, and assets as you go.
Then, another feedback sessionto evaluate, before adapting the work accordingly.
Repeat the cycle 4-5 times, and at the end, you’re left with a great looking brand that reflects the values and mission of your business.
Step Ten: Finalise the Brand Identity Design / Complete Branding Process
Once our client has agreed on the final brand identity, it’s on to finalising the deliverables.
Normally, we’ll have put together business cards, letterheads, and other branded products, so they’re output as PDFs and sent ready for print.
Your new logo design is output in both screen and print formats, in both colour and black and white.
Any other assets are exported into the required formats.
Then, we create brand guidelines that we can send to the client for their continued usage and guidance.
And essentially:
That’s a wrap!
Branding Process FAQs
Hopefully, after reading this post, you feel as though you understand the branding process a little better – or at least how Canny approaches these types of projects.
We thought now would be a good time to look at some branding process FAQs to make sure we’ve answered your most burning questions.
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What Is a Branding Process?
The branding process is a careful and systematic approach to creating and promoting a company’s brand. It is key to the success of any branding project as it lets everyone see what is involved at every stage.
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What Are the 5 Steps of the Branding Process?
In this blog post, we’ve outlined how Canny approaches branding projects, however, other agencies will have their own approach. Despite this, lots of agencies follow a ‘5 step process’ which involves defining a brand’s USP, creating a brand positioning statement, establishing a brand story, developing marketing collateral, and determining the marketing strategy moving forward.
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How Do You Brand Successfully?
There are lots of factors to consider when it comes to creating a ‘great’ brand. For starters you need to know your brands purpose, your competitors, your audience, your USP, your brand story, and your brand tone of voice. It’s also key to have a strong logo and brand message as this is what your customers will buy into.
The Branding Process: 10 Steps to Successful Business Branding
Every branding agency in the world will have its own branding process that it’s built and scaled over time.
Our way certainly isn’t the only way, but our branding process has served both our clients and us well in the past. If you’d like to see our branding work up close, check out our work with virtual event company iVent.
The important thing to remember as you progress through your branding project is to be as open, honest, and fair as you can be.
Come back to your agency in a timely manner, with constructive feedback, and they’ll do the same for you!
If you need any help with your branding project, then get in touch with our team of experts!
