Category: Branding

The Building Blocks of a Powerful Brand Strategy

Posted on August 7, 2024 by Sally Carlson - Branding, Business Tips, Company Culture, Content Strategy

Few business strategies are as crucial and multifaceted as developing a powerful brand strategy. Beyond mere logos and slogans, a well-crafted brand strategy creates the base of a business’ identity and market positioning. It encompasses everything from defining core values and target audiences to devising compelling messaging that earns—and keeps—customer loyalty.

A brand is more than the overall look and voice, more than how website content portrays the business or how employees speak about it when they meet with customers. It’s more than your product and service offerings. It’s even more than your internal company culture.

A brand is all of that combined into a complex and ever-changing strategy that you control. We can help.

Giant Voices creates market leaders carefully and strategically, placing one brand building block upon another to create a holistic foundation on which our clients can grow.

Brand Identity

Honing a brand’s identity—its look, feel and voice—is a natural beginning of a powerful brand strategy, and many businesses prefer to approach branding by perfecting these external-facing aspects first.

Logo and color palette development are arguably some of the most fun and exciting processes for clients because they’re so fundamental to the rest of the brand. Plus, it’s an inspiring opportunity for those who don’t get to flex their creative muscles regularly.

For Giant Voices, a logo is never just a logo. It is the basis of a brand’s visual identity and sets the stage for graphic design style and color choices, which, in turn, influence the overall voice and messaging.

When we updated W.P & R.S. Mars Co. to Mars Supply, we also modernized the company’s branding and voice while remaining true to the bold red color that set Mars apart from the competition for over 100 years.

In close partnership with Mars’ leadership, Giant facilitated strategic exercises designed to get to the root of the company’s brand identity. From there, we developed a strong, modern logo and refreshed the company’s values and core focus, but that was just the beginning. This work spurred:

A new company tagline
Refreshed subsidiary brands
Updated collateral
Market expansion strategies
Brand awareness campaigns

The new Mars logo was the tip of the iceberg in terms of the internal transformation that occurred in tandem. With strategic branding, Mars Supply has transformed itself into a modern industrial supply partner with a thriving online presence and a trusted, service-focused team.

Products & Services

The next brand building block to explore is a company’s products and services: what a business offers and how it communicates and promotes those offers is an important component of brand strategy.

Evaluating your offers against your brand and ideal target audiences will provide a clear indication of what fits, what doesn’t and what might be missing. What drives revenue and excites your team? Are there low-profit, high-effort offers you can remove from your lineup? Are your clients asking for products or services you don’t currently offer?

The sweet spot lies in aligning what your audience needs with what your business can deliver—and crafting messaging that supports your brand identity. Remember, you don’t have to be everything to everyone. If your team lacks expertise or bandwidth, build partnerships to fill the gaps.

Company Culture & Values

To take a brand even further, a business must look inward to develop its internal brand elements. Take time to evaluate company culture. Implement strategies to celebrate unique elements and adjust practices that are not serving the brand’s best interest. Solicit employee feedback and use key insights to course correct, when needed.

Company values are another essential internal element of a brand and should represent the core of a business. They’re the mantras your entire team upholds in their everyday work and a guide for gauging decisions on recruitment, hiring, employee development and retention, product development and overall business strategy.

Strong company values are key to driving business growth, so it’s important to ensure your values encapsulate not only what your business represents today, but also what you’re striving to be in the future.

Purpose

To perfect the next brand building block, you’ll need to draw upon all the work you’ve done prior. To find your WHY, the true reason your business exists, you’ll need to look back on your brand and its evolution.

Think about what makes your business unique. What gaps do you fill in the marketplace? What sets you apart from your competitors? What does your leadership bring to the table?

Then, push further. Think about your ideal target audience and what attracts them to your business. What keeps them coming back? How does your business solve a key problem in their lives?

As you evaluate what you offer and who you offer it to, you’ll uncover the insights that create your WHY. That’s your purpose. That’s why your team keeps coming back every day.

Communication Strategy

And now, the final building block. It’s finally time to develop a strategy for sharing your brand with the world. Refine your brand voice by revisiting your target audience.

How do your ideal customers prefer to consume information? Are they checking major news outlets, or do they prefer to get updates via social media? Are they visiting websites and sending emails or picking up the phone?

Understanding how your audience interacts with the world and what motivates them will inform where you communicate with them and what you need to say to inspire them to act. Think about how they’ll feel once you help solve a key problem in their lives and expand on that idea in your messaging.

It sounds simple in theory, but in reality, building a powerful brand strategy is an intense and in-depth process—but when you take the time to evaluate every aspect of branding, you’ll uncover insights that will help propel your business forward.

Drive Company Growth with Strong Brand Values

Posted on October 10, 2019 by Pascha Apter - Branding, Company Culture

A brand is much more than a name, logo and a handful of colors.

It’s your promise to your customers. It’s the core of why your business exists—and your brand values are what brings your company to life.

At Giant Voices, we help our clients create strong brands built on a solid internal foundation, because a brand truly begins from within.

Brand Values are Central to Company Culture

Whether you are founding a new company or ushering in the next iteration, defining brand values can help you shape your company’s future. They can—and should—inform your growth strategies, your internal company culture and the team you employ.

For Giant Voices and our clients, brand values are far more than lofty ideals shared once and then filed away. In our office, our values are LITERALLY painted on the wall. We live and breathe them every day. Our values guide our work, our attitude and our overall atmosphere of creativity and excellence.

Hire, Inspire and Fire Based on Brand Values

We often help our clients redefine their brand values when they are in the midst of change.

Whether that’s welcoming new leadership, integrating a merger or acquisition, entering new markets, or adding new products or services, having a clear set of brand values clarifies the path forward and helps guide important staffing decisions.

Sharing your values internally gives employees a chance to evaluate themselves and their work against the company brand. We’ve found this activity re-energizes great employees allowing others to self-select out when it’s no longer a good fit.

Our Values Define Our Company

Giant Voices is an ambition-based strategic marketing firm. While many marketing firms choose to specialize in a specific industry or service offering, that never made sense for the leaders of Giant Voices.

We view marketing as a full-service experience. There is never just one solution for closing a revenue or communications gap. Instead, there are many solutions and tactics that factor into a comprehensive strategy.

We’re a team of business experts who love learning about new industries, applying marketing fundamentals and figuring out all the unique complexities. There isn’t an industry we haven’t figured out how to conquer yet—and we didn’t want to limit our potential.

Plus, we have more fun this way!

We did, however, decide to specialize in the type of people we dedicate our careers to serving. It didn’t take us long to realize there is a key group of people that is aligned with our strategy. The ambitious.

Giant Clients are ambitious, business-focused teams with GIANT goals. They’re looking to expand into new markets across the globe. They want to introduce their company to altogether new demographics. They need to launch compelling new products and services.

Most of all, they’re willing to invest in a smart, strategic team to help them achieve their goals.

When clients work with Giant Voices, they get more than strategy. They get Ambition, Creativity, Excellence, Passion and Hustle. Those are our brand values.

We live them internally each day and we bring them into every aspect of our work. They drive client engagements and help us build long-lasting, successful relationships. Our brand values guide everything we do. Yours should, too.

Ambition – we’re driven to achieve for ourselves, our company and our clients.
Creativity – we’re resourceful problem solvers who find unique solutions to challenges.
Excellence – we’re proud of our work because we know it represents our firm.
Passion – we have a true love for the marketing industry and a genuine desire to help clients achieve their ambition.
Hustle – we show up with energy and enthusiasm, work hard every single day and go above and beyond for our clients.

That’s us in a nutshell. Who are you? Reach out today to start a conversation about how we can help you craft a powerful brand and corresponding values.

Our team of branding strategists is experienced in teasing out the attributes that make your company truly unique and transforming them into brand values that share your story.

How to Bring Your Brand to Life (With Examples)

Posted on February 24, 2015 by Pascha Apter - Branding

If your brand were a person, how would he or she talk?

If your brand were a theme park, what would it look like? What would the rides be called?

If your brand were a muffin, what kind would it be? Triple chocolate? Pumpkin spice? Sugar-free bran?

While these questions may seem like Zen riddles, they are actually a way to begin thinking about your brand in a deeper way in order to create more engaging brand experiences.

Let’s back up. What is brand experience, anyway?

A 2009 article in the Journal of Marketing defines brand experience like this:

“Brand experience is conceptualized as sensations, feelings, cognitions and behavioral responses evoked by brand-related stimuli that are part of a brand‘s design and identity, packaging, communications and environments.”

Translation: Every time someone encounters or interacts with anything associated with your brand, it’s an opportunity to create a brand experience. Take advantage of every opportunity.

Here are three brilliant ways to bring your brand to life, illustrated with three genius examples.

1. Ambient / Guerrilla Ad

What it is: Ambient or guerrilla ads are notoriously hard to define, but you know them when you see them.

Genius example: Bloody elevator doors promoting Resident Evil: Extinction.

Comments: While some might argue this ad installation crosses a line of good taste, you can’t deny that it is intriguing, gritty, gory and alarming. Just like the movie it is promoting.

Not only do effective ambient ads make an emotional impression on the people who encounter them, they also tend to attract media attention—which is a free, if unpredictable, way to magnify the impact of your marketing dollars.

2. Event

What it is: A happening that allows people to participate in or experience some aspect of your brand. This can be a one-time event, a series or an ongoing brand activation (like Nike’s House of Mamba).

Genius example: Moose Madness Family Festival in Cook County, MN

Comments: Cook County, Minnesota, is known for a lot of things, including its portion of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, moose population, family-friendliness, and artsy, quirky character.

(Full disclosure: Visit Cook County is a Giant Voices client.)

The annual Moose Madness Family Festival celebrates and embodies these characteristics with a weekend of moose-themed crafts, races, story readings, a treasure hunt and photo ops with a wandering moose mascot.

Moose Madness has garnered coverage in major media outlets, including the Chicago Tribune.

3. Microcopy

What it is: This is the instructional and functional text on your website. Think button labels, error messages, signup forms and checkout pages.

A Smashing Magazine feature on microcopy describes it as “the little text that can make or break your user experience.”

Give your microcopy some personality consistent with your brand. Good microcopy not only clearly explains what the user needs to do in order to attain a desired result, it also rewards the user with moments of delight.

Genius example: Pottermore, J.K.Rowling’s online Harry Potter experience

Comments: When you complete the initial registration process at Pottermore.com, you don’t get the usual dry-as-toast “registration successful” message you get at a lot of sites.

Instead, you see the message every young Potter fan dreams of receiving—“Congratulations! You are magical”—and your name displayed on a “List of magical folk” along with Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and other characters from the books.

Why does this matter?

Your brand is more than just a label. It’s a look, a voice, an attitude, and an experience—all crafted to powerfully appeal to your target audience.

With strategy, creativity and deep knowledge of your audience, you can make every marketing opportunity and encounter a brand experience they’ll appreciate.

Five Tips For Creating a GIANT Brand

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Pascha Apter - Branding

When you think of Giant brands, we bet brands like Apple, McDonald’s, Coke or Ford come to mind. While those companies indeed have created Giant brands, we don’t think you need to have a Giant company in order to have Giant brand.

How does an organization create a Giant brand? By following our five top tips.

Five Tips For Creating a Giant Brand

1. Define what differentiates you.

This is easier said than done. Your brand should represent you and you alone. Dig deep and create a position in the marketplace that sets your organization apart from your competition.

Take Giant Voices, for example. We are an AMBITION-based marketing firm. We choose to work with clients who have something significant to achieve, and know they need expert help to succeed.

When companies want a new brochure, they call our competition. When they want to close a substantial revenue gap, they call us. There are eight common differentiation strategies to consider, stay tuned for an upcoming blog on differentiation.

2. Know what your target audience cares about.

This should not be news, but not everyone in the world should be considered part of your target market. To create a Giant brand, you will need to clearly define a target audience, and most importantly understand what specifically they care about regarding your product or service offering.

How will what you are selling affect their concerns? Define that and you are on your way to creating a Giant group of brand advocates.

To learn more about defining your target audience, check out our blog post The Ten Commandments of Naming Your New Business, Brand or Blog.

3. Brand from the inside out.

Too often leaders think about their brand externally before thinking about it internally. One of the most important things you can do to create a Giant brand is promote everyone inside your organization to brand manager.

Your internal team, meaning everyone from the cleaning crew to the C-level, should understand your brand characteristics and promises BEFORE you begin marketing your brand to the external marketplace.

4. Give your brand a personality.

When working with Giant clients to strengthen their brand, we first begin by determining a unique voice for their organization. Typically this consists of generating approximately five brand characteristics that describe the personality of the company.

If your brand were a person, what kind of a self would this person be? Would they be clever? Sophisticated? Youthful? Energetic? Conservative?

If you took your brand out for coffee, what kind of conversations would you have? Would you enjoy the experience or would rather have coffee with your competitor?

5. Plan accordingly.

You want a Giant brand? Then invest in the planning, creation and management of it today and well into the future. A comprehensive marketing plan should tie all of your marketing strategies and advertising tactics around your brand with a beautiful bow.

After all, is a tweet really any different than a sales presentation? The answer is no. Every story relating to your brand whether spoken, printed or hashtagged should reflect your brand image and unique position in the marketplace.

Want to learn how to create and manage an effective brand? Get in touch with our team. We’re here to help.