Brands evolve organically over time. And the truth is there’s only so much you can prepare for as you’re creating your brand. We have mandatories we can take care of in advance like logo, color palette, font selections and so on, but the vast majority of your brand offering will evolve over the lifespan of your brand. A lot of the time your brand will be determined by needs. The needs of your customers or clients, the needs of your employees or the needs of your organization. As these need become solutions, more and more of your brand is unfolded.
It’s really the process of creating solutions over time that leads to well-established brands. As more time goes by, brands evolve, customers communicate their needs to their provider, enabling the provider to create more personalized solutions that solve the deeper needs set forth by customers. This process of responding to customers’ over time creates complex, well organized brands that seem to predict the needs of customers with greater sensitivity, achieving the ultimate connection with customers. Remember, a brands’ job is to make the audience feel understood, or “gotten”. When a prospect feels seen or understood it allows them to take the next step.
All brands must begin somewhere. So yes, there is planning and strategy involved from the beginning. I’m not saying we should all go out and start winging it. What I am saying is there should be both in healthy brand development. Early messaging, headline development, value proposition development and promotion, image research, color palette, logo and tagline, blog article development are all fundamental to a core brand suite and to the steering of the brand identity, and market affinity. As dissemination and campaign strategy are essential to marketing a new concept, and can planned early in the campaign lifecycle. However, we can also allow for analytics and reporting, social monitoring and nurturing to allow our audience to share there needs, so our brand can help satisfy them.
