Branding
An organisation’s brand is one of its most valuable assets. The brand provides an ideal shorthand for the work you do, while capturing emotional aspects, like the sense of mission and pride shared by staff and stakeholders alike.
A truly effective brand is founded in a strategic analysis of your organisation’s strengths, service offering and unique position in relation to peers. At the same time, it requires a detailed understanding of the needs, perceptions and motivations of your audiences, including staff, board members and trustees, policy stakeholders, partners, the people who will be using your services and – crucially – funders.
Developing the strategic idea
The strategic ideais the encapsulation of your unique brand position, what it is that makes you stand out and make a difference. It can be developed into an accurate position statement, on your boilerplate and in any context where you need a short, accurate description of the organisation’s unique offering.
But this is just the start. Once the strategic foundations are laid, it is possible to build the key components of your brand: name, strap, logo, visual components, key messages, and all of the things that create the tangible manifestations of the new identity.
Brand development process
Depending on the time and budget available, we use a combination of different techniques to develop your brand.
Workshops
At the heart of our tried and tested approach is a combination of strategic analysis and stakeholder workshops. This combination of background research and collaborative working is the most effective way of getting the most out of your in-house business expertise combined with the marketing, communications and design skills of Public Life’s team.
The workshops should primarily involve the core management team, but they can also be broadened out to a wider staff and stakeholder body at appropriate moments.
They involve a mixture of left and right brain activities: practical analysis of business issues with creative activities designed to free up the metaphorical and value-driven elements of the organisation’s brand personality and position.
User research
The better you understand your users, the more effective your brand position will be. User research can take many forms, including reviews of existing research and documentation, surveys, focus groups, face to face interviews and telephone interviews.
In most cases, we aim to develop a small number of key audience profiles – representatives of the most important audiences your brand will need to appeal to – and create personas for each profile. The key audience segment will be a representative or your most important customer group. Understanding your users means that the brand – and even the overall service offering – can be designed to provide the best fit with their needs and aspirations.
Competitor analysis and strategic positioning
Understanding your organisation’s place in the market is also key to developing a powerful brand. The key principle here is differentiation: what makes your service stand out from the crowd? What makes your offering unique and essential for your target audience?
History, culture – and stakeholder engagement
In most cases, organisational rebrands must build on what has gone before. Brand projects should always account of the history and culture of an organisation as a key component of the new brand. Incorporating this background into the brand idea is essential, as is understanding what internal trustees, staff and other stakeholders value about the organisation’s history and legacy.
Not only is consulting internal stakeholders is key to this understanding, but it is a valuable process in itself, providing staff and trustees with a voice and helping them to understand they have a stake in the organisation’s transformation and its future success.
Mergers
Mergers can provide particular challenges, as they require two or more organisations to merge, both culturally and practically. New systems, new processes, new colleagues and a change of culture can be both challenging and exhilarating for staff teams. The brand project provides an opportunity for staff from different organisations to share experiences and learn from each other, hopefully creating an opportunity to take the best from both backgrounds.
While much positive co-working can emerge from this process, there are also challenges and building a new and positive organisational culture is key. The brand can play an important part in this process by helping staff and stakeholders understand what the new organisation’s values, mission and services are.
Testing
Once we have a working draft of the core brand components – particularly the name and strap line – it is advisable to test how they play with your target audience. This should ideally be done through structured focus groups, but can also be done more informally, too.