Ten years and three steps of brand building

1st October 2005. Facebook is just over a year old. It will still be six months before anyone can send a Tweet. No-one owns an iPhone. And very few people know what a subprime mortgage is, or the trouble they will cause the global economy in a few years time. Hard to imagine any of this now, ten years later.

For the past ten years we’ve been building brands. We’ve worked with startups taking their first steps in the commercial world. We’ve worked with established businesses building on years of success. We’ve helped food producers get their products on shelves and increase their sales. We’ve designed packaging to help manufacturers sell their products on the other side of the world. We’ve helped charities adapt to changing circumstances and build eye-catching brands to raise their profile. We’ve done a lot of different things in ten years – take a look at our portfolio. But some things never change.

Every project teaches us a lesson. We learn something new from each client. Ten years of experience has helped us to develop a simple three-step process for building a brand. Whether you’re large or small, new or well established, a business or a charity, there are only three steps to building your brand.

The most common reason for a branding project to fail is that the organisation doesn’t understand the role and importance of each step. This usually means that they either start too late or finish too early, and miss out one (or two). You don’t need to start at One, or finish at Three, it depends on what stage your organisation is at and what you already have in place. But to make that decision you need to understand the benefit that each step brings to brand building activity.

Step One: Brand Definition
Before you can start building something you need to know what it is you’re trying to build. The first step you take is to define your message and the audience you want to share it with. To do this you need to ask lots of questions, and listen carefully to the answers. If you talk to the right people, and ask the right questions, you will learn everything you need to know to build a solid foundation for your brand.

Step Two: Brand Development
Your next step is to develop the tools and behaviour you need to communicate your message. This will involve creating the things that people will see, like a logo or a website. But it will also involve thinking about how the people in your organisation behave, from the chief executive to the most junior member of the team. The quality of the experience your customers have will depend on the quality of your behaviour, not just what your logo looks like.

Step Three: Brand Delivery
The final step when you’re building a brand is to create and implement the strategy you need to deliver your message to your audience. This is where all the work you’ve done in the previous two steps comes together and you bring your brand life. How you do this will vary for every organisation, so it’s really important that you create a plan that will work for your organisation – your budget, your resources, your product, your service and your audience.

The next ten years will undoubtedly bring more change, but one thing we are sure of is the importance of recognising these three steps when building a brand. Before you begin any branding project think carefully about where you should start, and stop. In that way you can make the best use of the resources you invest in the project and get the greatest benefit from it.


If you’d like to talk about any of the stages of the brand building process, drop us an email.


If you’re a small (or new) business and are interested in building your brand, visit our Startups Hub.


Photo: Flickr – Claire Sambrook © Creative Commons