Strong brand launch strategy starts at the very beginning of brand development, and it continually evolves all the way up to launch. As the brand characteristics become clear, so too does the launch strategy. If you rigidly set a launch strategy, then fail to add flexibility to accommodate the changes along the way, your team will get off track.
Staying on track means strategy questions don’t get sidestepped. It’s impossible to set a rigid launch strategy for a brand that does not yet exist. You can have an idea of what you want to do, but as soon as you clamp down on strategy shifts, you clamp down on potential success and limit your team’s vision.
Imagine you’re launching a new brand, and you need an internal document to get your sales team excited about it. If you impose a rigid brand style guide on the launch and sidestep emerging strategy questions, how can you accommodate new characteristics or holes that have been filled during the branding process?
The answer is simple: you can’t.
If your brand launch strategy remains flexible before all of the brand’s launch announcements and materials are completed, opportunities to capture the full strength of the brand can be developed and used to their full potential.
The key to effective brand launch strategy is flexibility. Once you have completed the full breadth of the brand development, then you can tighten the reigns and plan the final roll out.
Brand positioning is one of the single most important steps any business can take on the road to success. Yet, brand positioning is perhaps the most shunned part of branding that exists, especially for small businesses who understand the value of positioning only after the results of the effort are in. That means their motivation for the work itself is often low because they would rather be tending to the hundreds of other tasks calling for their attention.
I’ve found that clients often expect to see visuals at every stage of brand development, yet in positioning and strategy, there frequently are no visuals (or only those of your competitors), only text. Pointed text, valuable text, but still just text.
It’s easy to just say, ‘This is our position,’ or, ‘This is where we want to be, so we will be there,’ but the problem is if there is already someone there who is bigger, better, or far more financially endowed, you may need to shift positions. Brand positioning reveals that.
Positioning can be tough because it can reveal that your golden egg is perhaps a little more on the bronze side. More often, brand positioning is an empowering exercise in clearly defining your niche.
We all like to believe that our ideas are completely original, and often times they are. But – and this is a big but – sometimes original ideas are not so original, without you knowing it. In positioning, you gain valuable insight into who will be your true competition.
Brand positioning brings to light the viability of your product or service. It can also show alternate paths, and even reveal new opportunities.
Brand Positioning is a difficult task which can rarely be completed by one person alone. Good brand positioning is a question and answer proposition, requiring hours and days of intense research, along with a ton of true objectivity. I usually create a team of designer and client who work together.
Combined with brand strategy, positioning is a potent step in brand development. Brand positioning and strategy will provide you with a clear direction and a wide-angle view of the future for your marketing. It will also give your graphic designer exactly what they need to be able to design your corporate or brand identity with purpose and meaning.
Brand positioning clearly defines the following crucial things, before you invest time, money, hopes, and energy in realizing your vision:
Determine originality
Is your idea unique? You may think it is, but now is the time to do some intensive research to discover whether or not other companies are marketing the same product or service.
Establish your unique position in your chosen market
If your product is totally unique, you may have hit a home run. If there are other products just like it, you may have to position yours as being different in one important way, which can capture the attention of your audience, and can garner enough sales to justify the effort.
Identify competitors
Everyone has competition. Everyone. I once had a boss who liked to tell his employees that the company had no competition. He wanted them to think only about their own success. There is wisdom in that approach, because it can help people focus, however, a strong competitor is a valuable asset. It gives you a peer, a potential equal whom you can rise above, or set incremental goals against, to capture a market. All great athletes have competitors. Businesses do too.
Determine required budget to compete
Do you have the needed budget? You may have the drive and determination, but if a larger competitor has the marketing budget to outgun you at every crucial step, you are going to need to change your strategy, and you may need to consider a different position in the market.
Brand positioning is often a hard process. When you’re excited about getting your business started or launching a new brand, objectivity is usually the one key ingredient most people lack, and often in a big way. I highly recommend pairing with a brand consultant or graphic designer who truly understands branding.
At the end of the process, you should have a brand position summary that clearly states your market position, and can guide your product development, brand development, and marketing planning.
I frequently get the question at speaking events: ‘How do I find a great graphic designer for my brand development?’ There’s no adequate 30-second answer, so I thought I’d write a few posts here on finding a great graphic designer.
‘Great’ is a relative term. The designer has to be right for you by working with your budget, meeting your goals, inspiring you, and delivering effective work. How do you find the perfect designer for your needs?
One way to start is by considering locale. For instance, if you are in need of graphic design in Seattle, there are over 500 of us in Seattle alone, and those are just the ones listed in the local directory. Once you decide to choose a local designer, figuring our your budget and goals will help pare down the list of people you can work with. Don’t know your budget and goals? That’s ok. I hope to help you figure that out.
Train of Thought frequently takes calls from business owners who know they need to hire a graphic designer for brand development or web design, but they have no idea where to start. By ‘no idea’, I’m not just talking about the finding a designer part. If you haven’t the foggiest notion of where to begin, you are not alone!
Small business owners frequently have no budget in mind, no known annual operating budget from which they might figure out a project budget, no business plan, and no long-term goals down on paper. They often have no idea what constitutes a good logo design, and they have no idea what elements make up a brand. They just know they need a graphic designer. All of these unknowns are okay, if you can trust the designer you ultimately hire to help you answer them. Can I work with this set of variables? Well, I certainly try! The truth is calls like that are often the launch pad to a bunch of tough questions. Sometimes it leads to a great relationship.
Now, I could throw a guesstimate price out there based on what I think they need – and sometimes I just have to – but if I really want to help the person by providing an accurate estimate and have any chance of landing their business, it’s important to learn a few things first. Primary among them are their budget and goals.
If you have no budget, as in the sky’s the limit, every designer under the sun will LOVE you. But if you’re like most companies, you have a budget for each project. Sometimes budgets are set arbitrarily, and other times they’re determined by operating costs. Once you figure yours out, and find a designer you trust, it’s okay to share it.
Hands on the table
Ten years ago, if I asked about a project budget, I got a straightforward answer, but things have changed. Now when I ask for the budget prior to providing an estimate, about 85% of the time the answer is, “I have no idea. What should the budget be?” If I then produce a middle-of-the-road estimate, I stand a good chance of seeing my prospective client’s utter surprise fly across the room or through the phone, smacking into the wall like a herd of wild spoonbill platypus.
People often have a preconceived notion of what a design project is worth before they have any idea what the end-product will do for them, or what the development process might look like in terms of hours or services required.
Some people hold back on sharing their budget because they think it’s smart business, like maybe they’ll get a better deal. (It’s far more likely they wind up with a worse deal.) A more efficient strategy for getting an exceptional design is everybody with their hands above the table, working towards a common goal.
If you truly have no idea what your budget is, that’s ok, as long as you’re willing to do the work together to figure it out. At some point, your budget and goals absolutely have to align, or you will wind up frustrated or disappointed—or worse, over budget with a crummy design.
Budget alignment, an example
A company called me last year wanting a custom font designed and programmed. I was told that budget wasn’t a problem. I mentioned that custom type design and font programming can run between $5,000 and $15,000, depending on complexity. I heard this: “What?! Oh, I thought it would be maybe one or two hundred bucks.” Click.
Type design is often a 100-200 hour (or more) conquest. The end result is a truly unique typeface that becomes a core part of a company’s marketing communications. It provides a distinctiveness that few other elements can. The financial benefit of it is tremendous because it can transform a company’s marketing pieces from mediocre yawnfests to attention-getting masterpieces.
Say I spent 50 hours on their type design project. At their $100 budget, I would make $2 per hour on the project. Had the company’s goals and budget been aligned, I could have suggested a smart solution for them.
It’s the thinking that counts
Creative problem solving is part of what you should be looking for in a great graphic designer. It’s what elevates design to another plane that connects with people on multiple levels, generating greater sales possibilities. Savvy graphic designers can help you figure out a realistic budget.
Say you need a logo, corporate identity and website. You don’t know your budget, but you have an open mind. An experienced designer can tell you off the top of their head what a logo and identity costs, then ballpark a website estimate based on page count, features and work required. That’s some valuable input when you don’t know your budget, right? From there, you will be able to quickly access whether or not you can work with that designer.
Finding a great graphic designer
Finding a great graphic designer is not like finding a decent order-taker. Good designers are paid to think. Mediocre designers may do what you tell them, but they usually will not produce graphics that support marketing. And that’s really the whole point of hiring a graphic designer.
If you read every article in this series, you will be one dangerously informed entrepreneur, ready to march out and find an absolutely perfect fit in a graphic designer for your brand development needs or virtually any graphic design project needs.
Read on:
Finding a great graphic designer, part 1: Budgeting
Finding a great graphic designer, part 2: Goal Setting
