Branding

A brand conveys both the practical and emotional ways customers think about a product. It tells them what your company stands for, makes them feel a certain way about it, lets them know what qualities the product possesses and even garners loyalty to one product over another. Brands are hard working and important to the success of a business.

Before we can do anything, we need to understand your audience. In order to create and align a branding strategy we get under their skin and that starts with research. Finding out what makes them tick is crucial.

We then look at the ambitions of your organisation, determine your business needs and what that means for the brand. We also analyse your competitors whilst gaining a thorough understanding of the sector you operate in. Corporation Pop knows how to get to the heart of your business and customers. That’s why our branding service stands out from the crowd.

Using our findings, and working collaboratively with you, we draw up a brief. This serves as a guide to the essence of the brand. It lays out your values, tone of voice and how you want your customers to feel about your company. It also helps focus everyone on exactly who your customers are and the boundaries we will work within.

Brand assets

Once we identify the core essence of your brand, we set about creating assets. Early iterations often begin with sketches until we have a strong enough selection we can digitise and share with you. Our exceptional team of artists and designers know exactly how to transform your brand values into striking visuals.

Everything is mono at this early stage so we can focus solely on form. Colour can be so emotive we like to give it its own space further down the line.

As the cornerstone of a powerful brand, the logo mark is typically the first asset we create. This can be iconography, typography or more often than not, a combination of both. Naturally your input is essential but we’re sure you’ll love what we come up with.

Once you’ve agreed on a logo mark, we can begin introducing colour and moving onto other key assets. Ultimately, we’ll deliver a visual toolkit comprising logo mark, primary and secondary typography, colour palette, tone of voice and image styling. From the outset we keep accessibility in mind and strive to reach at least AA standards. That includes colourways and UI.

The assets we create are there to support your proposition and reflect the qualities of your business.

Testing

Testing is an integral part of the branding process. We test the logo mark and the rest of the assets with a selection of colour ways in order to provide you the best options to choose from. We test imagery to see how everything works together — whether that’s photographs, illustration or iconography. And we test how everything works with your current work. We also get users involved to see what they think and can even arrange focus groups for you. 

You will have eyes on everything at key stages throughout the project. That way, you keep full control and we don’t head down any dead ends.

Deliverables

Besides the toolkit, and to support a consistent roll out of assets, we’ll create brand style guidelines. These are for internal teams and external partners and are simple to follow regardless of platform. Brand style guidelines include examples of how people should use assets and dos and don’ts to make representing your brand as straightforward as possible.