Your brand is your business, your reputation and your promise to your clients.

Small and medium sized businesses often feel that the status of a brand is reserved for corporate giants. These corporations become iconic because of the value they placed in its design at the SME stage. A considered approach and strategy centred on the design of the brand and its visual identity of products or services delivers solid growth and customer loyalty.

If your brand promotes values shared by your clients a symbiotic relationship can evolve. Clients will become loyal followers, sales people, avid promoters & the future of your business. An individuals ‘brand loyalty’ is a way to project their taste and link themselves with the values you both share.

How do you create a brand? It’s not simple; it’s not a process that can be completed in a short space of time. A brand is an evolving strategy using visual assets that react to a changing marketplace. However you have to start somewhere, a solid base to build your empire, your brand.

A brand is an experience; this experience should be identifiable with you, your employees and your clients – In equal proportions.

We believe anyone can own a brand; it is far more costly to ignore the importance of its design in a business than invest in it.Any size business can benefit from getting it right.

We like our brands to have a personality; they should speak to the consumer – strike up a conversation, reason with them and ultimately become friends, good friends!

If it’s hard to imagine your business having this kind of emotional impact on your consumers, give us a call or pop in and we can show you how to begin or refine your brand experience.

Is taking a product to market as easy a journey as recent media trends have suggested?   Whilst it’s true that programmes such as the BBC’s Dragon’s Den demonstrate fairly realistically that if your concept or product is not well researched or designed then your hope of getting it to retail, or gaining investment, is pretty hard to achieve.

On the other hand, programmes such as the BBC’s Britain’s Next Big Thing tell a different story altogether, giving a selected group of suppliers a chance to pitch their products to the head buyers of Boots, Habitat and Liberty. The reality is presenting, or even getting the opportunity to present, to head buyers is rarely achievable.

Despite this advantage, numerous early casualties on BNBT had their products and designs rejected for obvious flaws. Others made it to shortlist, but when the buyers probed further and questioned the suppliers the propositions unravelled.

It’s not always down to product design either: one of the featured skincare ranges had a great concept, a gap in the market to exploit and could have been a very marketable brand but the product range failed to impress at focus group level due to price, branding and failure to convey the key USPs.

So, where do these ideas lose their way? Well, in our opinion as a studio that has seen success in bringing products to market, establishing new brands and tweaking others, we have seen first-hand that good ideas don’t always guarantee a successful result. Often concepts are never even seen by the consumer or the buyers. The big question is why?

If the brief and initial concept isn’t strong enough to carry a consistent idea through to market, it can fail on any number of points.

Allowing a brief or an idea to be a free-form journey without structure is leaves a project entirely vulnerable. Whilst this may be exciting, it rarely results in success. If a solid brief is not in place ideas wander and changes become frequent and unnecessary. One revision can become three, three become eight and before you can stop your head spinning, the original brief is a distant, irrelevant memory.

Tell tale signs that the brief is crumbling might include, for example, design by committee (when too many people have creative input to a single project), a family member who knows how to use a computer sending artwork to be included, or perhaps someone’s spouse, child, neighbour or even the milkman insisting on having input with their own ideas. Agencies often have to succumb to these demands and thus truly exceptional designs become transformed into mediocre clusters of disjointed artwork.

Successful brands and products that make it to market are those that have had strong ideals, concepts and execution. These brands have creative teams who know how to manage the many points of a brief, USPs, the market, consumers, pricing, manufacturing – the list is long. Taking all these points into consideration allows a capable designer or agency to create a well-crafted, user-centred design that meets the brief.

If you want to create a successful product or service, work with an agency that understands not only your needs but, more importantly, the needs of the consumer. Research is key, not searching Google images but research that actually involves getting up and going outside. Visit shops, watch the people who will buy your product. Or perhaps visit someone you don’t know and watch them use a similar product.

We advise our clients about the value in getting the brief right – let us research and use our experience to explore the project from every angle. From this point we can then create, implement and deliver a brief to adhere to.

(Try not to picture us as being disagreeable taskmasters though; we deal in building a good rapport, creating relationships and nurturing friendships with our clients).

We have learnt through experience that the success of a project is reliant on a complete, clear brief. This may sound abundantly obvious but it is all too often overlooked.

We ask, we observe but most importantly of all, we listen. Only then can we create a well-thought out concept with depth and potential. We employ this method in all aspects of our work and for this reason we enjoy not only where we are but also where we are going.

Your brief is key.