Ok, so you’ve decided you need to create or refresh your company’s brand. But how do you know if you’ve picked the best branding company to do the work?
And if the work they give you is any good?
After all, branding is VERY subjective. Yet your brand is one of your company’s most valuable assets. How do you, as a professional, steer your company and your management to making the best decision? Based on over 30 years of experience as a brand mechanic overseeing the transformation of brands from inside companies and inside agencies (had to oversee the redesign of the Yellow Pages walking fingers logo at one point – egad!), here’s my 7 point checklist to picking the best branding company and the best work:
- Not the best. The last.
- Is there a strategy?
- Does it deliver?
- Do people react?
- Does it pass the logo test?
- Does it walk, talk and dance?
- Is it about them or you?
You can print the 7 points above out as a checklist to keep in your drawer to evaluate any work. Here’s the details:
1. Not the best. The last.
When you are first selecting a branding company, they are going to show you their best work. Don’t fall for it. Ask to see the last 10 projects they completed. This way, you’ll get a better feel of whether they have a process to deliver good work consistently vs just get creatively lucky every once in a while. After all, all that great work they put up on their walls is going to be no help to you if your project fails.
2. Is there a branding strategy?
Branding isn’t (just) a fashion show. It’s a fairly mechanical business process designed to deliver an impression of your company in your target customer’s mind. Having a solid, clear branding strategy is the most critical element to achieving success.
So what is a branding strategy?
Well it’s not “we want something more creative, hip and cool”. I was recently asked to evaluate a branding proposal an organization received from another Toronto branding company and this was basically their strategy. The work was cliche and uninspired because the strategy was too.
A client in the IT consultancy space came to us to revamp their brand. Our research revealed that none of their clients could remember their current brand including the name. Secondly, it got confused in search results with another bigger company (EA) and, lastly, while there was a rationale in their minds what the brand and logo meant, none of the clients could play back their unique qualities as a company from their name or logo. We had to fix all that. That’s a branding strategy.
A private ski club I helped (yes, that’s a thing in Ontario) did a million dollar revamp of their clubhouse and needed to get a bunch of well-off families to pay substantial initiation fees to pay for it. Besides the cool new clubhouse the most leverageable asset they had was the prestige of being the oldest club around. Yet, as we told them, “they had the history of the Montreal Canadiens but the logo of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks”.
We needed something that leveraged that history and felt like a premium private club. That’s a branding strategy.
Each of these were tied to a very clear business problem that the new branding had to solve.
3. Does it deliver?
Boy, the way people post-justify brand re-designs! Get a load of how the branding company that tweak the Twitter logo a few years ago explained it:
Wow dudes it’s just a bird isn’t it? Seriously, I get how the design connotes freedom and fun but, while the rest of that may work in the boardroom, don’t get bamboozled by the branding company on your project with this sort of spiel.
Don’t worry about what they say it’s supposed to represent. If you have to explain it, it’s not delivering on the branding strategy is it?
Worry about what it connotes – what it suggests to people – when they see it. Ask people who don’t know anything about your brand:
“What kind of company would you expect someone having this logo to be?” OR “If that company were a person, what kind of person would they be?”
If they answer along the lines of what your branding strategy calls for, bingo!
The name we came up with for that IT consultancy connoted a group of people who were forceful, strong and possessed the leadership to get your multi-million dollar IT project back on track.
The branding I got back on the private ski club leveraged the club’s history by doing a contemporary take on the original logo from 1924 and connected its trailblazing past to a set of values you were looking for your family for in joining a private ski club.
4. Do people react?
While the ability of the branding to mechanically deliver the impression the strategy calls for is paramount, so is whether or not people react. Brands are symbols, flags that we fly at the front of our company’s ships. When you show people, look to see what brand ideas they react to. Whether they laugh, smile, nod or even cry you need to see them emote something. Branding that is just acceptable to everyone is exciting to no one.
When we introduced the re-branding for a charitable organization that helps teens in trouble, the staff and their supporting partners reacted emotionally. We brought their old brand into the next century while celebrating the amazing way they turned kids lives around and surrounded them with care.
5. Does it pass the logo test?
We’re pretty big on checklists for a marketing company and one of those is the logo test. If you can take a piece of communication and put your competitor’s logo on it and it still makes sense then your branding company hasn’t done it’s job. It has to be distinctive in the category.
The ‘Loving Winter Since 1924’ wouldn’t work on the other ski clubs.
The ‘Surge’ name didn’t look or feel like the other IT consultancy companies which all took the alphabet soup approach (e.g. XYZ consultants.)
We’re in the midst of a brand tuning project for a custom home company. We started by showing them how almost every logo for custom home builders had a roof shape in them. Marketing is about getting noticed.
6. Does the branding walk, talk and dance?
Does it easily extend to other media? Branding companies say ‘does the idea have legs?’ It should instantly inspire you and your team with ideas on how you can apply it. “Oh this would look great on a ________.” is a reaction you want.
Sometimes this is even a critical business deliverable. The Toronto Ski Club logo looked great on all sorts of clothing and, once we launched it, members started wearing it everywhere. We even made stickers of the logo for skies and snowboards. This raised the profile of the club in a cool way amongst the member’s wealthy peers: the exact target we were trying to reach.
To learn about other small ways to create big brands, check out this post on the Power of the Google Doodle.
7. It’s not about them.
Is your branding agency pushing too hard to sell you something because it might win them awards? “Oh you have to go with it. It’s soooo cool!”
A brand identity is the clothes your company wears and it has to feel comfortable in them. So your branding company shouldn’t be pushing you to wear that loud sports jacket and ignoring that you’re a conservative accounting company that needs to project stability and trust.
We had to tune up the branding for a shoe store chain that had been started by the current owner’s grandfather. We all agreed we had to make it more fashionable (it’s shoes ladies!) but it needed to reflect their small town values. And would there be a way to preserve some of the original design? I’m proud of the way we incorporated the original shoe shape (you can see it right?).
I hope these tips and the examples help you avoid disaster and achieve great branding success. You may want to print out the handy short list at the top of the post and keep in your drawer to evaluate any branding work you get.
The Marketing Garage is an award-winning Toronto branding company that uses digital marketing strategies to help you know whether your branding is going to work BEFORE you invest in it. Our tested & true 7-step process gets results and integrates your on and offline media. Call us to pop the hood on your brand.
