As of this week, I finally finished a year-long branding project. Well, I shouldn’t say finished, because this is the type of project that will continue to be refined, but let’s just say we took our time rebuilding and clarifying our brand.
Some may not understand the concept of a brand, but to put it in my own words, a brand is the emotional feeling and understanding one has toward an organization; this could include the interacting with a logo, slogan, packaging, tagline, etc.
When we first started this branding exercise, we noticed that everyone in our organization was using different language to explain our business. Not only that, but there was misuse of our color palettes, signatures, logos, fonts, etc. so we wanted to put it all together in a clarifying way for the entire organization.
We first brought the wider leadership team together and issued a questionnaire. This included questions about who we are as an organization. We asked questions like, “what are the core values of our brand?” or “why are we different than our competitors?” From this, we began to develop what we called the “Xenium-Brand-Manual-Sample” based on the responses and from our marketing team.
I will tell you, this process was not easy, particularly because we have had legacy taglines and marketing communication that was still used up until this time, so this process could have been seen as quite a shake-up. For the most part, people understood why we were doing it.
In the final deliverable to the wider organization, we developed a 20-page manual consisting of two parts. One is for the strategic side of the brand, includes:
- Company History
- Growth Goals
- Mission Statement
- 30-second elevator pitch
- Target market and target customer
- Values
- Personality
- Position
- Promise
The second part is all about the visual piece of the brand – which is forward facing to our clients and partners, including:
- Color palette
- Logo uses
- Logo misuses
- Fonts
- Creative elements
- Social media best practices
- Email signature
- Sample work
The final manual was delivered to the team this week, which contained both parts. It was very well received particularly because most of the employees did not have these tools in their back pocket and the freedom to use them within their own rights. To have brand consistency it made total sense to create this for the team to ensure that we were all using the same messaging.