Branding.
It’s the way your business establishes and positions itself in the marketplace. It’s how you connect with your customers, how you showcase your business’s values, and how you cultivate a personality.
It also happens to be our speciality and our passion.
From an outsider’s perspective, developing a successful brand seems easy. Nowadays, new companies appear to go from start-up to smash success within days or weeks, and suddenly it seems like everybody is talking about the latest clothing company or internet sensation. But in reality, it takes a ton of hard work, forethought, and creativity. It takes equal parts energy and innovation, plus a little bit of luck. Whether you’re building a new brand or retooling an existing brand, you’ll need to have the right plans in place if you want to become the next big thing.
For our next deep dive series, we’re going to take you inside Miss Details’ branding expertise, and give you a crash course on what we know about building a meaningful, lucrative brand.
Preview of the Full Deep Dive Series on Building a Brand
Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Beginning Your Brand | Part 3: From Planning to Practice | Part 4: Revisit + Revise | Part 5: Conclusion
Don’t Be a Branding Disaster
Even billion-dollar companies can get it wrong.
Back in 2009, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice (a PepsiCo brand with annual sales of nearly $1 billion dollars) changed its packaging and invested $35 million in a new advertising campaign. But criticism of the change came almost instantly, with customers complaining that the updated boxes had lost their originality and emotion. Within two months, sales were down 20%, a loss of $30 million on top of the investment, and the box was back to its prior packaging.
It’s a cautionary tale for any company: even the most successful brands can make missteps that can cost them dearly. Tropicana was big enough to survive its branding fail and smart enough to understand when it had made a mistake, but a smaller company that made a similar misstep probably wouldn’t have been as lucky.
Diving in Deep: Building a Brand
Over the course of the next five weeks, we will be showing you how to take either your start-up company or existing business through the process of developing and implementing a brand strategy. From initial brainstorming through implementation and beyond, we’ll discuss the roadmap necessary to ensure that your brand stays authentic to your business and relevant in the marketplace, and to give you a brand your company and all those associated with it are proud of.
Part 1: Beginning Your Brand
Before you build a house, you have to pour the foundation. Even if you’re an existing business with a half-developed branding strategy, having a discussion that starts from the ground floor can go a long way towards fleshing out a cohesive plan that makes sense. We’ll discuss what you need to do from a branding perspective to ensure that everything aligns with your mission and values, and fits within your industry.
Part 2: From Planning to Practice
Now that you have your foundation poured and set, it’s time to start bringing your brand into being. No matter how you got here, it’s time to set out processes and systems, get everybody on the same page, and position your brand—and your business—for growth. In this installment, we’ll go into the core documents, pieces, and strategies you need to consider as you’re fleshing out your brand, ensuring you don’t try to do too much too soon.
Part 3: Revisit and Revise
Once you send your branding out into the world, there’s still a lot of work left to do. Brands require attention, feedback, growth and maturing, especially as a business grows and changes along the way. We’ll give you ideas and tips on how to maintain your brand’s efficacy and keep it fresh while staying true to your core values, as well as share some examples of companies whose mistakes in this area cost them tens of millions, if not more.
Conclusion: Series Wrap Up
We’ll look back and then forward, summarizing the key takeaways from the series and then giving you advice on what to do with it all. We’ll also provide you with some questions to ponder moving forward and links to helpful resources, as well as action steps of what to do next.
By the end of our series, you’ll be ready to approach your branding with new confidence and direction, with a greater understanding of the processes which drive your branding towards authenticity and success. If you have any questions along the way, you can always email us ([email protected]) and we’ll get back to you within a couple business days. We can’t wait to get started!
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About Miss Details
Founded by Tanya Gagnon in 2004, Miss Details is a full-service branding and design firm which helps entrepreneurs and companies launch, adjust and reinvent key aspects of their branding and business marketing strategy. With a background in all aspects of interior and experiential design and a passion for data-backed design, Tanya leads the Miss Details team to guide her clients through everything from a refreshed website to a full rebranding, helping them put the pieces together to create a consistent, authentic, unique brand image.