We recently re-branded and revamped the packaging design for Maxlife Batteries. We’ve given the brand tons of personality and created a brand mascot ‘Maxitron’ to deliver our brand messaging. Each battery cell marks a small little nugget of interest with a great slogans to make you smile.

An important question when undertaking any reassessment of your brand is whether to go for small, incremental changes as a refresher, or to plump for a major overhaul of your company’s or product’s image.

Broadly speaking, evolution is preferable if you are already in a strong position with a solid customer base and you just need to keep up with a growing or developing market. Revolution, on the other hand, might be more appropriate if your customer base is in decline, the market has changed substantially since the inception of your current brand or you have no point of difference from your competitors.

Redfire can help you work through work through your rebranding or brand refreshment project using our in-house Brand Evolva process.

HOW CAN REDFIRE HELP WITH YOUR BRANDING:

Redfire has significant experience in brand development and brand design. We look at brand building in a very strategic manner ensuring our brand development work elevates your unique point of difference and brand personality to the forefront. If your looking for brand developers who are passionate with all things branding, then we would be the ideal brand agency you should consider. We cover everything from brand strategy, brand design, brand identity, rebranding, brand management, brand marketing through to product branding.

Whatever sector you work in, keeping your brand communications fresh is essential. Reassessing your design, language or identity every few years should be seen as an ongoing investment in your company rather than a costly extra.

All successful companies revisit their communications periodically, even the world’s most recognisable brands. But reinvigorating your brand doesn’t necessarily mean you have to start from the very beginning, reconsidering your big idea or vision and so on. Our BRAND EVOLVA™ process allows us to easily engage in a brand refreshment where we can step in at any point or stage of a brand’s life-cycle to implement change.

If you’re happy with your company’s big idea, vision and personality, these things can remain the foundations of what you’re doing – but the implementation of your brand should be refreshed to keep things on track and ensure it remains relevant to your target audience.

HOW CAN REDFIRE HELP WITH YOUR BRANDING

Redfire has significant experience in brand development and brand design. We look at brand building in a very strategic manner ensuring our brand development work elevates your unique point of difference and brand personality to the forefront. If you're looking for brand developers who are passionate with all things branding, then we would be the ideal brand agency you should consider. We cover everything from brand strategy, brand design, brand identity, rebranding, brand management, brand marketing through to product branding.

Brand names are an important aspect in setting the tone and personality of your brand, as well as being a key element in marketing activity. Along with design and tone of voice, a name can be a means of differentiation and should reflect the overall brand strategy you’ve developed. The key to a great name should distinguish you from the competition. Don’t pick a name that makes you one of the trees in the forest, then spend the rest of your marketing budget trying to stand out.

At Redfire, we’ll help you think about how your different and what that means for your positioning and branding. We’ll help create a name that is the result of a clear positioning strategy. The key is to find a fresh way into the hearts and minds of your customers, redefine and own the conversation in your industry, and engage people on as many levels as possible. The best product and company names represent the ultimate process of molding these ideas down into a word or two.

Every brand naming project is unique and our process is tailored to suit your budgets, requirements and objectives. We make sure that all aspects of a work plan are designed to complement your naming project, corporate culture and time frame. As with any plan, it’s all about inspired execution.

On the whole, a brand name falls into one of a few types, which can be arranged along a kind of spectrum of attributes. These attributes are:
Functional/Descriptive, Invented, Experiential or Evocative.

Functional or Descriptive brand names simply say what the company/brand does. For example:

Air New Zealand
BMW ( Bavarian Motor Werks)
AA (Automobile Association)

Invented brand names. There are basically two types of invented names for products or companies;
1) Names built upon Greek and Latin roots or 2) Poetically constructed names that are based on rhythm and the experience of saying them. For example:

Google
Fonterra

Experiential brand names rise above descriptive names because they are more about the experience than the task and offer a direct connection to something real, to a part of direct human experience. For example:

United Airways

Evocative brand names differ from others in that they evoke the positioning of a company or product, rather than describing a function or a direct experience. For example:

Virgin – airlines
Charlies – orange juice

Redfire has developed an in house process with nine ways to evaluate and develop great brand names. Give us a call or drop us an email and we can discuss how we can help with your next brand or product naming opportunity.

HOW CAN REDFIRE HELP WITH YOUR BRANDING:

Redfire has significant experience in brand development and brand design. We look at brand building in a very strategic manner ensuring our brand development work elevates your unique point of difference and brand personality to the forefront. If you're looking for brand developers who are passionate with all things branding, then we would be the ideal brand agency you should consider. We cover everything from brand strategy, brand design, brand identity, rebranding, brand management, brand marketing through to product branding.

If you’re thinking about how to brand or rebrand your business, its products or services, or if you want to assess where your brand stands at present, there are a few key aspects you should consider:

The big idea – what lies at the heart of your company?
Values – what do you believe in?
Vision – where are you going?
Personality – how do you want to come across?

If you can start to answer these questions with clarity and consistency then you have the basis for developing a strong brand. Let’s take each of these in turn.

1.The big idea
The big idea is perhaps a catch-all for your company or service. It should encapsulate what makes you different, what you offer, why you’re doing it and how you’re going to present it. The other ‘ingredients’ are slightly more specific, but they should all feed from the big idea.

The big idea is also a uniting concept that can hold together an otherwise disparate set of activities. Ideally, it will inform everything you do, big or small, including customer service, advertising, website, staff uniforms, corporate identity, perhaps right down to your answer machine message.

To pin down your own big idea you will need to look very carefully at your own business and the marketplace around you, asking these types of questions:

How can you stand out?
What is your offer?
What makes you different?
What is your ‘personality’?
What do consumers want or need?
Is there a gap in the market?
What is really unique about your product or service?

Redfire offers a very strong strategic platform to our brand building and can aid this process by helping you uncover your brand opportunities.

Once decided, the articulation of these ideas can be put into action through branding techniques such as design, advertising, events, partnerships, staff training and so on. It is these activities that set up the consumer’s understanding and expectation of your company; in other words, its brand. And once you’ve set up this brand ‘promise’, the most important thing is to ensure that your products and services consistently deliver on it.

Jucy Rental Cars: big idea

Jucy is a great example of a basic, clear big idea and its implementation. The Jucy premise is simply to make things easy and to provide the best bang for your buck.

And because the big idea is so simple, company founders Tim & Dan Alpe has extended it to a wide range of otherwise unrelated services – from the Jucy hotel to Jucy Cruises – without having to change the basic brand.

2. Vision
Generating a vision for your company means thinking about the future, where you want to be, looking at ways to challenge the market or transform a sector. A vision may be grand and large-scale, or may be as simple as offering an existing product in a completely new way, or even changing the emphasis of your business from one core area to another.

Although corporate visions and mission statements can often appear to be little more than a hollow dictums from top management, a well-considered vision can help you to structure some of the more practical issues of putting a development strategy into action. If you’re clear on what you’re aiming at, it’s obviously easier to put the structures in place to get there.

3. Brand Values
Like the word ‘brand’ itself, the term ‘brand values’ is perhaps a little over-used in design and marketing circles, but it does relate to important aspects of how people see your organisation. It’s what you stand for and it can be communicated either explicitly or implicitly in what you do. But imbuing your company’s brand with a set of values is tricky for a number of reasons.

Firstly, everybody wants the same kinds of values to be associated with their business. A recent independent survey found that most companies share the same ten values, namely: quality, openness, innovation, individual responsibility, fairness, respect for the individual, empowerment, passion, flexibility, teamwork and pride.

Secondly, it’s not easy to communicate values: overt marketing may seem disingenuous, while not communicating your values in any way may result in people not seeing what you stand for. And lastly, any values you portray have to be genuine and upheld in the way your organisation operates.

Redfire can help you clarify what your organisation or business stands for and then they can develop ways for you to communicate that effectively. This might be through graphic design, language and tonality, advertising, social media and so on.

4. Personality
Once you have established your ‘big idea’, vision and values, they can be communicated to consumers through a range of channels. The way you decide to present this communication – the tone, language and design, for example – can be said to be the personality of your company.

Personality traits could be ‘efficient and business like’, ‘friendly and chatty’, or perhaps ‘humorous and irreverent’, although they would obviously have to be appropriate to the type of product or service you are selling.

It need not have anything at all to do with the personalities of the people running the company; although it could, if you want to create a personality-driven company in the way that Richard Branson is very much the figurehead for Virgin.

And for smaller companies, the culture and style of the business can often reflect the founder, so its values and personality may be the same.

Here are a few examples of how you can start to control the elements of your company’s personality, conveying certain aspects to customers in different ways:

Graphic design: The visual identity – hard corporate identity or soft, friendly caricature?
Tone of voice: Is the language you use (both spoken and written) formal or relaxed?
Dialogue: Can your users or customers contribute ideas and get involved in the organisation – effective through social media? Or is it a one-way communication?
Customer service: How are staff trained to communicate with customers? What level of customer service do you provide?

As companies grow, their personality and values are reflected more in internal culture and behaviour than through the characteristics of the founders. This personality then defines how the companies express their offer in the market.

Putting it all together
Using the ‘key ingredients’ that we’ve outlined here will give you a solid understanding of your organisation’s brand, as well as strategies on how to present it to people.

Starting with the ‘big idea’, you can then go on to refine and set out your company’s vision, values and personality. And once these are all in place, we can turn your brand blueprint into tangible communications.

HOW CAN REDFIRE HELP WITH YOUR BRANDING:

Redfire has significant experience in brand development and brand design. We look at brand building in a very strategic manner ensuring our brand development work elevates your unique point of difference and brand personality to the forefront. If your looking for brand developers who are passionate with all things branding, then we would be the ideal brand agency you should consider. We cover everything from brand strategy, brand design, brand identity, rebranding, brand management, brand marketing through to product branding.

Creating difference. Branding is a way of clearly highlighting what makes your offer different to, and more desirable than, anyone else’s.

Effective branding elevates a product or organisation from being just one commodity amongst many identical commodities, to become something with a unique character and promise. Branding can create an emotional resonance in the minds of consumers who choose products and services using both emotional and pragmatic judgements. Branding can influence consumer behaviour and get more money for sometimes the same product. ie The vodka market is a perfect analogy – it is a clear tasteless alcohol but with many different price points, all positioned through differing brand strategies.

Consumers are generally willing to pay more for a branded product than they are for something which is largely unbranded. And a brand can be extended through a whole range of offers too.

Pam’s, for example, began life as a limited range of economy products for New World supermarkets and now sells a wide range of products, in almost all FMCG categories. Consistent application of the Pam’s brand attributes, such as ease of access and low price, but with great package design that is consistent with mainstream brands has allowed the Pam’s brand to move into new market sectors without changing its core brand identity and gain mass consumer acceptance.

Creating a connection with people is important for all organisations and a brand can embody attributes which consumers will feel drawn to. It is the the live blood for any business to compete in the long term and a vital component for any business today.

Redfire has significant experience in brand development and brand design. We look at brand building in a very strategic manner ensuring our brand development work elevates your unique point of difference and brand personality to the forefront. If your looking for brand developers who are passionate with all things branding, then we would be the ideal brand agency you should consider. We cover everything from brand strategy, brand design, brand identity, rebranding, brand management, brand marketing through to product branding.

If a brand results from a set of associations and perceptions in people’s minds, then branding is an attempt to influence, harness, generate and control these associations to help the business perform better or sell more. Any organisation can benefit enormously by creating a brand that presents the company as unique, distinctive, trusted, exciting, reliable or whichever attributes are appropriate to that business.

While absolute control over a brand is not possible due to outside influences, intelligent use of design, advertising, marketing, service proposition, corporate culture can all really help to generate associations in people’s minds that will benefit the organisation. In different industry sectors the audiences, competitors, delivery and service aspects of branding may differ, but the basic principle of being clear about what you stand for always applies.

HOW CAN REDFIRE HELP WITH YOUR BRANDING:

Redfire has significant experience in brand development and brand design. We look at brand building in a very strategic manner ensuring our brand development work elevates your unique point of difference and brand personality to the forefront. If you're looking for brand developers who are passionate with all things branding, then we would be the ideal brand agency you should consider. We cover everything from brand strategy, brand design, brand identity, rebranding, brand management, brand marketing through to product branding.

Brand design is the process of creating a distinct identity and personality in order to communicate and promote an organisation, person, product or service. Redfire can help you explore how developing a strong brand can work and what it can do for you and your business.

Because the term ‘brand’ itself refers to a very broad range of attributes, the brand identity goes way beyond the logo, spanning many different aspects of an organisation and its products or services and harnessing many different communication and design skills.

Brands are built around a holistic set of associations that people have with a company, product, service, individual or organisation. Developing and managing these associations is a complex process in which design plays a vital role, but which also includes other marketing communications disciplines, as well as the culture, processes and conduct of a company itself.

Brand design is therefore a much deeper and broader process than visual identity design or logo design, although graphics are often a crucial way of succinctly symbolising and evoking a brand and its associations. In fact, brands reach people via what many brand strategists will call touchpoints, including:

Visual elements, including corporate identity, logo and other graphics
Customer service
Product attributes
Physical environments
Print communication
Online/digital interaction
Language/copywriting
Packaging
Materials and their visual or tactile qualities
Form
Sound
Other marketing communications activity

It is the total combination of touchpoints that culminate to form a strong emotional connection in the hearts and minds of an individual and hence make consumers brand loyal.

Because brand design can involve work in any combination of the areas listed above – and more, Redfire’s holstic Brand Evolva process provides a strong direction and methodology to develop new brands or refresh and revamp existing brands.

HOW CAN REDFIRE HELP WITH YOUR BRANDING:

Redfire has significant experience in brand development and brand design. We look at brand building in a very strategic manner ensuring our brand development work elevates your unique point of difference and brand personality to the forefront. If you're looking for brand developers who are passionate with all things branding, then we would be the ideal brand agency you should consider. We cover everything from brand strategy, brand design, brand identity, rebranding, brand management, brand marketing through to product branding.