The principles for building brands with impact
There are many ways to build impactful brands, and they will differ from one case to another, but here are some overarching principles.
Always start with why. It may sound obvious, but it’s so important to think about why you exist and, ultimately, why people should care. When you ask that question, it takes you to deeper, more interesting places that are more emotional and compelling to build a brand narrative and brand identity upon.
Define your (real) audience. We always ask, who do you need to build your brand for?
When working with WWT, we identified a vast untapped audience beyond their current members who care about nature and biodiversity and believe that wetlands are worth protecting because they are a solution to the climate crisis. This informed the entire new brand idea and identity, ensuring it spoke to the broader audience without alienating their core.
Be informed by lived experience. This is something that we live by at GOOD, and it informs all our work, not just brand. When you are informed by and inspired by people with lived experience, you unlock emotion and insight that allows you to tell a story in a compelling way that connects with people to get them to care about a cause.
When rebranding Pancreatic Cancer UK, we had to be very conscious about tone of voice due to the sensitive nature of Pancreatic Cancer. However, when speaking to people with lived experience, they say you must be bold. You have to demand attention because if you don’t do it, who will? This then informed our bold, optimistic and unignorable brand.
Aim for distinctiveness. We need to ask ourselves if people are going to notice. Will people look up and pay attention in this increasingly distracted and noisy world?
This is something we strived to do for the National Oceanography Centre. When they came to us, they were a very academic institutional brand and spoke mainly to scientists, but they had a strategic organisational imperative to speak to a much bigger audience, to get more people to feel empowered to help the oceans thrive. And so, with that in mind, we needed to be much bolder, much more distinctive with bold colours and typography and beautiful standout imagery.
Live your brand. We find that whilst values can sometimes be helpful, they’re often so broad and generic that they lose all meaning. However, when you articulate them in a more active way, you can start to think not just what the brand looks and feels like, but how it’s manifested by the people that live and breathe it every day.
Our work with Sue Ryder is an excellent example because what they did as an organisation added real value to their brand. Beyond the logo and beyond any single piece of communication, their actions cemented what they stood for in the minds of their audiences. Grief kind changed the cultural narrative around grief and helped people reach out and talk to loved ones who were grieving.
Taking people on the journey
When it comes to stakeholders, it’s essential that everyone has the same understanding of brand and what it is you’re trying to achieve. Stakeholder management can be seen as a tick box, and actually, it’s the key to success.
We look at it in three stages:
Enrol – When you’re thinking about your stakeholders, it’s important to define who they are and their roles and land your expectations of them upfront.
Engage – Once you know who they are and what their role is, the next stage is to engage them. But it’s about engaging the right people at the right time and in the right way. Consider who in the organisation you can engage to unlock some of your brand stories; that might be people who work in customer service, a vet, a therapist, etc. – it doesn’t always have to be the most senior people.
Embed – It’s tempting to see stakeholders as just people who need to be involved in the process for sign-offs, and once the brand is finished, their jobs are done. But after a brand is created, it then needs to live, and that’s when it really comes to life via the people. Empowering them with the proper knowledge and understanding of the brand to go on and embed it across the organisation is the key to success.
Investing in your brand is one of the most transformational things you can do, but we know making yourselves distinctive in such a crowded market takes careful planning, design and implementation. At GOOD, we have a tried and tested brand model to ensure you not only build a brand with impact but have buy-in from your whole organisation, so they are equipped to go on and live your new brand.
If you would like to collaborate on any rebrands, please get in touch with lucy.martin@goodagency.co.uk
