What does a good branding person actually do?
- Jun 1
- 15 min read
Looking to hire a branding consultant or agency? Here are 5 things they should be doing for your business.
The conversation around branding in board rooms and meeting rooms across the world is usually 5 questions:
How are we perceived?
How do we look?
Do we stand out?
Are people thinking about us and when/where do they think of us?
Who is buying from us? And subsequently, who can we get to buy us?
None of these are in any particular order but if all 5 questions aren’t being asked, then start asking them. Because branding goes well beyond how you look and way, way, way beyond that of a logo. And this is what any good brand consultant or agency will focus on when it comes to the branding (and marketing) of your business.
Because I’ll tell you now, the great branding people out there are thinking far more about other things to help your brand win than just how your logo looks.
So to give you the cliff notes version of 5 things a REALLY good branding consultant will be doing, ask them if they look at these 5 things:
Brand Strategy (market orientation, segmentation, targeting and positioning
Category entry points (times/reasons/places for buying)
Internal identity (your internal team culture - purpose, values, personality)
External identity (messaging, visuals, sounds, smells)
Brand touchpoints (websites, signage, stationery, events, merch, social pages…even if it’s just the planning of these to know when and where the brand lives in context)
Conversely, here are 5 things to look out for from a less than good branding consultant will be doing:
Don't ask who you’re targeting or who you’re competing with.
Confuses branding with graphic design and only designs a logo.
Delivers brand assets without considering where and how they’ll actually be used now and into the future.
Isn’t helping your business in any other way than just how you look.
Presents a heap of concepts/options to choose from - might sound great, but this creates a decision paralysis and not what you should expect from an experienced branding professional to give you their best efforts and work.
My point here is that branding is your businesses competitive advantage when it comes to differentiating your brand from comparable competitors with similar offers. And yet these discussions around board room tables only scratch the surface when it comes to creating any meaningful outcomes if the only questions asked are, “Do we look good?” and “Do we stand out?”.
So if the assumption up until this point has been that branding is only about logos and colours that get dropped onto your packaging, store front or stationery, let’s broaden that horizon so that you know exactly what a branding person or agency can actually do to give your brand a shot a better business success with better branding.
1. Brand Strategy
I’ve said this many times in previous articles. You can call it brand strategy, marketing strategy, even business strategy. The intended outcome is the same, to help the brand win for better business success. What is brand strategy? I’ll give you the best definition I’ve come across and it’s broadly applicable to any form or strategy context: “A strategy is an integrative set of choices that positions you on a playing field of your choice in a way that you win. It’s a theory you have that is both coherent and doable” - Roger L Martin.
Many ‘branding’ people don’t offer brand strategy, or they do but it focuses only on your team’s common purpose/mission/vision, a set of values and shared personality - this is what I’d refer to as your team’s internal brand identity, as in what defines the collective identity of all of those in your team to align with. Brand strategy on the other hand, is 4 steps:
Market orientation - what is the need/problem in the market you can or are solving.
Segmentation - who are all the people that would need such a thing.
Targeting - who are we going to focus on as the most viable target now or in certain contexts.
Positioning - what simple idea are we going to be known for by these people we are targeting, so that they think of us (rather than the competition) when needed.
I discovered this from a REALLY good MBA marketing professor, Mark Ritson, that’s worked with the likes of Louis Vuitton, Subaru, Westpac, Sephora, Johnson & Johnson and the list goes on & on. All the other forms of marketing or brand strategy that get you to the end goal of how your brand is going to win, are a treasure trove of complexity in comparison to these 4 simple steps.
Because they diagnose the situation of what the problem/need is and who’s got that problem or need, to then say, “Yep, we’re gonna go after this lot and everything we’re going to do has to make sure people remember and think of us for X, Y or Z” and you move on to the fun stuff that everyone wants to do like your visuals and your advertising and your website. But strategy first, always.
It’s the dart board you need so that everything you do has something to aim at, and most will skip this step either because they don’t know about it, or don’t think they need it (branding people included). So I’m here to tell you that if you don’t do this, you have nothing to measure success against. Think of it as your brand’s KPIs for effectiveness. Especially when you add 3 more steps after that strategy phase to give yourself a brand plan to execute the strategy, and they are:
S.M.A.R.T. Objectives: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound key performance indicators that are the goals with which you measure your success.
As an example, the goal could be more foot traffic through the door of a real estate agency that says, “We want to increase direct appraisal requests by 25% within 12 months.”
Tactics: A prioritised list of branding and marketing steps you’ll take that achieve your objectives, based on your capacity (time, money, effort).
To carry through this real estate example, they’re planning on doing 4 things: 1. Update their branding so it actually stands out on their For Sale billboards and other touchpoints like ads,
2. Create an advertising campaign for property market insights in the area targeted to those most likely to sell. 3. Direct those people from those ads to a website landing page to get recent sales insights and a lead capture form. 4. To generate more awareness they’re going to get other billboards up in the area for more outdoor advertising. Simple stuff, yeah?
Budget: Pretty self explanatory but everything has a cost and that cost defines what Tactics are doable now or in the future, so the tactics and budget are done in tandem.
For this real estate agency, they can only afford to do 3/4 of their desired tactics, and do the outdoor advertising later once they’ve seen an uplift in appraisals that convert into customers to be able to swing that additional tactic cost.
This is a brand strategy. A diagnosis that forms a hypothesis of how you believe you’re going to win, followed by a plan to execute the strategy. This is the best start to do better branding.
2. Category Entry Points
This is a relatively new term in the marketing and branding world, but it’s used to describe a really simple concept, which is to define when and where a customer will think of and buy from you, so that your brand will be the one that’s there. Meaning it gives you the strategic advantage of being in the right place at the right time, even if a customer is only thinking about a situation, rather than actually being in one.
So as a brand we want to come to mind and be easy to find, yeah? And this kind of thinking is what sets many great branding people AND the brands themselves apart from the rest. Because if you start thinking about when your brand should be showing up and when it should pop up in people’s mind, this starts to better direct your entire brand strategy in terms of the positioning AND the planned steps you then take to achieve that greater level of salience and physical presence.
It’s a little hard to describe what Category Entry Points are any further without giving a couple of examples of brands that have entered new places, times or reasons for consumers to think of and buy their products.
The first is one I’ve talked about many times before and that is Coca-Cola’s popularisation of the figure we now know as Santa Claus. With sales slumping over winter in the USA back in the 1920-1930s as Coca-Cola was growing, the proposition of a refreshing cola drink served icy-cold wasn’t helping. So in 1931, Coca-Cola created an ad campaign that squarely positioned them as a brand to be associated with Christmas. Because here’s the thing, a brand isn’t just what you sell, it’s these associations that bring to mind what you sell, and Coca-Cola did this by aligning Santa Claus with the Coca-Cola name, colours and time of year to encourage more consumers to think of Coca-Cola at this time of year. History shows this worked spectacularly and their visual depiction of Santa is what most of the world now sees as Santa. Coca-Cola at Christmas is a Category Entry Point.
A more recent example of this is Cadbury who actually kind of took a leaf out of Coca-Cola’s playbook of their ‘share a Coke’ campaign with personalised names on their bottles instead of their logo. But Cadbury went a step further to tap into the Category Entry Point of personalised gift giving, particularly at newsagency’s like WHS Smith in the UK that sold gifts and birthday cards. So using a rotating wire stand usually used for those personalised name numberplates you can get for your kids, they used the same kind of display stand to put Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate blocks that had personalised names on them for people to select for someone as a gift. A simple idea, that I’ve since seen done by Toblerone as well, in a new place for people to think of and find their brand. That’s a Category Entry Point that expands upon Cadbury’s already known places to buy and reasons to buy.
So it’s a bit of a mix of your brand’s strategic positioning and the execution tactics you make that aligns the two so that you brand is standing out, is thought of, is present, is found and that simple but significant thought that when considered early enough, can produce far more creative and effective branding, marketing and business outcomes.
3. Internal Identity
As I touched on earlier, this is the part that many branding people call a brand strategy. I disagree. As there should be nothing overtly strategic about what you inherently believe, what you value and what your personality is without forcing it and no one in your team getting behind it convincingly.
Because you’ve no doubt been in a workplace where the culture in the room is defined by 3 or 4 words that look impressive on a motivational poster, like PRECISION beneath an image of two fighter jets flying above and below one another. But in reality that doesn’t inspire day-to-day clarity of what you’re there to do, or any sense of personality you can align with to know if it’s the workplace you want to be in, let alone exude to customers.
This is the thing, the internal identity of your brand is a reflection of the team you are or the team you hope to grow. The more inherent that is based on existing characteristics or aspirations, the better as it’s far more natural than picking adjectives out of a hat. But the big point is that internal identity shows its head when customers experience your brand.
Meaning that the purpose you roll out of bed for and show up to work each day to do, is yes, serve those you are targeting and give them the experience you’ve positioned your whole brand around. But it’s also about adding a distinct personality to it that could be the difference between why customers pick your brand over another.
You’ll know what I mean when you’ve been greeted by an unenthusiastic cashier, or worse, a sleazy salesperson hell bent on a sale. Those extremes are what cause misalignment between your offer and your brand, because your team and the identity that represents them is part of your brand. It’s why people will walk out or avoid those brands entirely, because of one team member or even a whole team.
So there is tremendous value in nurturing a strong commitment to the internal identity of your brand as it’s what can guide positive team culture that any HR manager will be thrilled with, and it becomes a guideline in itself of who to hire and fire. Many branding consultants gloss over the importance and value of this step, especially in how it is used day-to-day to encourage a great internal team identity that is then experienced by customers. It’s another one not to skip, especially if you’ve never considered it to be part of your branding.
4. External Identity
Yes, this is where you design a logo. The original term for a ‘brand’ was used for livestock to distinguish herds of cattle of different owners. Today we still use this same principle for something like a logo, but now we have far greater opportunities to distinguish our brand from others than how the name of the brand looks above the door.
So when we’re externally communicating and connecting with potential and existing customers, we can do all of the following:
Logo design
Colours
Fonts
Symbols
Patterns
Image & Video style
Sounds & Music (also known as sonic branding)
Mascots
Brand ambassadors (Eg. celebrities)
Messaging (eg. taglines, slogans, value propositions and brand story)
The more the better, if you can, as they give your brand every opportunity to be recognised and remembered to stand out from the crowd.
I’d take a stab at guessing 99% of initial branding conversations that businesses have with a branding person start with this external branding stage. Only to be pulled back to a strategy stage first to ensure there’s a clear direction first. The problem though is that everyone wants to rush to get to this step and I can definitely see why as it becomes the most tangible part where you actually have something to use immediately to create change. However, that eagerness often creates a two-time branding exercise. The first time to create some visual branding. And the second time to redo it all because there was no direction to begin with and what was made didn’t align. It’s common, I get it, and this is why I write these kinds of articles to avoid that loss of time and money.
Now if you work with a great branding person that does this external identity step as well (or has partnered with someone else that does the strategy and internal identity steps - which I have done many times), they’ll give you the following:
A logo that is trademarkable, can be used in ANY context you put it in, isn’t too complex to look at that it becomes hard to remember, and doesn’t need to say explicitly what your business does like 499 of the Fortune 500 companies do.
Colours that aren’t the same as direct competitors and work in digital and print contexts.
Fonts (or even better, custom fonts) that are legible and align with your message.
Messaging that aligns with your brand positioning and makes it easy for a customer to understand your offer and its value clearly and succinctly.
Sounds that might not just create cues to recognise your brand, but could also elicit emotional triggers.
Symbols and patterns that can become as iconic as a logo - think Burberry’s tartan patterns.
Mascots that add personality and recognition to your brand.
A brand guide that instructs the usage of all these assets.
The paradox of these assets are that are use the most used, like logos and colours, are the least effective brand assets that create effective distinctiveness. While the most effective (up to 8x more effective), being sounds and mascots, are the least used. Which says a lot about those who are good at branding, if they encourage and create a broad suite of assets that give your brand a better chance at success than just a logo, colours and fonts alone. Because every business can be recognised and remembered for a logo and colours if they see them enough. But what about if people close their eyes, or if the logo isn’t present, will your brand be recognisable, will it come to mind?
A great measure of effectiveness of your external branding is if you take the logo away, will your brand be recognised. It means you’ve done more to occupy more of the tiny brain cells in the minds of customers that would have otherwise been stored for a competitor brand.
5. Where your brand shows up
This is the part that can be considered at every step of the branding process, either in planning where it will show up or how it will show up when you actually develop the touchpoint a consumer will engage with your brand. Be it a website, shopfront or internal shop layout, stationery, signage, merchandise, gifts, packaging, social media, your phone line welcome message or hold music, wherever and whenever your brand can be present.
One of the situations I like to use context of where your brand shows up, is when presenting my client’s external identity, to bridge the gap between concept and reality, a suite of visual mockups of how all those assets I’ve helped them develop will actually be experienced in context. Be it the animation of a logo at the end of a video, a real estate For Sale billboard out front of a house, a website homepage, social media content or the design of what their packaging could look like. The keywords there are ‘could look like’ as these are just conceptual references that go well beyond a logo shown on a page and saying to my clients, “What do ya’ think?”. Which is what many branding people unfortunately do, and you as the client miss the opportunity to see the world in which your branding will live, to then be able to make a confident decision in agreeing that what has been made will work.
The problem with no context is that your brand is then developed inside a vacuum and isn’t stress tested for the real world. Something as simple as does your logo work when it’s white instead of black, or do your colours work in digital and print might sound trivial, but there are reasons why these are as important as whether your brand name is not only available, but also doesn’t mean something vulgar in another language that your customers might speak, or the same for a particular brand message that it means the same thing in other languages when translated. These are the considerations that the good branding people out there think about and work around.
So you might think that your branding looks all good to go, but once it’s implemented it all falls apart either because it’s not managed well, or it was too hard to implement for everyone from the receptionist to the CEO. This can be a big problem with many branding outcomes that look good overall, but are often far too complex to use. Be it pages and pages of brand guidelines that have 20 different brand colours, 8 different fonts and 15 variations of the logo. Messaging that is too long and hard to say, let alone remember.
I’ve always felt that if the branding requires a great deal of hand holding to use day-to-day in any touchpoint, it’s not simple enough, especially for a small business to manage when they don’t have an internal team that manages the brand and marketing it. Because that right there is the challenge, not only for those within the business, but for the branding person tasked with developing the strategy and brand identity…better branding should be simple.
I’m not talking about bland boring branding either. I’m talking about a simple brand strategy and plan that fits on one page. Brand guidelines that can be condensed down to a couple of pages. One or two key messages you play on repeat. A repeatable design style that works across all packaging rather than reinventing the wheel for each product. The simpler you keep things, the easier it will be to use them, and what this ends up doing is it means your brand has a far greater chance of being presented consistently at every touchpoint you apply it to.
Because it’s easy to pump out a bunch of stuff to cover all bases and give you so much stuff that it becomes hard to know how to use it. Whereas what is hard from a branding standpoint is to make this stuff simple so that it’s easy to use. And yeah it’ll look “easy”, but that’s what good branding people can do. They develop, create and design branding that can be used effortlessly. That’s valuable to businesses to help them win.
Now there’s plenty of other things great branding people can do that I’ve not listed here, like brand/product/service naming, brand architecture if you have multiple brands that engage with one another, IP registration, and brand management to help you sustain a consistent presence in your market to help the brand grow. So as I said at the beginning of this article, there are far more things to help a brand win that great branding people are considering and can do beyond a logo, colours and fonts. They may not do all these things as some strategists won’t do the visual or sound design part of a brand identity. While there are also those who specialise in copywriting for brands. That said, you can find the triple threats that do it all (throwing my own pink hat in the ring) with strategy, writing and design. Or you may work with branding people that partner up or offer this within their team in an agency, to help you with all of these things.
Though I do understand that many small businesses will have more of a challenge to see the greater success that bigger brands do simply because of budget and capacity constraints, as there’s less cashflow and people power to invest into branding efforts. That said, apart from your people, your branding is just about the only other thing that appreciates in value, as opposed to many of the overhead costs associated with running a business. So if you HAVE TO grow your business, just like you HAVE TO pay to keep the lights on, then branding (and marketing) can either be seen as another cost, or it could be seen as an investment.
Especially if the price to do more than just a logo is more than you were expecting to spend, let alone the time and effort it takes to do more over time. It’s the price every business has had to pay to get ahead and every big business you know and buy from has done this and started small.
A great branding person can do a lot to help your business and they’ll be the ones that not only objectively come in to analyse your business, but sit in both your corner and your customers so that the conduit between your company and customers, aka, your brand, is catered to at both ends. As that’s what better branding does to give your brand a shot at creating better business success.
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