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Brand Strategy

What Can A Sound Brand Strategy Do For Your Business?

By on

May 16, 2018

- Brand Strategy

In the same way placing a Ferrari logo on an old, beat up car doesn’t make the car a Ferrari, branding is much more than just designing a brand’s logo or developing it’s name. Here’s what a sound brand strategy can do for your business:


1. CREATE A LEADER – Brand Consultancy



Brand Consultancy addresses the value your brand has to offer to the market.


Developing a sound strategy begins with a brand development workshop. This tool helps identify the why, the how and the what your business has to offer the market. Drawing out and rooting your business to the newly defined pillars that the company will stand on forms the basis for any further communication development.


In a Brand Audit the effectiveness of your brand is understood – what is your brand’s current position in the market? What are its weaknesses or inconsistencies? How does it compare to its competitors? What is its place in the market


2. DEVELOP A KEY DIFFERENTIATOR – Brand Identity



Brand Identity and Brand Recognition follow from a sound market assessment.


What are your competitors doing? How do they look, feel and communicate? How can you be different?

How can your brand be positioned to really attract your target market?

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Developing a sound Logo, Brand Extensions and Collaterals such as stationery, merchandise and packaging, play a huge role in differentiating the brand from its competition. What is the message your brand is sending its audience? And how can that voice stand out from all the others?


3. ACQUIRE YOUR MARKET – Brand Communication



A good Brand Communication Strategy is vital to engaging the brand’s target market. This is where your brand starts to become a personality.


Rooting back to its pillars, the brand begins to develop a voice that reaches the ears of its target market, by developing sound strategies for Social Media Reach, Website Development, Marketing Collaterals, Campaigns and Product Launches.


Is your brand’s promise coming through? Is your communication strategy sound enough for your audience? Can the market trust you?





Does your brand need assistance in any of these areas? Zeitgeist can help – reach out to us.





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Brand Strategy

Branding – The Importance Of A Mood Board

By on

April 18, 2018

- Brand Strategy

Have you ever wondered why some brands appeal to you right from their logo through to all their viewable content across channels?

It’s because you understand the language. And just like alphabets make words that are the building blocks of English , a moodboard creates anchors to visual language that make a brand.

And as we all know, a brand is NOT just a logo.


The Beginnings Of A Strong Brand

So you have an idea – an outstanding business plan that makes sense to execute in today’s market. And you feel the excitement of sharing this with EVERYBODY. And then you stop short. How are you going to communicate this perfect little brain child of yours?

Always begin with a moodboard.

Allow yourself to explore images, patterns, colors, typography, illustrations and textures that inspire you to develop your business. If you believe your business has a fresh and innovative offering, look for elements that will continue to inspire that feeling. This becomes your base point for development. Zeitgeist uses Pinterest as a tool to gather these ingredients – something that would be hugely beneficial to a rookie too.


Identifying The Communication Process

Depending on how creative the Client is, we choose to either create a tangible mood board for interaction, or a digital mood board to confirm direction. Based on your resources and preferences you can do the same. I personally prefer a board that I can touch, to drive the senses even deeper.

Then, begin to arrange your elements to make sense visually. Perhaps you decided to club categories together, perhaps you prefer to jumble things into what works for you mentally. The idea is to get you to start feeling like your business is being rooted into something visually communicative for your target market. If you feel the board is getting too heavy, it’s okay to remove a few elements, or if you feel right about it, split them into two, to analyse two potential directions. There is no wrong or right. This is just conceptual.

Now you have your anchor. As you develop your brand remember to keep looking back at your moodboard to draw continually from those elements that inspired you to begin with. If you stay rooted to the same colors, typography and imagery, you will begin to see your Brand speaking its own language to your potential market.


From Design Brief To Mood Board

Today Zeitegist shares two digital mood boards with distinct directions, based around the design brief for SmartFarm, that nudged the Client into choosing a clear road map going forward.

Hope this helps! Happy Designing 🙂


The Design Brief

SmartFarm represents a marriage between agriculture and technology.

The brand language should be ‘Young’, ‘Fun’, ‘Relevant’ and ‘Flexible’.

The brand identity needs to appeal to both, B2B and B2C market segments.





INSPIRATION 1
The mood board that follows brings together a collection of images, colours, patterns and art that render an uncompromising, more corporate but approachable feel to the brand language:





INSPIRATION 2
This collection of images, colors, patterns and art brings a more congenial and sophisticated yet friendly feel to the brand:





Madhuri Rao,
Founder & Chief,
Design Strategy




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Brand Strategy

The Anatomy of a Brand – Fashion Harbour

By on

April 11, 2018

- Brand Strategy

Just like the human body, a well thought out brand has multiple parts that function together to make the whole. So, what are those parts, and how do we apply it to our process?

When a Dubai based client approached us with her idea for the e-commerce fashion brand she wanted to launch, we went to work to dissect her brand into key elements that would serve as a clear differentiator in an overwhelmingly competitive market.
The idea was to humanise the brand with a clear and distinct personality that added value to the local market.


THE SOUL

We started with its SOUL. Why did this brand need to exist? What was its core purpose? Its vision? To get these answers Zeitgeist immersed the client into an in depth 2-day brand development workshop to spring some life into the business. It very quickly became evident that this e-commerce platform was to be the canvas that connected fashion enthusiasts to unique products from all over the world.




THE BRAIN

But what would this mean to the BRAIN of the brand? We needed to figure out a logical way that this brand would reach its market. We understood that Fashion Harbour’s largest market would be women and so right from its name, we needed to inspire, excite and welcome in our target market. To do this we needed to dig deep into all the areas these women interacted with that were connected to fashion and lifestyle. We wanted to build logical strategic alliances that could help deliver our message. And so, we began to build Fashion Harbour’s roadmap to reach its destination.



THE HEART

Now we needed to infuse HEART into Fashion Harbour. How could we manifest a feeling of warmth and togetherness to create a sense of loyalty? Heavily embedded in R&D, we understood that to communicate our brand we would need distinct social media strategies put in place. To begin a relationship that inspired loyalty meant that we needed to figure out what inspired these ladies. We understood that a large part of our market spent hours browsing Instagram looking for brands and products that could add value to their lives. And this is where Fashion Harbour needed to be. We spent countless hours on design strategy. How should each post look? How will it sound? What do each of these women want to hear? The idea was to allow the brand to invoke loyalty from its customers. We created online strategies that mitigated loneliness, created self-worth, offered education and induced community.



How did this all come together to form the DNA of the Brand? Very simply, the brand’s unique value proposition was to be ‘Inspired by Culture, United by Style’. This meant that everything the brand stood for and communicated would represent expressive fashion, global fashion & democratic fashion.
We developed the brand to represent a lifestyle, and not just a collection of products.







DRESSING IT ALL UP

What CLOTHES would the brand wear? What would be in its cupboard? The brand identity needed to be gentle and feminine but strong enough to advocate its presence online. We drew inspiration from the local pier to define the typeface and created a fluid watercolour as the background to emphasize femininity in the logo. Colours and gradients were used to depict varied forms of fashion and culture that all talked of the brand’s DNA – open minded and inspired. And ultimately, our logo was designed as the brand’s favourite hat – a distinguished, impactful image that was tailored to remind the user of a trendy brand that impacts their life.







Madhuri Rao
Founder & Chief,
Design Strategy




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