How to Bring a Brand To Life

Bring Your Brand to Life: From Soul-Searching to Brand Recognition

The Kleenex of Your Industry

Imagine your brand, a trusted household name. A part of daily life folks don’t want to live without. Imagine your brand setting the standard for your context, the way the brand name Kleenex is synonymous for the “tissue” someone uses to blow their nose. You’ll know your brand is fully alive when you’ve reached brand recognition. This doesn’t have to be global. It’s all about who and where you’re targeting, what industry best fits your product, and the community your brand cultivates. 

But how do you get there? 

729 Solutions has been at this work a long time, and we’re not gonna lie, *pops collar*, we’re great at it. We’re not only skilled, but it’s what we’re passionate about. We love to bring your idea out onto the table, uncover all its shimmer and brilliance, and send it out into the world exactly as you imagined it. We love digging into your story, hearing every seemingly disparate detail, and finding out your brilliant, authentic, fascinating self as it shows up in your business. We consider it a profound privilege to be able to steward brands in that process. 

Bring us your scrawled bar napkins or your fully fleshed out powerpoint presentation about your brand. Whether a stack of post-it notes or at incorporated entity status, we’ll meet you where you are and walk through the visual expression of your brand.

Tell Us Everything

First, let’s lay it all on the table, starting with a brain dump. Tell us everything about your dream and brand so far. What solution are you stewarding into the world? What inspired your idea? Tell us your purpose, your vision, your mission, your values. Tell us the aches and pains, how your idea resolves them, and the joy and peace felt when people discover what you’re offering. We’ll listen with rapt attention, like a dog in single-minded focus waiting for a piece of food to slip from the table. If it seems overwhelming, take heart. These pieces will come together in the process.

Making it Personal with Your Brand Persona

From there, we’ll craft your Brand Persona. This includes the qualities, ideas and feelings you want people associating with your Brand. We’ll be pulling these out from your story to make those qualities shine. Remember Apple’s “Mac vs PC” ad campaign with Justin Long as the Mac? Quirky, hipster, trendy, chill, lifestyle brand to suit the creative types: therein lies the Brand Persona. Who would you cast to represent the persona of your brand?

Who Are Your People?

Next, it’s time for some market and user research to get to know your customer base. We’ll survey the landscape and provide you with the insight you need to connect with your audience. Who are your people and what are they about? What are their needs, priorities, and their highest values? 

To bring your brand to life, it needs to both visually represent you as you want to be known, and it also needs to speak the language of your customer base. We’ll make the research process easy and thorough so your brand can be on its way into the hearts and households of your targeted people.

Enlivening your logo

Here we are: the moment you’ve been waiting for. (Okay maybe you didn’t know you were waiting for this, but we love getting to this climactic next part!) Now, you have a brand persona paired with the research to meet your customer base as they are. Now it’s time to pull it altogether in visual expression: your LOGO!

From your story to symbols, from research to roughs, we’ll work with you to bring your brand from your heart space to expression, and we’ll adjust it until you feel known. We’ll put together a logo that exhibits your voice, your personality, your story, and your solution for the problem you’re solving. We’ll run draft after draft until we get it right, and you can recognize yourself in the mirror. 

When we’ve gotten it right, you’ll witness your story symbolized in simplicity and essence, holding your complexity and impact together with clarity and focus. We want to hear you say, “yes, this is me!” Like great empathy. Like the best conversation.

Recognize Yourself At Every Stage

Spoiler alert: this won’t be the last time you walk through some or all of this process. As your business grows, as the industry pivots, your brand will evolve. Any long-standing brand will transform through a few redesigns over its lifespan.

Brands don’t finalize; they reach stages and live into seasons. A brand fully alive will need maintenance and find itself evolving in order to meet the growing relationship with your industry and customer base. It will keep evolving as your business does, growing through development stages. Just like you’re still you from childhood, teenage years, and young adulthood, but you’re also different, you’ve leveled out or sharpened, you’ve softened edges and you’ve also grown more aware of who you are. You have always been you and yet you keep becoming you. That’s the case with your brand.

You can be true to your brand now and still find it sheds some layers down the road. Maintaining a relationship between your brand, industry, and customer base requires maintenance. We’ll be there for that, too.

Giving It Wings

After all this hard work, it’s time to send your brand out into the world. 

We’ll make sure you have what you need. We’ll help you build up your Brand Toolkit, and implement your visual identity into web presence. Through placement and strategy, we’ll equip it to venture out into the world, singing your praises and connecting with your target audience.