Brand design and development

Brand design is not your logo. A logo is a small ingredient in the recipe it takes to create a resonant and enduring brand. 

To be enduring and engaging, a brand needs to be built on solid strategic foundations.

It will bring together the core brand messages and positioning with a design language (including brand symbology), tonality, imagery and behaviours and will formalise them in such a way as to allow an organisation to speak compellingly ‘with one voice’.

Brand development process.

DPR&Co’s brand development process begins with strategic brand elements and moves through to the creative and executional strategies.

Brand creation & positioning strategy roadmap

Brand expression.

Naming: DPR&Co helped name many organisations and products. The tests we apply to a name include:

  • Mnemonic value (memorability)
  • Simplicity and ease of expression
  • Tonal fit (does it ‘sound’ like the product or organisation and would the team behind it be happy to use it)
  • Protectability (we conduct a global search and brief our copyright lawyer to run checks)
  • URL clear space

Brand values.

Many organisations struggle to describe a compelling set of brand values.

Internally focused brand values are relatively easy to conceive. But establishing how your values impact a customer’s propensity to buy your brand may require you to distil customer-facing values that you can ‘live’ through every transaction and that don’t expose your organisation to risk. 

Your team must be able to put these values into practice easily. For example, if one of your values is customer centricity, you can expect your customer to be doubly annoyed by a failure to deliver a positive customer experience.

Visual identity.​

A visual identity for any successful organisation will cover a long list of applications:

  • Brand design – the brand symbol itself
  • Basic elements – strap/positioning lines, typography, colour palette, logo clear space and usage rules (acceptable and unacceptable usage)
  • Imagery – set of directions around the style of imagery that will complement the brand

Budget partially determines how comprehensive your basic list of elements can be. We provide a ‘zip-up’ guide on smaller branding jobs – a concise set of rules around the brand expression. 

Key messaging

Again, building on the strategic brand foundations, we apply a creative overlay. In some circumstances, this is a stand-alone process while it may be part of our New Real process in others.

Brand assets

Materials that support your organisation will come to life. This process may include brand briefing documents, brand assets such as screen savers, signage, pre-launch and launch activity planning including media briefings and brand-themed mood videos, video press releases and more.

Brand ‘idea’

Often (but not always) distilled as part of The New Truth process, a brand ‘idea’ simply describes the feeling you want your audience to experience when exposed to your brand. It may be that the brand has a particular social or environmental overlay we need to communicate compellingly. Most importantly, your brand idea should resonate with authenticity and credibly with your audience.

Brand delivery

  • A brand manual with all requisite strategic and creative elements – concise or comprehensive depending on budget and complexity of audience mix.
  • Assistance with brand deployment – ongoing oversight of brand roll-out or period reviews to ensure integrity, compliance and application.

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