Branding
Your Brand is your greatest asset.
We help you build, nurture and sustain it.
Over Two Decades of Creativity & Innovation
Circle is one of Northern Ireland’s leading Brand, Interpretation & Exhibition consultancies with a 20-year portfolio of work that spans all major public and private sector organisations throughout the UK and Ireland.
Brand
Your Brand is your greatest asset. We help you build, nurture and sustain it
Your brand is more than your logo. It is the sum of organisation’s qualities, values and reputation and how people - including your customers, employees and the media - perceive, experience and trust it.
Our role is to help you mould and shape these perceptions and create a consistent inspirational and connected brand experience. Why does this matter? Because branding is the promise you make to your customers. It sets you apart from your competition, it builds trust and gives customers a reason to use your services. Branding tells your story and why you are in business. With our help, your brand will continue to grow and thrive.
Brand & Positioning Strategy
A brand positioning strategy is your map for creating an established brand identity and achieving long-term goals.
Great brands tell a story that connects with their audience. They inspire confidence because they stand for a clear set of values and speak with an unerring voice that people recognise and trust. At Circle, our role is to get under the skin of your brand to reveal its personality and key characteristics. This process plays a vital part in guiding us towards a creative and compelling brand strategy that captures the personality of your organisation and builds meaningful connections with your customers.
Brand architecture
We start by reviewing the brand architecture and where your brand sits within the overall structure.
• Is it a stand-alone product or does your brand represent a unique service?
• Does it operate on its own, or is it subsumed under an over-arching ‘family’ brand from which it gains kudos and prestige?
• How well does your existing brand collateral work, what experience does it deliver and how might we improve that experience?
Then we ask pertinent questions
• Who are your customers, what do they want from your brand, where are they located and how do we create targeted messaging that resonates with them?
• Who are your competitors, what are they doing well - and badly - and how do we achieve substantial differentiation from them?
• Where do we position your brand in the overall market?
• What is your USP, the competitive advantage that sets you apart from your key competitors and gives your brand a competitive advantage in the market place?
Brand values
All of this leads inexorably towards us gaining a greater understanding what your brand stands for and the ‘brand values’ that form its foundation and that will guide it moving forward. We also identify the all-important ‘brand personality’ and how it feels to interact with the brand. These are the characteristics that help build an emotional connection to your audience. Adhering rigorously to this process brings us to an end point where we understand the strengths and qualities of your brand, what you do, why it is important and how it differentiates you from your competitors. We know who we are talking to and how we should talk to them. All of this forms a base on which we can start to design and build a brand name and identity.
Brand Naming
The brand name identifies, communicates, protects and legalises your brand, so choosing it is one of the most important decisions taken during brand development. It can also be a one of the most challenging.
• Your brand name is your most valuable marketing asset.
• It should look good in print and in digital formats
• It must be memorable and set you apart from the competition
• It must communicate important messages to your customers
• It must have ‘legs’ to carry your business well into the future
What’s in a name?
Condensing all the attributes of a strong brand name into one or more concise words is a tall order. Fortunately our rigorous brand name system breaks it down into a series of manageable steps.
• We dig deep to gain a real understanding of who you are, what you do, how you do it, what you stand for and where you are going
• We build up a picture of your brand personality and how it feels to interact with the brand
• We create an exhaustive list of potential names
• We refine potential names to create a impactful shortlist
The final choice
Each brand name on our shortlist is checked to make sure that it is unused, is not trademarked and is not on any business name registers or domain names. We also check to see if the names will allow your brand to develop beyond your home country; that they make sense in other languages/cultures and do not cause offence.
The final step is to present the final refined shortlist to you.
Brand Identity
Your brand identity is what makes you instantly recognisable to your customers and distinguishes you from your competitors.
To reach this stage we will have developed your brand positioning strategy and helped you to choose your brand name. For most small and medium enterprises, our next step is to use all of this deep knowledge and insight to assemble your unique and distinctive brand identity.
Working at the highest level
Some of Circle’s high-level branding projects involve working with major public sector organisations, local government departments, nation-wide service providers, etc. These projects demand the highest levels of skill and specialism. In such cases, our consultants undertake a rigorous process of stakeholder engagement, which forms an integral part of the brand identity development process. All feedback and outputs from this phases is then distilled into a Brand Insight document, which is used to further develop and refine the brand identity.
The complete ensemble
Your logo encapsulates your brand personality and conveys its values. But your brand identity is a tangible expression of your company. It embraces everything from your corporate colour palettes, to the particular font styles used online and in print. It even embraces the form and style of images that can be used to promote your products and services and the tone of voice with which you communicate.
At Circle, our skills lies in crafting a brand identity that forges a connection with your customers and builds a positive perception of your brand. When combined with a well-designed logo, our effective brand identity will help your organisation to reach its audiences across a wide range of platforms, effectively and persuasively.
