AEC Branding Process

Viewing the rebranding process as a one-time event is a trap.

Wise leaders see rebranding as the beginning of something valuable and legacy-building. And it’s no small undertaking.

We believe if the process doesn’t bring you to a place where you were at least a little bit uncomfortable—perhaps even a little scared—then you probably aren’t differentiating yourself from the competition.

Project Management & Communication

While we will bring in specialists to assist with the process, website development, and other occasional needs, you’ll never be handed off to a junior account person, or inexperienced designer. Working with Bold Brand means your project will be led directly—and exclusively—by Josh Miles.

We’ll create your project plan and schedule together, along with regular check-ins. While we have all learned that Zoom can work well, we’re also happy to hop on a flight for important meetings, sessions, or events.

DRIVE Brand Strategy 

We understand the importance of your brand for attracting clients, prospects, and talent. We’re proposing to interview key stakeholders, employees, and clients to help us refine our research, language and direction as we develop the brand.

Our process begins with our initial discovery meetings (ideally in-person), with the leadership team and key decision-makers in your company. We’ll provide key questions in advance for your consideration, and discuss them specifically within our meeting. Concerning the logistics of the project, we’ll agree on key objectives, general timeline and primary points of contact. The bulk of our discovery is focused on positioning goals and outstanding characteristics of your company from a branding perspective. In a perfect world, this meeting would include anyone who should have a vote in the process. Following the discovery meeting, we’d like to collect any existing brand or communications samples, or any research that your company already has.

We will seek to understand what’s best about your company, where you’re succeeding, where you’re potentially missing out, and even areas where you may be failing. All aspects of your company will be explored. We’ll also explore similar market-leading companies from around the world. We’ll compile a brand audit of your existing brand and touchpoints, and we’ll compare and contrast where you are within the market.

The DRIVE brand strategy process should take three to four months to complete, assuming schedules cooperate.

Expectations for your time: We expect to have some demands on your team for the duration of the engagement. We’ll need 2-3 meetings with your internal leadership and associates for discovery, workshops, and interviews. Expect each of these meetings to be about 2 hours long. If there are any other staff off-site we should speak with, we’d prefer to do those via Zoom or phone, where calls should be about 30 minutes each. 

Our brand strategy process is called DRIVE, which stands for Discovery, Research, Insights, Voice, and Brand Essence. We believe in strategy-first, holistic brand solutions. Within our DRIVE process, each step is completed by drawing on the intentional discovery and well-founded strategy.

Discovery

Our process begins with our initial discovery meetings, which take place in person, at your HQ or virtually. Discovery is the internally-facing part of our research. We’ll provide key questions in advance for your consideration, and discuss them specifically within our meeting. Concerning the logistics of the project, we’ll agree on key objectives, general timeline and primary points of contact. The bulk of our discovery is focused on market analysis, positioning goals and outstanding characteristics of your company from a branding perspective. This meeting should include anyone who will have a vote in the process—leadership, marketing, etc.

Research

Before the discovery sessions, we’d like to collect any existing brand standards documents, sample branded documents, proposals, and any research your company already has. Next, we’ll begin to audit and research your organization from an external perspective. We’ll also explore similarly leading companies in your market, as well as great companies in other parts of the world. We’ll compile a brand audit of your existing brand and touchpoints, and we’ll compare and contrast where you sit amongst your competition. We’ll also perform telephone interviews with some of your best clients. We typically recommend 6-10 interviews for a solid, qualitative sample of how your clients perceive you.

Insights

As we compile our findings, we’ll assemble a brief and finalize your scope, timeline, and any additional options. We’ll present and illustrate our findings, including how internal brand perceptions compare to external perceptions. Sharing these findings will often be a mix of heads nodding and looks of surprise. It is from these contrasting ideas that we will provide recommendations for your strategic direction and concepts for your brand positioning, as well as recommendations for how to approach brand architecture. This is the beginning of developing your brand strategy, including Mission, Vision, Brand Values, and perceptions statements such as, Who We Are, and What Makes Us Different. Once your team approves a strategic direction, we’ll move on to Voice and Essence, which go hand-in-hand.

Brand Voice & Brand Essence

Once our strategic direction is finalized, our team will document our recommendations for brand voice, which is quite literally, how your brand speaks and expresses who you are, and your brand essence—the simplest, most succinct word or phrase that embodies your brand strategy. We’ll present our brand voice and strategy recommendations including our research, messaging guidelines, brand voice and tone, sample headlines and subheads, CTAs, elevator pitches, and one-liners.

Phase II: Brand Identity & Brand Standards

After finalizing your brand strategy, we’ll work to develop visual recommendations for your company. The beautiful part about including a new visual identity as part of the brand relaunch is simple: audiences see visual changes faster than words alone, and they quickly realize “something has changed.” That difference is a great signal to the market that they should pay attention, and dig in to learn more. In this phase, we’ll begin to explore concepts, mock-ups, and final designs for the brand. You’ll be asked for feedback or approvals at each of these phases.

Elements to explore will be inclusive of potential updates to the brand color palette, typography, photography styles, graphic systems design, and a brand standards guidelines document to help your team continue to build on what we create in this phase.

We believe a great brand will serve as a platform for creating messages and communications assets. A great system allows for flexibility while maintaining consistency. Unity is the goal, not uniformity.