Effective Branding: questions you should be asking every business

Take a look at the image above.

It’s instantly recognizable as one of the most popular beverages in the world. No logo, no text: that’s how strong their identity is. Coca Cola is not just selling soda, they’re selling the experience, emotion, and lifestyle associated with their brand: happiness in a bottle.

Now, I’m not here to talk about how effective Coke’s branding strategy is (or how they’ve been stealing land and water in developing countries, or how they tried to convince everyone to start exercising more instead of not drinking coke). Instead, I want to talk about my interesting recent experience as part of a workshop related to branding.

As a designer, I’ve often heard that branding and user experience (UX) are different disciplines. However, that’s not entirely true. I like to think of branding as part of the experience. At its core, branding is about all about setting your customer’s expectations and providing them with an experience, and UX ties in directly with that because it’s related to the user’s needs and creating products and services around them. Therefore, the two are not so exclusive, and intersect quite often.

Anyway.

The Situation

What if you are the owner of a newly established company, or a startup, and you have this revolutionary idea, but don’t have the understanding to communicate it properly to your target audience?

The Twist

Your revolutionary idea is supposed to be truly revolutionary. We were divided into groups and asked to go with one idea each from this set:

A set of wonderful product ideas

I know they all sound very tempting, but we decided to go with “Dehydrated Water” (because, you know, staying hydrated is very important!)

The Process

Each group was provided with a template that we were to fill out as owners of these fictional companies. The template included different kinds of questions, mainly to assess how well we understood our own business.

To reinforce a brand, first you must understand what it is they do.

The entire point of this was to be the starting point for a conversation, and the deeper this conversation, the better our understanding of what the company does. Which is why the questions ranged from introductory ones like, why we started this company, to more specific ones like target audience, competitors, and key objectives.

Guidelines for filling our the template

An important thing to note, since the original ideas that we were given were so absurd, it was hard to take a serious direction with the exercise (obviously), nevertheless, it proved to be a very fun learning experience!

I told you we were serious about saving water.

For the sake of this exercise, we colour-coded our sticky notes to differentiate between facts, opinions, and assumptions (it goes without saying that we had a lot more opinions and assumptions about dehydrated water than facts, perhaps because it isn’t a real thing)

I don’t know how to describe it correctly, but it is a very unique experience to reflect on your business when you’re trying to sell something like dehydrated water. For example, a few gems:

• Who are our competitors? No one, we are pioneers in this field.

• Who’s our target audience? Astronauts (they would obviously need dehydrated water in space, you dummy)

• How should our product make our customers feel? You know that feeling when you end up making more money from less money? Something like that.

True pioneers in this field.

All jokes aside, these questions presented us with a solid guideline to look at businesses from multiple perspectives (that we as designers should be aware of!). Like what value a business is bringing, what they know about their target audience, have they identified any challenges that they might face, and so on.

At the end, all these different perspectives combine to help form an identity, which concluded in our final task: to create a logo for the company. This is something I experimented with on the side myself.

Logomark + Logotype concepts

The questions we had answered before helped me in understanding the kind of differences and benefits the brand must communicate, and I used those points in coming up with a few ideas for the logo.

Ultimately, this little exercise benefited me as a designer because it provided me with a structure to better understand how to start conversations with clients wanting to work on brand strategy. And even though the entire idea was highly absurd (actually, dehydrated water is sounding more real the more time I spend writing this blog), it was a fun experience brainstorming and coming up with various facts, opinions, and assumptions, and then using them to create a concept logo.

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