To be successful and relevant in market, new and existing brands don’t need to be the best in their field. They just need to be unique and different.
For many clients we have been the builders and unearthers of the intangible back-ends of brands—the parts you don’t see but that you feel. We help figure out the why. What it is that will make your brand relevant to a buyer and their customers.
We begin brand work with a client visioning session where we define our targets and break the brand down into emotional and rational characteristics, define its personality, its promise and the pillars that support that promise. This session is fun and the exercises are designed to extract the brand underpinnings without over thinking them. The objective is to establish a framework for our goals, offering and personalities to work within.
A considered distillation of the visioning session and exercises evolves into the brand's positioning document where we define and qualify the positioning (our stated commitment), create the outward-facing tagline that sums up our essence, the pillars that support our claim (made of key points), an ownable definition/description of the intangible and emotional product we’re selling, examples of how we might bring this brand promise to life and, finally, the brand inspiration – our mojo.
This positioning document acts as our filter as we begin to fill in the communications gaps in the organization. Once we have established what drives our company, it becomes very easy to know when something is right for the brand and when something is wrong for it. It will help us answer questions about sub-brands and sub-brand positions. It also de-personalizes feedback and can spare hours of debate. It becomes the emotional and personality standards that all creative that follows must support.
The brand messaging platform is the explanation of the brand pillars – the emotional and rational benefits of engaging with your brand. A brand's messaging platform is different from a product messaging platform where the functional benefits of your different products are explained and extolled. The brand messaging platform is the basis for all content creation – what to write in an ad, a news release, a website, in a brochure, etc. The messaging platform is the genesis of any stories that are developed to support and promote brand.
The visual representation of the brand. Now that we have completely and confidently defined who the brand is and how it carries itself, it's time to transform that essence into a visual identity. This is where we weave our core and regional brand positioning into a unified graphic suite. All possible applications of the identities need to be considered in their creation from signage to web to outreach programs.
Tugboat Group delivers a brand book (kit) with every brand developed. This book contains the blueprint for the brand, including style guides for identity use, copy, type and colour, supported by a detailed brand positioning.
While strong and resilient, the best brands are living things that must be cared for, nurtured and helped to evolve. Brands must be regularly examined for relevance with audiences, as they are the real drivers of a brand.
Web + Application Development
Tugboat.Online is our web and software development engine room. We can develop just about any site or application, any size, for any purpose. In fact, Tugboat.online is so specialized, we needed to give it space to grow.
Curious to know how we'd approach your unique requirements? Let's talk.