Defining what a brand stands for

Set a clear brand strategy brief by establishing the business problem, prioritising the essential challenge and turning the findings into a clear direction for creative work.

Choose research around the uncertainty your brand decision needs to resolve, combining direct stakeholder input with audience and market investigation where needed.

Employee interviews can reveal competing accounts of your business and where those accounts come from, helping distinguish useful insight from inherited assumptions.

Base your brand promise on demonstrated strengths that matter to your audience, connecting what the business stands for with a credible reason to care.

Your brand purpose is credible when it guides what the business does, including what it is prepared to stop doing, rather than existing only as a statement.

Your brand's tone of voice should express the qualities audiences can genuinely expect from your business, using language that carries those qualities across different uses.

A shared strategic idea connects your visual identity with your brand voice, giving language and design a consistent meaning rather than simply a matching style.

A shared purpose and core character keep a brand coherent across different audiences, while allowing messages and expression to reflect what each audience needs.

Your B2B brand tagline should express one meaningful brand idea in language people can remember and repeat, rather than compress every message into one line.

Reconsider your product name when research shows that it confuses customers or employees and gets in the way of a clear identity or value proposition.

Your brand is credible to software developers when it reflects their working values and your business's demonstrated contribution to their community, rather than simply describing its technology.