Brand
Great brands generate cut-through, inspire loyalty and supercharge financial performance. But great brands need to be out in the real world, not stuck in endless, expensive development.
We’ve created an agile branding framework to make sure your brand does exactly what it needs to, when it needs to. It’s dynamic, lean and highly effective – perfect for startups, scaleups and innovators.
Branding, the BRICK way
Brand Strategy
We'll pin down your market position, then use it to create a powerful brand identity and creative direction. For startups, we've designed a Minimum Viable Branding (MVB) service, which gives you a strong foundation that's just as lean as it needs to be.
Brand Design
Our design team will give you a distinctive visual identity that captures your brand essence. We'll find the right blend of visual elements – including logo, typography and colour palette – to communicate your personality and values effectively.
Messaging, Story & Tone
Your visual language is only part of your brand toolkit. Choosing the right words, and finding the right way to deliver them, is an art that will transform your ability to connect with your audience. Our resident wordsmiths will help you do just that.
Creative Ideas
There’s nothing like brave creative for standing out, driving demand and fostering innovation. Once your brand identity is up and running, we develop unique, ownable creative concepts to get all eyes on you.
Brand Expansion
If the core of your brand is in place, we can build on what you have to support new content, assets and activation. We’ll create new possibilities for your brand, while staying true to who you are with minimal growing pains.
Rebrand & Reposition
If you have a brand problem, we can solve it. Whether you need a 180-degree spin or a subtle reposition, we can move you into a new and improved brand identity without losing sight of your purpose.
Frequently Asked Questions
The core components of a brand are always the same. For the visual identity: logo, typography and colour palette. For messaging: brand story, tone of voice and mission. That said, there are lots of areas for expansion that we'll look at with you when the time (and budget) is right.
We will always make sure your brand strategy and foundations are in good shape, and test any concerns if we need to. For example, if you came to us with a brand name we thought might hold you back, we'd stress-test it with you before building the brand out any further.
We know that your time is limited, and we keep this in mind during the process. Typically, a brand project will involve a one-hour team call every 1-2 weeks for the duration of the project. For an MVB startup brand, that could be as little as six weeks. For larger brands, it could be 12 weeks or more, depending on the scope of work.
Founders and leaders tend to get a lot from the branding process. It's an exploration of your vision and can really galvanise teams and energise the business. The team-building and alignment aspects of a brand project are really cool, so many clients lean into it.
Our creative team have worked (and won awards) at some of the biggest agencies in the UK, representing household brands. But they all find supporting the next generation of businesses, like yours, much more rewarding.
As a team, our experience spans B2C (FMCG, consumer apps, heath & fitness, retail, banking) and B2B (SaaS, AI, cloud & data, property, financial services). But the best category innovators take inspiration from other markets, looking outwards not inwards. So we seek variety and originality in our creative ideas, and take inspiration from unexpected places.
Branding is the process of shaping a company's identity and perception in the minds of its target audience, focusing on long-term reputation and recognition. Marketing is the activity that drives market engagement, builds product demand and facilitates sales. But there is a huge crossover between the two, and you can't (and shouldn't) keep them apart.
That's why we keep both disciplines under one roof. A brand only exists in the real world – it's the marketing and activation that bring it to life and test your assumptions about what your consumers want.
In terms of budget, we've stripped out all the unnecessaries in a typical branding process to keep it tight. Our unique agile branding framework allows for us to craft great brands efficiently and affordably.
If you have no brand identity or existing brand equity to protect, and just need the basics to get started, £10K + VAT is roughly what you can expect to spend, and it'll take around 6 weeks. If you've got customers and communications up and running, it'll cost a bit more – we'll figure that out with you.
Great branding makes everything in business so much easier. It is easier (and cheaper) to market, to sell, to raise capital, to inspire and align your teams, to hire and to retain customers. Great branding does an incredible amount of heavy lifting in terms of financial and operational performance.
So yes, budgets are tight, and you have to make hard decisions. But you won't regret a well-managed, cost- and time-efficient investment in your brand.
This is where the fun really starts! At BRICK, we take ambitious, lean businesses to market, with a blended activation service of PR, content and multi-channel comms. You can find out more here.
We can also help you expand your brand with new assets and tools when you need them, and build you a website that prioritises performance without sacrificing the fun stuff.
Take it from our clients...
