Data-driven branding

Where brand strategy meets good design

An effective branding strategy underlies everything an organisation does when it comes to marketing. It’s the framework that guides blog content, social presence and visual design. It’s how you create and promote your organisation’s voice.
 
  • Without a strategy, you risk presenting an inconsistent and disorganised face to your customers and leads.
  • Branding is a process, beginning with the research and planning it takes to craft a brand that reflects the work your organisation does and the people behind it.
  • Once a strategy is in place, the fun begins. Brand design encompasses everything from logos to colour palettes and naming strategies.

Brand strategy

Brand strategy is the first step that informs the entirety of the branding process. We help you to find out who you are, and who your customers think you are. The process involves:
 
  • Using interviews and employee surveys. With these, we learn about how your organisation sees itself, now and in the future.
  • A tone of voice guide and messaging guidelines. Backed by the results of our research, this provides a roadmap for all future content creation.
  • Customer personas. These are representations of your ideal customers, and give content-creators and designers a specific audience to talk to.
Learn about strengthening your marketing strategy

Proposition development – the big idea

Brands aren’t just what you want them to be. They’re a combination of your opinions and those of your customers. We help you craft a personality shaped by these opinions, making your business and your brand clear and consistent. We help you create or refine:
 
  • A mission and purpose for your organisation, which is reason you do what you do.
  • ‘The big idea’, which communicates conviction and dedication to customers, giving writers and designers a concrete raison d’être to work from.
  • A set of values that speak to who you are as a business and that drive decision-making.
  • A bank of keywords that can be used to solidify your brand in all marketing communication.
Learn more about crafting a consistent voice

Brand identity, logo design and evolution

Creating a successful logo isn’t about blindly designing trendy symbols. It’s a combined effort that is informed by messaging guidelines, personas and proposition development. It supports all marketing and sales efforts. Here’s our approach:
 
  • Whatever we come up with has to look that way for a reason. Logo ideation is a research-based process at Articulate.
  • It’s a multi-team project. We’ve got incredibly talented designers and copywriters at our disposal, so each design is justified and backed by clear, compelling explanations.
  • We help you come up with ideas for effective product and service names that communicate the work you’ll be doing.
  • Brand evolution is crucial. We’re experts at iteration, and treat design as an ongoing process.
Learn more about brand identity

Brand guideline development

Getting brand guidelines down on paper ensures that the entire branding process is recorded for the future. The ‘brand book’ will become your go-to resource when you make branding decisions, from briefing designs and content to helping a new marketing agency partner to keep your brand coherent. This would include:
 
  • The brand ‘idea’ and purpose.
  • Your organisation’s mission and vision.
  • The general creative direction for the brand, split into visual and product communication.
  • Tone of voice documents and personas.
  • Relevant keywords.
  • Logos, fonts and colours, all accompanied by short explanations.
  • Images and illustrations, with stories.
  • Layouts, with explanations.
Learn more about brand guidelines

The branding team

We’re a multi-disciplinary team. Our developers are experts in UX and UI strategy, and we’ve got incredible illustration and animation talent at our disposal, alongside our copywriters and sales experts. We bring these skills together for our branding projects, keeping the practical application of each proposal in mind. Branding is not just a pretty face for your business, it’s a fully-integrated and explainable strategy.
 
  • Designers and content creators work hand-in-hand from start to finish, ensuring that any strategy we come up with can be justified according to brand guidelines and user experience.
  • We’re big fans of iteration, constantly refactoring our branding process. It keeps us up-to-date with developments in digital branding, and ensures our work never stagnates.
Meet the Pixels

A data-driven approach

We’re not satisfied with vague decision-making based on guesswork. Our branding process is backed by concrete data gathered from internal and external interviews, a firm knowledge of web development and content creation, and an up-to-date understanding of tried-and-tested branding practice.
 
  • We keep a record of our research, supporting each decision and suggestion with clear evidence and explanation.
  • Our in-house data analysis team gives us the expertise we need to crunch the results of interviews and user research to pick out the most important insights.
  • Our data analysts allow us to take a deep-dive into the ‘before and after’ of the branding process, identifying areas for improvement and iteration, so we can focus on the changes that will make the biggest difference.
Learn more about our data-driven work

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