Brand Strategy

To stand out from your competition and attract and retain customers, you need a robust brand strategy.

Your brand is much more than your logo and visual identity: it’s the overall impression your customers have of your business.

As experienced brand strategy consultants, we can set out your business’ plan to create a strong, positive, lasting impression in its customers’ minds. Executed well, a brand strategy generates long-term value and a sustained competitive advantage.

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You’ll get a comprehensive brand strategy, including clear guideline documents and practical tools, which will empower you to manage your brand consistently and run your marketing effectively.

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As specialist brand strategy consultants, we can help you to:

  • distinguish your business from its competition
  • encourage your customers to connect with your business
  • articulate your business clearly and impactfully
  • feel more confident managing your marketing
  • make effective marketing decisions more quickly, even as a non-marketer
  • delegate marketing activity to internal staff and external suppliers efficiently
  • build brand equity over time by maintaining a consistent, distinctive brand more easily
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“We really enjoyed working with LOCK. They quickly understood our vision for a premium, quality brand for our business and delivered exactly what we wanted. They were also clearly passionate about our business and cared about our success, which made it a pleasure to work with them...

They were really adaptable and flexible, and accommodated our needs as our project evolved, including delivering brand training for all our new employees which they pitched at just the right level.”

Stephen Berry, Director, Charles & Ivy

Our Brand Strategy process

We adapt our process to your business’ specific needs, working around any existing brand elements that you already have and integrating them into a complete brand strategy. Generally, projects run as follows:

Discovery

Every project begins with a discovery stage in which we work closely with you to develop a thorough, well-rounded understanding of your business, its customers and its competitors. This stage lays the necessary groundwork for the next stages of the project.

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Brand platform, including key messages

We use our discovery stage insights to develop your business’ brand platform. It articulates the core of your brand strategy simply and clearly, summarising why your business exists, where it’s going, what it cares about and how it behaves.

It also encapsulates this complex thinking into accessible shortcuts for you and your staff, supporting you to zoom out of detail when needed and adopt an elevated, customer-focused perspective on your business and its brand.

The final part of your business’ brand platform consists of its key messages. These provide a clear framework for all your future marketing communications. They support you, your staff and your marketing suppliers to articulate your business to customers succinctly, consistently and impactfully – whether you’re meeting them in person, writing a blog, presenting a webinar or posting on social media.

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Verbal and visual identity

We then develop the two remaining areas of your brand strategy: your verbal and visual identities. As expert copywriters, we craft your verbal identity to help you express your brand in words, producing a tone of voice and a style guide that will shape your business’ written and spoken communications.

Next we support you to create your visual identity, or develop your existing one. As expert marketing project managers, we brief, direct and manage an external graphic designer or creative agency on your behalf, managing design development smoothly while ensuring your input shapes the final outcome.

Depending on your needs and preferences, we can either recruit a creative supplier from our trusted network that aligns with your budget, work with an internal staff member or manage your preferred designer.

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Handover

To ensure you and your team are fully confident with your brand strategy and your new marketing tools, we conduct a comprehensive handover with you. We tailor this handover to your requirements, whether it’s a meeting with you and your senior team, a presentation to your marketing team or a brand training session for all your customer-facing staff.

Implementation

After investing in a brand strategy, it’s crucial that you implement it properly across your business’ marketing channels and customer touchpoints so you can maximise the value it can add to your business.

We can direct and manage your brand strategy rollout to ensure it’s executed accurately, consistently and to the highest standard. Find out more about our Strategic Marketing Implementation service.

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How much does it cost?

£3,500

Brand strategies start from £3,500. We price on a case-by-case basis because the outputs and time required vary.

Find out more about how we charge in our honest brand strategy consultancy pricing guide.