Branding

What is a brand? The answer is really quite simple. Brand isn’t a name or a logo; it is what your customer thinks and feels about your company or product. Your brand is your reputation. Therefore when people see your name or see your logo, they make a natural association of what they think or feel – it’s very holistic. To read more on what’s a brand see: What is a Brand?

Brand = Reputation

Anyone can copy your product, mirror your distribution network and match your price. What they can’t copy is your reputation. Ideas are what inspire and direct your reputation. While companies without ideas can try to copy your brand by adopting a name, logo or product claim like yours, they can’t take your reputation.

Things like names and logos are important. They are ingredients to creating and building your reputation, and of course core to your identity. Built upon a foundation of a sound brand strategy and executed through consistent high quality design and copy, your brand reputation will fuel profitable growth.

Merriam Associates will help you define and nurture a clear, durable, compelling and profitable reputation. Our branding services include:

Brand Strategy
We help you lay the foundation for a great brand by defining and articulating your brand strategy. Great brands have a clear and specific customer-focused reason for being.

Brand strategy is articulated in brand attributes, personality, positioning, messaging and the relationships within the corporate brand portfolio (often called brand architecture). Effective strategies center on the needs and wants of the customer, going beyond product features and benefits to address why the brand is unique, and how it fits in the life of the customer or consumer. Our work usually begins with a research phase to develop a thorough understanding of your market, competitors, and customer wants, needs and motivations.

We then develop a fully articulated brand strategy including:

Naming
Our naming experience includes work for some of the world’s largest multi-national corporations. We have taken that long, complex, and expensive process and simplified it for small and fast-growth companies that do not have big budgets and extensive resources. We invite you to review our advice and methodology:

Choosing a Name
Styles and Types of Company and Product Names
History of Great Brand Names: How Best Known Brands Were Named
Naming in Our Web 2.0 World
Naming Your Company or Product — Biggest Mistakes
Six Factors For A Memorable and Motivating Brand
Renaming Proxios: CEO Talks About the Process

Also we have several research and cases studies from some of our clients, here are some samples:

Selected Naming Projects
Rebranding Proxios
AIG Name Change to AIU
Macy’s Blunders with Marshall Fields Brand Name Change

Our innovative approach focuses on finding unique names that work strategically. We help you define your needs, set strategic criteria, evaluate your options, and secure URLs.

Logo Design
Your logo is what begins to bring your brand to life and convey its personality. We will help suggest logo styles that will best fit your strategy,and will provide visually stimulating examples of how different approaches can work for your company, product or service. We design with strategy in mind:

Logo Styles and Logo Types
Small B2B CompanyRedesigns and Refreshes Its Brand
HP’s Swoosh-O-Matic

Each logo is a visual expression of your promise. We never use generic design templates or visual clichés like swooshes.

Visual Systems and their Application
The creation of a systematic approach to your visuals, whether for your web site, brochures, business cards, even videos, will dramatically strengthen the power of your brand while cutting your production costs. Creating a tool kit of graphics, typography, color palette, and imagery will turbo-charge the visual impact of your communications. Instead of each piece standing alone, they will work together, build on each other, and create a unified and consistent brand across media, products, audiences, cultures, functions, and parts of the your organization. To see some advice and examples on these concepts:

Visual Systems Strengthen Brands
Beyond the Logo

We can help you create a system and toolkit that will help you manage the production of communications and save you the cost of reinventing every time you want to make a new brochures, trade show booth, or sell sheet. We can also individual design marketing and sales applications and materials.

Brand Architecture
Brand architecture is the relationship of brands within a portfolio to each other and the parent company. Merriam Associates has worked on brand architecture projects for Fortune 500 companies such as Exxon-Mobil, Johnson and Johnson and Chevron. Many small companies neglect the efficiencies and brand strengthening power that effective management of their brands can earn them. For more information on brand architecture, see these articles:

What is Brand Architecture
Does Your Brand Architecture Support Your Business
Brand Architecture Strategic Considerations
Approaches to Brand Architecture

Call us 347-410-7005 or email us at info@merriamassociates.com