Many new companies tend to focus their marketing efforts on a specific product or service. Meanwhile, they often fail to see the importance of brand building from the get-go. Startup companies commonly believe that their product benefits are obvious and the brand can speak for itself. However, you can’t put that much trust in all potential customers.
You need to develop a visual brand and content strategy to outline your message. As a result, your consumers will understand your company almost as well as you do and believe in your product. Strong brands are flexible brands, where design, development, and content are backed by a strategy that allows the brand to evolve through time.
What is a flexible brand?
A flexible brand means that a brand’s visuals and strategy can be easily adapted to reflect evolving core values, focus, and consumer needs in a continuously changing market. Many companies don’t realize why it’s important to develop a strong and flexible brand, but they should.
Why should you care about brand flexibility?
Firstly, as your company expands its capabilities, you need to add the expansion into content strategy and ensure visuals reflect it. As you expand, you also need to compare new products to your company values. You must check if your goals align and then if needed modify existing ones.
From an outside perspective, new services or products are not always obvious. If you aren’t leveraging these changes you aren’t leveraging new strengths. A flexible brand gives you the ability to easily adapt and tweak your content strategy, brand visuals, and values.
When you have a flexible brand you save time and frustration when you adapt your brand as you expand. The inability to adapt your brand message and content should not hinder your company’s growth. That’s because, with flexible brands, you don’t need to start from scratch. You have a base to start from making expansion and growth much faster. So, now you understand why your company needs a flexible brand, but how do you create one?
How do you develop a Flexible Brand to grow your company?
First of all, you need to identify the main goals of your product or service. What do you want to achieve for your consumers? Narrow down your goals and then decide how you want to sound and look as a brand. Define key messages and then your content strategy will come together.
Secondly, refine your messages and position them accordingly in the market. To create an evolving strategy you must continuously analyze your message and check if the message reflects your consumers’ needs through time.
Alongside content strategy are design and development. Content producers, designers, and web developers must keep strategy in mind. Flexible visual brands begin with design systems that reflect the brand’s strategy.
A design system is a collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards, that can be assembled together to build any number of applications. This makes visually reflecting your company’s capabilities, as you expand much easier and faster.
To maintain a consistent and flexible brand you must focus on the communication between designers, developers, and content producers for your company. All teams need to keep strategy in mind to remain a consistent brand and communicate the same message.
You must ensure brand and message consistency with meetings with all different teams. Collaborative meetings allow each team to look at a branding strategy through multiple skill lenses.
Today the importance of flexible communication and branding has skyrocketed. Leverage your company’s growth with continuous assessment of your brand visuals and values with a flexible brand. Brand flexibility is key to having your company stand out in an evolving and crowded marketplace.
About the author
This article was written by Noriko Harada. She is a managing partner at digital marketing agency,
45/RPM located in Washington DC and Mexico City. With several years of strategic marketing experience, she leads their team in brand building through developing digital strategies that drive results for their B2B and B2C clients.
