A branding process can take between 4 weeks and 14 months, plus long-term efforts and roll-out. Here’s why the range is so drastic:
When it comes to estimating how many weeks or months the branding or rebranding process can take, the answer depends on a number of factors:
- The size of your company and how demands might change as you grow
- The complexity or technical intricacies of your product or service
- How much research, discovery and testing your organization will need
- How many brand assets your company will require
- The amount of your budget
- Who is doing the work
- Who will need to review and approve the work
- Brand launch and roll-out
The beginning of the branding process is dedicated to discovering factors related to your business, such as the space in the market your business or product occupies, your competitors, your opportunities and challenges, your point of differentiation, and so on.
“Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business.”
–Warren Buffet
Launching or relaunching a brand is an important process.
If you’re like most business owners or company executives, you may only engage in the branding process a few times in your career, so it’s important to work with a branding company that is steeped in the process of building brands and constantly thinking in a forward manner. Reputable branding companies can give you a good grasp of the time it will take to refine your brand. This way, you can plan accordingly and handle all of the other tasks under your charge as your launch date approaches. Trillion’s branding process follows the following 5-step process:
- Research
- Define brand strategy
- Design logo and visual identity
- Develop brand guidelines
- Develop additional branded collateral and plan for roll-out
Here’s how to estimate the amount of time the branding process will take for your company:
If your established brand hasn’t made any updates or adjustments for many years, it’s not unusual to be sensitive to change. Certainly, drastic departures can quickly confuse customers and generate a whole slew of problems that can have a negative impact. That’s why careful consideration should be given to any color adjustments, logos, and communication methods with your customers. Looking at the rebrand as an evolution of the brand is, many times, the best approach. Taking into account the findings in your research process, you can make educated decisions on how and where to position the rebrand.
1. Qualitative Research for Your New Brand
Understanding how your brand fits into the marketplace is a critical first step in creating a unique positioning. The research process can take as little as a week or many weeks depending on how deep a dive is required to arrive at a collective perspective.
Brand research tasks and deliverables can include:
- Define what is unique about your product or service and why your prospects will want it.
- Understand your competitors’ products and services and the market you are a part of. This means reviewing what they are doing and comparing their brand positioning, values and identity to yours while searching for points of differentiation.
- Survey focus groups to evaluate your customers’ current perceptions about your brand.
2. Brand Strategy and the Branding Process
Once the research is completed, you can begin working on the foundation of your brand. By having a better grasp of who your customers are and how best to reach them, you can begin formulating your brand strategy. This part of the branding process can take 1 to 3 weeks or more to develop and refine.
Top brand strategy tasks and deliverables:
- Create mission and vision statements, defining what your company stands for, who you help, why you help and how you do it differently, as well as stating the long-term hopes and aspirations of the company.
- Create user personas and define the demographics of the people who will use your product or service.
- Develop your positioning: how your company is uniquely suited to address a specific customer need and how they will benefit.
- Prepare your brand values and state what your brand stands for.
- Develop the brand language and power words that your brand will use consistently when communicating your messaging.
3. Designing Your Logo and Visual Identity
By now we’re ready to begin turning all of the hard analysis and research into a visual identity that is conceptually interesting, product or service-appropriate, and highly appealing to your customers and prospects. Naturally, your new or revised logo is a key marker in the process of developing your new brand identity, but it’s not the only one.
Important brand visual identity tasks and deliverables:
Along with your new logo, your branding team needs to define and design your brand’s color palette, font family choices, visual look and feel and apply that to your marketing materials such as your website, ads, signage, collateral, social profiles, business cards, and more.
Because every business has diverse needs, the logo design and visual identity part of the branding process can take 4 to 6 weeks or up to many months to complete.
4. Marketing and Advertising Plan and Implementation
Once you have a consensus on your brand’s positioning and how it will look and feel, you need to develop a road map to spread the word in the most cost-effective and opportunistic way. With the help of a marketing plan, you will set goals over the coming weeks and months that will introduce the brand to prospects and turn the brand into a profitable powerhouse. It’s also critical for the plan to be flexible to adjust for marketing efforts that work—as well as those that don’t.
Top marketing and advertising plan tasks:
- Defining target audiences/segments
- Outlining marketing goals for specified time periods
- Identify opportunities and tactics to reach your target demographics
- Define key performance indicators and metrics that define success
Getting the Branding Process Right, the First Time
If you are in the process of developing a brand or feel your brand is overdue for an update, give Trillion a call at 908.219.4703 or reach out to us for our branding expertise. Our exceptional reputation has led us to help some amazing companies. Could yours be next?
