Brand Strategy, or “how to highlight the efforts you make to run your business”

What do we mean when we talk about a service called “brand strategy”? Is it worth paying for? In what occasions and circumstances?

If you have more doubts than certainties about how to improve your business’s image by working alongside a branding agency, perhaps this article can clear things up.

Jeff Bezos, the entrepreneur behind the American company Amazon, once said: “your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room”. What does that mean? It means that your brand is, ultimately, the set of valuations that consumers make about your business — that is, what they think and say about your company when making purchasing decisions, recommending — or dismissing — your business.

Moreover, working on your business from a “brand perspective” also means preparing it to interact and be perceived in a specific way in the public sphere, where your products, services, messages, and actions come into contact not only with consumers but also with other players — such as suppliers, potential partners, and even your own employees.

Clearly, the brand is not your logo — it is much more than that.

It is important, then, to intentionally shape the image your brand aims to create in people’s minds. This exercise is backed by a very rational and methodical study that will ultimately define how your business should look, behave, and act — not only to be considered and chosen by your clients, but also to stand out from the competition. This is where what we call “Brand Strategy” comes into play.

It’s that simple: if your startup, institution, or company has an in-house Marketing and Communication department dedicated to establishing and guiding your brand strategy, then you presumably don’t need to hire a brand strategy service — they’re already handling it. In that case, Nómade can connect with them and strengthen their work or increase your team’s capacity with concrete design and brand actions.

If that’s not your situation, and no one in your business is directing brand strategy, then it would be the perfect time to entrust an agency — like us — to study your business reality, seeking to provide you with a diagnosis that informs you about the current state of your brand, and also, actionable guidelines and best practices so that even you yourself can lead your business with a new dimension: Branding.

At Nómade, we advise you when you need to have solid definitions in place before working on your brand’s visual identity and/or developing communication pieces or other specific activities.

If we determine that having a defined brand strategy — “Brand Strategy” — would genuinely help improve the communicational performance — current or future — of your business, our strategists will carry out a preliminary study to analyze your business from the communicational dimension, characterizing consumers and studying your competitors, in order to identify possible lines of action that strengthen the public presentation of your products and services.

We adapt our Brand Strategy service to your specific interests, being able to integrate aspects such as the following:

We characterize consumers and analyze competitors, and in some cases, we also study design, communication, and/or consumption trends specific to the industry in which your business operates.

You will learn about your own business in relation to the market context in which it operates, from the perspective of communication and brand image projection — that is, from its “brand dimension”.

Mapping competitors and identifying where to position your brand in the market landscape is part of the Brand Strategy work we undertake to support your business’s positioning.

The preliminary study is a diagnostic report that highlights opportunities to express your brand with strategic intent, aimed at establishing conditions designed to attract potential consumers, build loyalty among current ones, and differentiate your business from the methods and resources competitors use — seeking to accentuate the differentiation of your product or service in the market.

Our strategy reports communicate emerging insights, establishing ideas, guidelines, and best practices inspired by the detection of opportunities.

We have an arsenal of tools to bridge the gap between discoveries and the expression with which your brand should present itself and behave publicly. We define aspects such as brand pillars, voice and tone, brand manifesto, suggested brand phrases and promises, and even a positioning statement.

All these definitions help your brand express a singular character in how it communicates and conveys the value you deliver through your products or services. For you, this will provide the confidence of leading the project and making communication decisions backed by rational arguments.

In cases where it proves necessary — especially when developing new brands — we also develop the brand name — “Brand Name” — understood as the initial definition that will enable building the project’s identity, bridging the gap between strategy and materialization.

The creative trigger and the brand pillars are some of the elements we use to establish a bridge between the reading of the market and the expression of your business’s positioning.

At Nómade, the presentation of the study and brand strategy is as key as it is defining in the life of your project. That’s why, our brand strategists will guide you by presenting findings and decisions in a synchronous meeting, where you can interact and reflect alongside them.

At the same time, for this same moment, our art directors work alongside them to present you with possible graphic directions in which such a strategy could materialize, thus opening the path to the next stage: your brand’s identity — an identity deeply inspired by strategy, which will bring to the world a look as unique as it is aligned with your business interests.

Interested in working together? We leave you this contact to connect with our commercial team (: