A brand your customers can love and engage with – not just tolerate or transact with – is one of the most powerful advantages any business can have. And it matters now more than ever.
We live in an audience-centric era. If your audience thinks you don’t “get them,” they’ll find somebody who does. Earning attention, let alone affection, in a noisy world starts with a strong, recognizable, authentic brand.
Building a brand identity has always required strategic clarity. But today, great branding requires an unwavering focus on fostering authentic connections – making humans your north star as you navigate changing touchpoints, platforms, and trends.
BFM Brand Lab is built to deliver. Our branding practice brings together a cross-disciplinary team of experts in strategy, design, and copywriting, with the agility, acuity, and human focus to give you a strong start to building a great brand.
We’d love to hear from you.
Connection Is Critical
Whoever your audience is, countless brands are vying for their attention. If that audience doesn’t want to hear from you, they have an unprecedented ability to tune you out.
That’s why the brands that succeed in digital are the ones that attract customers. They don’t just offer products or services – they offer emotional engagement and meaningful experiences. These brands know they can’t be everything to everyone. They seek to find and reach a unique tribe and build a relationship. They share the values of their tribe and they’re unafraid to show it.
For brands that take on the hard task of really getting to know and delight their audience, the rewards can be immense. They take transactions and grow them into relationships, building lasting connections as they do.
Our Brand Strategy Framework
The basics of effective brand development are timeless, but we believe the digital age demands we do a few things differently.
Today, an unwavering focus on your audience is more important than it’s ever been – as is agility and speed to market (your customers want to connect now, not two years from now). We approach branding in the digital age with four core principles, which we call the four Cs:
- Be true to your Core. It doesn’t matter how clever or slick the packaging is – if a brand is not true to your business, customers will see right through it.
- Connect with your Customers. When your customers are empowered, you need a brand they actively want to interact with.
- Distinguish yourself from your Competition. It’s critical to identify competitive, visual, and emotional whitespace where your brand can win.
- Relate to the wider social Context. Brands that truly understand social trends don’t just avoid #fails – they’re bold and engaging and stand for something.
Working with BFM Brand Lab
What’s it like working with us? It depends partly on your needs. You might be looking to refresh a long-established brand, or coming to the BFM Brand Lab with a big idea and a blank slate (we love it when that happens).
Our brand services are delivered by a team lean enough to maximize agility and sharp enough to ensure quality of work. Your team will tackle brand strategy, visual and verbal identity collaboratively – we have specialties but no silos. We get excited about collaborating with stakeholders and digging deeply into a business, but we’re not wedded to an information-gathering process that takes months. We can move with the lightning agility of start-ups or the more deliberative pace of an established brand.
The aim of brand strategy is to draw out critical insights from the four Cs – Core, Customers, Competition, and Context. These four factors define the territory of opportunity for brand concepts and let us define the overall feel of your brand together.
Once we have a concept that can represent you, resonate with your audience, and help you stand out from your competition, we’ve set the stage for the brand story – the framework that defines your brand’s mission, vision, positioning, personality, and values. Your story, in turn, gives further direction and definition to the final phase of our approach: an eye-catching visual identity your business can take to market.
