What are Branding & Design?

Branding is the architecture of your business identity. It’s the visual, auditory, and ideological experience that captures your strategic messaging and delivers it to the public.

A proper branding and design strategy creates a cohesive identity around your products, solutions, or services. It’s how you create and refine the personality of your business and present it in a way that’s worthy of press coverage, industry awards, product sales, and investor dollars.

What are Branding and Design?

Branding and design create a business persona that your customers and investors can recognize and trust. Branding defines your business story and sets the parameters for how you’ll position your company in the public domain and design breathes life into that story with compelling visuals and aesthetic elements . 

Together, they lay the groundwork for all marketing and communications initiatives — from PR campaigns, to sales collateral, to customer interactions, and beyond.

Why Do Companies Need Branding and Design?

Before your company can embark on any other marketing initiative, strong branding is essential. A cohesive brand identity is the root of success for subsequent marketing campaigns, sales materials, press engagements, and strategic communications programs. Poor branding and design, on the other hand, can do lasting damage to your corporate reputation. 

Consider your company website. It’s the central fixture for your owned content and the desired destination for all web traffic relating to your brand. It is also the core showcase of your brand. It takes a user only 50 milliseconds — that’s 0.05 seconds — to make their initial judgment of a website’s design. And that first impression is hard to erase. 

When new customers visit your website, receive your product in the mail, open your company newsletter, or watch your ads, branding is what they see. When potential employees research your company or investors decide whether to work with you, it’s your branding that will influence that critical first impression.

What Do Branding and Design Services Include?

1. A brand analysis: Before any design project or branding initiative can take place, a thorough brand analysis is needed. This step helps to solidify your brand identity and how you want to be represented in the media (if you want to learn how we approach this process at Trust Relations, you can read about it on our PR services page). 
2. Strategic messaging: A comprehensive branding program will deliver a carefully crafted brand guide to inform how your business references itself in public-facing marketing materials, interviews, and internal communications. Strategic messaging extrapolates upon your core brand values. 
3. Website design: Your website should showcase the best of your brand. A skilled creative team—with graphic designers, UX specialists and SEO experts on board—can bring your vision to life online. Your branding team should manage the backend development, user experience, and design elements of your website to ensure customers and stakeholders have the best experience possible. 
4. Website copy: Breathtaking visuals can’t stand on their own . Your agency team should also adapt your company’s strategic messaging guidelines to  your website (and other digital platforms where appropriate). A thorough branding project should ultimately provide you with original web copy that’s designed to boost your SEO strategy, communicate your key messaging and, ultimately, convert interest into intent.
5. Graphic and logo design: A branding and design team typically handles the conceptualization and creation of your logo. Then, they can adapt that logo and additional design elements to create other  visually appealing graphics for your marketing assets. From infographics and company one-pagers to branded presentations and other corporate communications, your brand aesthetic should be consistent.

How Do Branding and Design Boost Brand Trust?

Branding is the lynchpin for every physical and digital manifestation of your brand. It’s the name atop your headquarters. It’s the logo you stand behind, the colors on your website, the value propositions in your sales deck, and the tone of voice in your email newsletters. 

Consistency across these channels is the foundational gateway to brand trust. And trust is absolutely critical to earning a place in customers’ budgets and investors’ portfolios. 

At Trust Relations, we focus on conveying that consistency and elevating your brand’s genuine value. Before you can tell your authentic brand story to the world, you must know that story intimately and embody it every day. Branding helps you to define, understand, and deliver that story with vibrant sincerity to  your customers, investors, competitors, and key stakeholders.

If you’re ready to bring life to brand with high-impact strategic messaging and design, you can work with us here.