What's the difference between a brand strategist and a brand designer?
Branding, logos, visual identity, positioning, graphic design, strategy…it can all sound the same, right?
Sometimes all you want is a new logo for your business but who do you turn to? If you ask a graphic designer, they might say they can do a logo but ask for your brand strategy first. Huh? Brand strategy? What does that even mean and why can’t the graphic designer do it? In a nutshell, graphic designers will design based on a brief and the brief comes from your strategy.
What is a brand strategy?
First things first, your brand is not your product, your logo, your website, or your name.
A branding strategy is your plan to achieve a series of long-term goals that ultimately result in your brand being known and chosen by your ideal customer. A successful brand strategy will include details on your vision for your business, your mission, your promises to your customers, your values and how you are going to communicate these. Your brand strategy is not your logo, colours, fonts or even your website. These are creative elements of the strategy but they are not the strategy.
So, your designer will ask you about your strategy in order to craft a visual identity to fit perfectly into the strategy but most graphic designers don’t do strategy.
Can’t my graphic designer help with the brand strategy?
Some designers do strategy work too, but you should be aware that they will charge more for this service than the creative work of designing your visual identity. I like to refer my clients to a strategist that looks at the entire business when working on brand strategy, digging deep into your story, why you are doing what you do, why you want to work with certain clients, what products and services you offer or are planning to offer, pricing, messaging and more. Out of this work comes a brand brief for me, the designer, based on the strategy you come up with together. The brand brief covers the following:
brand name
brand tagline
backstory of the business
what you are like (here’s where we get to know you a little better. We want to know you are passionate about, your personality, the culture of your organisation)
what you believe in
your core values
your customers
the offering
your point of difference
domain name
keywords and phrases
your purpose (why do you get up every day and do this work? mission - what do you want be known for and vision - where do you see your business in 5, 10, 15 years)
design prompts
colour preferences/ideas
image inspiration, if any
your closest competitors (Knowing your competitors will help you create a brand strategy that is grounded in the real world.)
You can see that there’s a lot in there and now you can understand why designers are not always experts in helping you define all of the above. However, armed with this brief, your branding designer will be able to craft a visual identity that translates all of the above into a visual picture of sorts that represents your business and which will play an important role in your overall brand strategy.
So why does my designer say they will do a ‘strategy session’ with me?
Ensure you understand what’s included in the branding work your designer is going to undertake for you. I do a ‘strategy session’ with my branding clients before I put pencil to paper to doodle logo ideas, but the purpose of that strategy session is to discuss the information in all the items in the bullet-point list above.
Sometimes it quickly becomes clear that the client hasn’t worked through all of this yet, in which case I refer them to a strategist (often Finola Howard) and then they come back to me with total clarity on what their business is about, what their objectives are and the strategy to get there. The visual identity I design then fits nicely into that bigger picture.
If you feel you need the strategy piece, do get in touch and I can make introductions. If you have your strategy and are ready to transform that into a beautiful visual identity, please get in touch so we can discuss how I can help.
