Building a New Brand

Setting the Foundation

With my back­ground in Graph­ic Design, I have designed visu­al iden­ti­ties for exist­ing brands, but I’ve nev­er had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to devel­op the frame­work for a new brand from the ground up. At SCAD, I was able to work with five oth­er stu­dents from dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines in a spon­sored col­lab­o­ra­tive design class to build a new brand for a nation­al client.

The new brand we helped cre­ate will launch in ear­ly 2012. Three oth­er class­es at SCAD have been build­ing off our research and brand foun­da­tion — an Indus­tri­al Design class cre­at­ed pro­to­types for the phys­i­cal prod­ucts that are part of the brand, a Ser­vice Design class worked on training/sales sup­port and inter­ac­tion design, and a Graphic/Interior Design class final­ized the store design and brand stan­dards man­u­al. I can’t give away too much about the nature of the brand itself until after the launch, but I can dis­cuss more about our process.

Our task was to devel­op ratio­nal and emo­tion­al brand attrib­ut­es, cre­ate a brand val­ue propo­si­tion and design the brand iden­ti­ty frame­work strat­e­gy. This frame­work includ­ed the brand name, logo, short and long-term design strat­e­gy of the new prod­uct line, as well as the retail store expe­ri­ence and mar­ket­ing tech­niques. The scope of the project was daunt­ing at first, con­sid­er­ing we had about 8 weeks to con­duct research, pin­point design oppor­tu­ni­ties and deliv­er our final pre­sen­ta­tion to the client.

Dur­ing our ini­tial meet­ing with our client, the VP of Mar­ket­ing for the com­pa­ny, we lead a brain­storm­ing ses­sion to decide on three ratio­nal and three emo­tion­al brand attrib­ut­es. After the meet­ing, my class­mates and I devel­oped def­i­n­i­tions for these attrib­ut­es to give them more spe­cif­ic mean­ing for the brand.

Brand Design Analytics

We looked at the com­pe­ti­tion, per­formed pas­sive on-site obser­va­tions, and cre­at­ed a SWOT analy­sis. We then designed and exe­cut­ed a con­tex­tu­al research study, inter­view­ing tar­get cus­tomers as well as con­duct­ing prod­uct name and col­or mar­ket test­ing. We used the seman­tic dif­fer­en­tial research method cre­at­ed by Charles Osgood in order to match par­tic­i­pants’ atti­tudes towards poten­tial names and col­ors on a scale against the brand attrib­ut­es.

Presentation

Our ethno­graph­ic research showed us oppor­tu­ni­ties for the new brand to cre­ate val­ue for its cus­tomers through design. We first pre­sent­ed these find­ings and the accom­pa­ny­ing design strat­e­gy to our client in late May 2011. The meet­ing includ­ed the VP of Mar­ket­ing as well as brand man­agers, a sales direc­tor and prod­uct man­age­ment direc­tor. Based on the feed­back we received at this meet­ing, we refined the design strat­e­gy and pre­sent­ed to a larg­er audi­ence two weeks lat­er. Our final pre­sen­ta­tion was pitched live to our client con­tact and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly broad­cast to exec­u­tives and upper man­age­ment in three loca­tions.