The ideal brand experience is to connect and feel like your principles line up with the brands you associate with. The way a consumer feels about a brand largely determines the decision to ultimately use that brand’s products or services. And knowing where a brand comes from and its heritage helps consumers know what kind of brand they’re associating themselves with. The importance of authenticity and trustworthiness in the consumer eye has increased monumentally. Establishing the right logo and identity can build up confidence in the consumer and will encourage them to more positively associate themselves with a brand.
Brand Identity
Imagine a brand as a person. People are unique individuals with their own styles, characteristics, and quirks. So are brands. Brands have their own distinctive stories. At Torque, a Chicago branding firm, we look for this uniqueness and meaning in the ideals and brand story. We look for ways to bring life to the brand through a showcase of their individual personality. If a brand is a living, breathing entity, our job is to put the life and feel of the brand at the forefront. Sometimes a brand comes to us having lived a full life, but wants to refresh or reposition their identity, and we seek to understand the ways in which the brand wants to move forward during the process. Other times a brand will come to us fresh, in adolescence. In that case, we work with the brand to help them bring life and establish a genuine and purposeful identity that will last for them. In any situation, we tailor our approach to each distinct brand to explore their diverse heritage and market position. We look at where the brand is, where they’ve been, and where they hope to go. An important aspect of bringing life to a brand is the opportunity to connect with the consumer and foster recognition to create a humanistic and individual personality.
When we feel we understand the desires, needs, and heritage of a brand, we work with them every step of the way to create a suite of tools and materials to use for both design and messaging. We work to create a sleek and professional tone while also maintaining the individuality and personality of the brand. We tailor each of our processes on a case by case basis unique to each particular brand and their own distinct message and identity. We make sure to follow up during each step in the process to ensure that everything from design to messaging is in line with the imperatives for the brand. We ensure they are happy and satisfied with the end product of the endeavor to shine light on the brand life.
Logo Mark
A large part of a brand’s identity is its logo. The importance of the logo is enduring. The logo is meant to represent all of the feelings and ideals of the brand identity within one singular image. It is also the first thing consumers imagine when they think of a brand. When a person thinks of a brand like Target, they immediately imagine the bullseye. This is no coincidence. The logo is much more than simply a design to represent the brand in an image. It also evokes emotion because the entirety of the brand identity and story is behind that image. This is why it’s important to have a logo that accurately represents the brand identity. The same way we look for meaning when designing the brand identity, we look for depth and feeling when designing the logo mark. We want to design something beautiful, but also functional. We seek to create a logo mark that accurately conveys a client's heritage, position in the market, tone, unique personality, and core values, but also one that functions across any and all media they might desire. We do this in a similar way to brand identity in that we work with the client and explore multiple creative directions, each relating to an aspect of the persona. We work with the client during the entire process to ensure we create a unique and beautiful logo mark that they’ll both love and that will last for ages to come with the same relevancy.
The design and reinvigoration of brand identity and logo mark design is a personal way to connect with consumers and allows a brand to tell its own unique story while ingraining the ideals and values it holds.
Strategy & Planning
Our clients operate in constantly moving environments and the always-evolving media world. This can be stressful and confusing to navigate. We help them announce, pre-empt, manage, respond to, and sustain a brand-relevant voice and presence across internal, social, and earned media channels.
First step: Define context and goals
There are two key aspects to our strategy and planning process; the first is to ground the planning in the context of the business to support business goals. This seems like it should be obvious, but consider that campaigns are often worked on by multiple agencies. Most advertising agencies are hired to deliver a beautiful creative campaign and then place it across an array of (usually expensive) media channels. Specialty firms like website development companies or video companies are hired to deliver tactical marketing. These conditions often mean that the larger context of the business and business goals gets lost due to marketing managers on the client side who have not asked for nor expected objective input from their agencies on the ‘why’ of marketing. However, here we care about overall business goals and a client’s message.
We at Torque are marketing-rebels, poking our noses into every aspect of the business to possibly find sometimes hard or unpleasant truths about, not only its marketing, but the business itself. What our clients get from us often includes recommendations on both operations and marketing together to ensure that the marketing program is as impactful as can be. This is important because we believe that marketing is much larger than the marketing department and that the brand experience comes from the company as a whole.
For instance, the distinct brand attributes of product companies are often the information provided by the companies about the general product category and how the category itself can be helpful for customers, in order to help them to make good business decisions. The best place to provide non-promotional content is on social media, and is most effective when connecting with and engaging the company’s best customer/product experts to help passionately bring the brand to life. We believe that the marketing strategy should be concerned with all the moments and places where brand experiences occur across any and all of its activities.
Second step: Focus on the customer
The second key to our planning process is to be relentlessly focused on the customer. This also seems like it should be an obvious idea, but most of the best customer-centered literature and practices were developed within well-funded Fortune 500 companies and not midmarket or small companies. Small and midmarket companies oftentimes are more concerned with promoting themselves to their audience and not so much with customer focus. Torque brings big company thinking to small and midmarket businesses for an agile fee.
Strategic Planning and Integrated Marketing
Define the goals of the company, brand, or product and then set the context to make a plan to deliver on those goals. And then after, make sure all the creative materials and work are integrated for the delivering of those same goals.
Brand Architecture Strategy
Seek to make sure the brand and all the assets it touches are both cohesive and unified in both message and tone. This keeps everything consistent which will make recognizability much easier for the consumer and the market.
Influencer Campaign Planning
Discover who the most influential people in the industry are and then look for ways to connect with them, in order to raise visibility and credibility for your own brand. If they have a Twitter, engage with them there. If they have a YouTube, inquire about possible collaboration.
Social Media Activation Campaign Planning
Find out which social media platforms work best for your company and the industry at large. Research the stakeholders and their work streams to determine the best ways to engage, the right people to follow or engage with, and what people involved in the industry are talking about.
PR and Media Relations Planning
Create a plan and strategy for raising awareness about the brand, company, product, or service through media coverage. The strategy for hosting live events and writing press releases is important.
Internal Communications Planning
Make a plan to help you keep your employees engaged and informed in all your important marketing activities.
Search Strategy
Discover who potential stakeholders could be and identify their workstreams. Then use keywords to create search streams relevant to those interests and, by process of elimination, narrow down the keywords to the most efficient streams to yield the most pertinent results.
Brand Storytelling
Both the terms ‘brand’ and ‘storytelling’ are at the squishy heart of what makes marketing powerful. Brand Storytelling is such an important part of the process, but ironically enough, it often eludes general understanding.
Think about, if you will, for a moment, the cherished and long-held human practice of storytelling. Some stories help us bring ideas to life. Some stories help us recall and pass on memories and traditions to others. They make us feel things and leave impressions on us. Even the best strategist, who seems to be driven solely by logic, can be moved in an emotional way by good storytelling.
Like a good story, a brand leaves people impressions and feelings about a product, a person, or an organization. The difference between a story and a brand is that brands are designed with a very specific purpose in mind. Brand stories are the expression of strategy, the way strategy connects to a person’s emotions.
It’s a commonly-held and well-researched belief that consumers buy for emotional reasons and then justify their purchases with logic. Business buyers, however, tend to become so involved with the features and functions of their products that they forget the important human nature of marketing. They become driven to making clinical decisions on behalf of their company, sometimes even able to completely rule out fears and feelings. We aim to remind them of this.
Not always will you find right brain skills (creative) and left brain skills (strategy) within the same company, but Torque offers the opportunity to work with a whole brain marketing team. We are both thoughtful marketers and passionate storytellers.
Brand storytelling is made up of many components. The combination of a great strategy, gained by researching the market, potential consumers, and statistics and the beautiful and witty creative aspect is what reaches the audience. It’s what creates a feeling and impression on the people it was created for. This mixture of strategy and creative work is what identifies us.
Perhaps, there is a product or service out there with a compelling and unique story behind it, but no one knows. How do you tell people? Well, the obvious first step is to tell the story. The issue becomes how and who to tell it to. With the right research, insight into an audience is gained to tell you important things you need to know about your target market and their interests. After the strategy is created, telling this brand’s unknown story becomes much more effective because you know who to talk to and how.
Our research process helps us gain consumer insights about what they want and what will help them connect. This is the lead in for our level-headed strategists to come up with a plan to reach the most impactful groups. Strategy in place, passionate and purposeful creative design ties everything together. Combining both the right and left brain to have a whole brain experience is something we do with passion.
Research and Analytics
In a world where Big Data is expanding further still, the approach to research and the insights that are drawn from it are as important as designing and executing a study. As marketing planners, the Torque team is a group of researchers by nature. We are constantly asking questions and peeling back the layers to find truths.
We pool together techniques, tactics, and partners from a variety of backgrounds to compile, plan, and execute qualitative and quantitative studies via survey or interview. Increasingly, however, our attention is on social media listening and conducting ecosystem audits which are analyses of the community and the specific people clients should talk to as well as the activities they should be engaging in and talking about based on information gleaned from the digital media channels which allow for discussion.
This is a methodology for assessing keywords, social channels and trending online conversations. We identify stakeholders (potential users) and their work streams (the potential users cares and concerns that relate to the product category) by techniques such as executing advanced Google search streams and social listening. For example, if the product is an app management software, we start with a general idea of who the audience and community is: small business owners. Then, we narrow down the broad scope by using our techniques to possibly find segments of the broad category and categories we hadn’t considered. For the app management example, segments examples are salon owners, automotive repair shop owners, etc., and a new category could be small business associations or start-ups.
The research needed for initial planning and the thoughtful tracking of analytics are both key aspects of managing an agile marketing program. Agile marketing is defined simply as a marketing process that allows for measuring results and response and adjusting the program when something isn’t working to it’s full potential. This is why digital media is a good fit for agile marketing; it allows for quick responses and adjustments. This may seem simple or obvious, but it isn’t always to everyone. Traditional marketing (ex. Flyers, brochures, billboards) pre-ordains a whole campaign and then releases it in one go, which leaves little room to analyze the response and change the program if needed. This is partly because paid media lead times and contract commitments don’t allow room for much flexibility and change, although a great detail of research and strategy goes into these programs at the front end. On the opposite hand, digital media is responsive in real time, day to day, even up to the hour. It’s the only media that’s truly interactive and instant. In digital marketing, brands can actually engage with their audiences. This in mind, it’s best when marketing programs are designed as pilots, or test programs, which allow for learning and adjustment.
Conducting in-depth social listening before launch opens up a whole new perception of what companies will expect to learn and understand before launching a campaign.
One example is in our work for Juvo Products where we knew that family members were important to the product purchasing process, but when we located forums set up just for family caregivers, many posts receiving hundreds and even thousands of detailed comments, we realized the size and engagement levels of the community
In short, the initial research process is designed to be more broadly scoped and behavioral insights are developed during the campaign as an ongoing process by carefully tracking analytics.