Product Branding.

We work with large and small clients to develop product branding solutions that are built on solid strategic foundations.

Design alone will not suffice for products; you need a solid understanding of your market, their expectations and what speaks to them. If you start with just the creative, you could end up with something that looks great but sells nothing.

Projects should be strategically led, but you also need a creative team capable of exploring many product branding ideas. And they need to do this without burning your entire budget.

When we work on product branding, our creative team covers a lot of creative ground quickly by exploring creative direction on paper, not on the Macs.

This affords you more ideas for your money and makes branding and packaging decisions easier.

Some clients come to us with an idea, others with an established product that needs rebranding.

Wherever you are on your product journey, the importance of your brand name is equal to the creative work.

If your product brand name isn’t quite right, no amount of creative wizardry is going to fix it, so this, too, is something that we can help with.

This may be checking trademark opportunities for a current name or running workshops to help you generate one.

A robust and memorable product brand name will help you with recall and make it easier to build and reap the benefits of brand equity.

1. Your brand is everything. If you’ve invested time and effort in developing your product, don’t sell it short at the last stage by scrimping on your naming and product branding.
2. Getting your product branding right from day one saves you money in the long run. As your product gains market traction and builds equity, the last thing you want to do is completely change it 12 months down the line. Product branding may be challenged by retailers, especially if you are a food brand looking to get on the supermarket shelves, but the ability to prove your product brand is solid from day one may avoid costly major branding decisions in the future.
3. You and your potential market need to engage and love your brand. People do buy products with bad branding, but you’ll find that if the love isn’t there, it can be hard to build equity and advocacy.
4. You’ll have confidence in your product’s branding. Loving something and believing in it are two different things – good product branding means you’ll know it’s right and will be confident it can succeed.
5. You’ll be giving your product either a new lease of life (rebrand) or the best start in life. Great product branding gives you something solid, meaningful and considered to hang all your other marketing materials off – from social to your website.

There are 100s of other reasons to invest both time and money into your product branding.

If you’d like to talk about your branding your product, give us a call on 01295 266644. We’re based in Oxfordshire and work with local, national and international brands.

We don’t generally have a fixed process in which every client gets force-fed.

All products are different, live in different sectors, and have different stories to tell, but our process involves several important stages.

Research

Planning to fail? We doubt it, so research is crucial in product branding projects. This can be desk-based, done via a specialist research partner or even more in-depth with focus groups and interviews.

Budget is most often the thing that determines the best route for your product, but without even the briefest amount of research, we’re designing blind and creative decisions can end up being based on personal preference rather than research-based information.

Strategy

The research has given us insight into your market, where they hang out, what they say and what they ‘like’. Strategically led product branding projects use this stage to bring all this information together and make sense of it all.

The carves out the answers to the who, what, and why types of questions, helps to form the brief for the creative stages, and maps out the desired outcomes.

Design

Yes. The fun bit. Often, clients are very eager to get to this stage, but you can only have pudding once you’ve eaten your greens.

With the research and strategy in place, the creative stages of the project have direction, a sounding board on which to base decisions, and something to sense-check all creativity.

Our approach to creative work generally includes pads, pencils and a whole load of sketching out ideas. Unlike some agencies that decide internally what’s best and show you three options to ‘pick a winner’, we share everything but will guide you on our work and potential direction.

Whether working on a single product or branding a product line, our approach keeps the creative all about the idea and less about the final design until we’re ready for that.

Feedback

This can be you, your team, friends, or family, or we can go back to the focus groups if we used them at the start.

Feedback helps us to refine and develop the initial creative work into a more finalised product brand design.

This is where it starts to get real.

This is where we need to achieve commitment from everyone involved – constructive and objective feedback helps us to ensure we are moving in the right direction to commit to the creative.

We’ve worked with a diverse range of clients over the years – from fresh-faced startups to established brands.

Every project we work on is different, and we pride ourselves on not having a ‘house style’. We interpret the brief and find the best strategically-led creative solution.

There are infinite ways to brand and package a product, so our focus is on the right way for you, your product and your market.