Brand Development

Marketing has more than its fair share of acronyms and buzz words which, in many cases, have taken on a life of their own. Branding is one of these: much talked about but little understood.

What is branding?

There are many valid definitions of branding, but for the purposes of this site let’s go with: a brand is the result of the expectations created in audiences’ minds through experience.

The key points in this definition are that:

• for audiences, read customers, potential customers, investors, press, employees - in other words everyone who comes into contact with your company. brands exist only in the minds of the audience.
• brands are created by an individual’s experiences of a company – through its products, services and communications.
• There are hundreds of ‘moments of truth’ everyday, when people come into contact with your company either directly or indirectly: each one is an opportunity to delight or disappoint.

Brands are therefore proved and deduced through a company’s actions, not just declared in an advertising campaign.

Brands exist by default

Brands exist by default, but strong brands are built.

A company can’t choose not to have a brand; you can’t stop people forming an opinion of your company based on their experiences.
So the challenge is to set & control the brand in such a way that the perceptions formed as a result of a company’s actions differentiate it from its competitors.

There are many benefits of having a strong brand: a strong brand provides a valuable differentiator over competitors, it can enable premium pricing and the visual/verbal symbols act as fast, efficient communicators.

In our increasingly competitive world, people buy brands, not products.

Whether you are looking to establish a new company (and therefore brand) or are looking to change your brand to support changing business needs, Exoro can help you with the process from initial planning to full scale implementation.

Corporate identity

Corporate identity is an essential element of effective branding. A strong company, product, or service identity acts as a useful point of recognition for customers and becomes shorthand for a company's brand values.

There is, therefore, a great deal more to corporate identity than a well designed logo.
An effective corporate identity system defines and pulls together all of the constituent parts (e.g. logo, typeface, colours, tone of voice, etc.) into a cohesive set of deliverables from letterheads and business cards to product design and website.

Exoro has experience of creating new company and product identities as well as evolving and improving existing identity systems. We will devise the processes to ensure consistent implementation across your whole organisation and can produce useful support tools, such as easy to use guidelines and templates for Microsoft Word and PowerPoint applications.

Communications audit and planning

All too often we can't see the wood for the trees and this is especially true for a company's communications.

At the outset, key messages are clear and feature prominently in marketing materials, but over time new presentations, direct mail pieces, web pages etc. are produced that, if reviewed in the cold light of day, will be off-message and in many cases not designed in a way sympathetic with the company's corporate identity.

Exoro can undertake an objective review of your communications materials and assess how well they match company messages and corporate identity, and recommend how to get things back on track.

At the heart of any effective marketing campaign should be a strong plan - a plan built on achievable objectives detailing all the specific activities to be undertaken. Many small to medium sized enterprises do not have the skills in-house to write objective-based plans, but Exoro can undertake this important aspect of marketing.

Intranet and Internet

There is a great deal more to achieving a successful website, than simply publishing some cleverly designed HTML or Flash pages. Your website is your business' window to the world, and behind the well presented window should be a well ordered organisation.

Statistics show that today's web visitors expect much from a website, and if they cannot find what they are looking for quickly they will look elsewhere.

User experience is everything

The design of a website needs to cover structure, look and feel, interface to other IT systems, online shopping, hosting etc.

And once you've got your website, you're nearly there, but you've not arrived.
How are people going to know about your site?

The website needs to be integrated with your marketing campaigns, and you need to drive visitors to your site. An important part of this is to ensure you have effective registration with the various search engines, this in itself can be a time consuming and complex process.

For an introduction to search engine registration download our search engine overview document.

Market Research

Market research is a valuable marketing tool. Understanding your company's market, getting feedback from customers and prospects can help optimise your marketing, measure its effectiveness and prevent you from wasting time and money.

Whether it is to undertake pre- and post-campaign awareness measurement, testing message platforms or product ideas with focus groups, or getting an understanding of market dynamics, Exoro will manage your project, calling upon industry leading experts to provide the highest quality market research.

Message and Proposition Development

This is an often overlooked aspect of marketing and communications planning. It can be time consuming, and is therefore seen as getting in the way and delaying the production of marketing materials. So, in the interests of expediency, companies head straight for the printer so they can get their company brochure into the hands of their customers and prospects as soon as possible.

And then after a while it is realised that the company's core messages are hidden among a wall of verbiage, in other words customers don't understand what it is you're trying to say or what you are trying to sell, and you end up having to redo the work.

Message development is a vital building block for all communications activities.Spending the time up front to define a company's core messages will in the long run save you time, money and aid effective communication with your customers.

Marketing and Business Plan Development

Getting the right commercial and strategic perspective is crictical to business success. Exoro's team have a wealth of experience in writting and presenting marketing and business plans that launched new services, products and business. Working closely with clients, we can help you secure valuable funding and support where and when you most need it.