21nine Branding

We enable you to grow successful brands that generate real wealth by attracting and retaining ideal customers in established and new markets.

Don’t make the common mistake of undervaluing your most important asset - YOUR BRAND!

In a profit-hungry economy, it’s easy to become short sighted and overlook investing in your brand since it doesn’t fit with short-term profit targets. Brand investments can be indistinguishable from your overhead costs. Cutting back on brand support can immediately boost your company’s profitability but the long-term effect on market share and market approval could be detrimental sometimes taking years to recover.

You can feel secure knowing you are in experienced hands; we have successfully rebranded more than 140 companies over the last 11 years from SMe’s to large Multi National Corporations.

Whether you are creating a new brand, re-launching or reviewing an existing one you can have total peace of mind knowing that you will be using our Brand Alignment Process™.

This system encourages you to probe and question to a very deep level in order to set up parameters that will help create solid brand foundations that are tailor made for you.  

Once these foundations are in place the building begins.

We have been creating brands for nearly 40 years!

Over the 25 years that we have worked as professional designers, we have worked with some of the biggest names on the planet; Motorola, Johnson & Johnson, Hyundai to name a few. we have won numerous awards for our work and are now being recognised for our area of expertise.

What is a Brand?


“A brand is what you think or feel about a product, service, company or person”. 

It’s that simple. 

A brand can be a product (Coke), a service ( Royal Mail) a business (Standard Life) or a person/personality ( David Beckham).

The very word BRAND comes from the German word (Brandwunde) meaning burn. This is exactly what the Brand Engineers TM are trying to do; Burn their brand into your mind.

Brands create trust and evoke an emotional response. The result of this response is that they create a bond between the brand and the consumer. These bonds will overcome incredible opposition from competitors.

Quite simply, ‘People Love Brands”.

How many logos did you notice today? The next time you have a few minutes to spare look around and count how many logos you can see, it does not matter where you are,  look to see how many of these do not even need to have any writing or names. 

Ask most people and they will tell you that a logo is the brand. This is NEVER the case. The logo is indeed part of the brand - some say it is the most important part but it is only a part.

“A brand is what you think or feel about it”. 

Hire the branding company who are at the forefront of the practice, pay them all the money they ask for and let them do their best. This is definitely a great way to start building your brand, but to most of us it is unrealistic. The point here though, is that if you did this, you still cannot guarantee that your brand will be seen or perceived the way you want it. The reason for this is that your brand must interface with the one element that can make it sink or swim – the human being! People’s unique experience with your brand is what it is all about.

You can put parameters in place to guide them and attempt to align them to what you’d like them to think about your brand. But, people are people each living a very different life with very different ‘unique’ circumstances.

It is essential to set up brand guidelines. These guidelines are a series of parameters that will keep your ideas of what you want your brand to be, on track. Think of them as a double fence, the kind you see around horse racing tracks. Implementing your brand will take time and money and maintaining the brand will also take incredible diligence by those trusted to do so. Generally the bigger the company, the less flexibility on offer, it can be very frustrating for designers when they have to go to the ‘logo police’ to get a bit more latitude. In general terms no one person is bigger than the brand – unless that person IS the brand! (Richard Branson).

People love to buy from people they trust. Creating the perfect brand will ensure that you tick all of the right boxes which in turn will guarantee that selling your product will become easier. If you ensure that you keep on ticking these boxes and are tapping into the customers ‘hot buttons’ something remarkable will happen. You will no longer be SELLING TO THEM. The transition will have occurred and they will now be BUYING FROM YOU.

The benefits of having a brand are many fold. Without a brand you have to explain WHY they should buy from you and you will also spend a great deal of time convincing and educating them about the merits of your brand. 
The components of branding

Branding in general use consists of 5 components:

1. Positioning
2. Storytelling
3. Design
4. Price
5. Customer relations


Positioning:
defining in the mind of your customer what your brand stands for and how it competes against the competition. (Mercedes v Skoda)

Storytelling:
Brands allow us to play a part in their story we, as customers are the living, breathing embodiment of their brand. In essence, their brand is what we think and say it is. (Nurofen, Bisto, Nescafe)

Design:
The design elements of the brand are much more that the logo. They are all of the parts that add up to more than the sum. The colour of Fairy Liquid or the specific matt silver finish that appears on the iPhone are integral and carefully designed parts of a very controlled brand strategy programme that has been designed to maximise and harness brand awareness. (Close up of KitKat wrapper)

Price:
Price can be overcome by brand loyalty. Brands that compete against each other by cost cutting very rarely come out on top. When people buy, they buy their brand. (Breitling v Casio)


Customer relations:
Why you buy a certain brand depends mainly on the fact that you trust that brand. It will fulfil its promise. This is key to the brand. When brands fail to do this a specific chain of events go into motion and if the brand producer does not halt the chain quickly enough the loyalty of the customer will be gone for good. (Ratner).