Below we share the questions we most often encounter about brand consulting and brand naming, along with our answers.
What Stages Are Needed to Create a Brand?
First, we need to understand this principle: brands exist in minds. For that, you need a brand strategy that can live in the mind. This strategy is built by carrying out a strategic brand analysis — analyzing the consumer, the competition, the market, and the brand’s current situation, and interpreting the data. Brand ideas set without a comprehensive, detailed analysis have, believe me, already been thought of by many of your competitors before you; either they are hard to implement or they are far from the realities on the ground. So the first stage is a detailed research and analysis process. Then, by examining this data, the brand strategy is created. Bringing the strategy to life is applied in two stages: the first is adapting the brand to the defined strategy, and the second is turning that strategy into a marketing plan. This is generally carried out by companies’ marketing departments. Brand-consulting firms can also provide brand-management consulting during the implementation of the marketing plan.
How Is Brand Strategy Brought to Life?
The brand strategy has been set, the brand applications made, and a marketing plan prepared and put into action. A project like this is completed in roughly 6 to 12 months, but the brand needs to keep applying the defined strategy in its ongoing marketing communication. Remember: if you keep hitting the same spot, you leave a mark. So you must patiently apply the same brand strategy. In a branding project, research and consulting firms can sometimes be intertwined structures, and sometimes the research firm and the brand-consulting firm are separate. What matters is that the process of interpreting research findings and turning them into strategy does not run in a disconnected way. At Goodjob we apply this structure in an integrated way, keeping research and strategy under one roof throughout a branding project.
How Do You Become a Brand?
A brand needs a reason for being, a set of values to fulfill that reason for being, and a passionate team to bring the strategy to life. Becoming a brand, contrary to popular belief, is not hard at all. The methods that lead to success have been applied for decades and keep producing results. What matters is putting those methods into practice. Any person and any company can enter the branding process and become a brand by following the steps of brand creation. It is not enough for a company to say “I want to be a brand.” It must grasp the importance of branding very well and carry out what needs to be done — with the help of brand-consulting firms. Brand-consulting firms speed up the process for companies and ensure that the company’s resources are used more efficiently.
Which Are the Best Consulting Firms?
Rather than answering “which are the best consulting firms?” by naming firms, it is more useful to ask what the qualities of the best consulting firms are:
- They are firms that, with original brand ideas, let a brand stand apart from its competitors in the market with ease.
- They are the ones who make sure the brand strategy they build is applied in the field, not just on paper.
- They are firms that chase results, not fame and reputation.
How Much Are Brand-Consulting Fees?
Brand-consulting firms can price their services in two different ways: project-based or as monthly consulting. What matters here is how much time the consultant and the expert working on the project devote to that particular brand-consulting project. An hourly brand-consulting fee is set on the basis of the labor to be allocated to the project.
What Is the Difference Between a Management Consultant and a Brand Consultant?
In very short terms, a management consultant designs the inside of the company, while a brand consultant designs the outside of the brand. The management consultant determines how the company will be run internally — its organization, roles, and responsibilities — while the brand consultant determines how the brand should be perceived by consumers or customers.
What Positions Exist in Brand-Consulting Firms?
In brand-consulting firms there are strategist brand consultants responsible for strategy, analysts who work during the project’s analysis phase, and technical experts who work on technical branding projects. Brand-consulting projects require a professional team fluent in more than one discipline, because the process — which begins with research and continues through the discovery of consumer insight and the setting of strategy — needs to draw on different disciplines. These disciplines may include sociology, psychology, business, anthropology, communication, statistics, and the fine arts.
How Is a Brand Name Found?
Finding a brand name has become harder than ever. Names that ad copywriters once found by leafing through mythology dictionaries at agencies are now almost impossible to register — in short, the mythology dictionary is exhausted. Every month, hundreds of thousands of new brand-name registration applications are filed around the world. In an age where finding a registrable brand name keeps getting harder, brand naming has itself turned into a specialty — a process in which experts in linguistics or writing create new brand names by applying specific methods. To get more detailed information on this, get in touch.
Brand Name Creation Techniques
Some of the brand-name creation techniques are as follows.
- Founder brand names: like Ford…
- Descriptive brand names: like Facebook…
- Invented brand names: like Kodak…
- Metaphorical brand names: like Apple…
- Abbreviation brand names: like SAP…
- Meaningful-alteration brand names: like Netflix…
Brand-name guides, brand-name generators, brand-name software, and brand-name tools are among the frequently used methods. But finding and deciding on the name of a brand that is dreamed to become very large in the future is very hard to do with such tools and methods. Because, as is well known, a brand’s greatest asset is its name. For example, the ease with which a brand name comes to mind takes priority over all the shapes and signs related to that brand. All the visual assets created for that brand are designed to serve the brand name. Awareness stands at the very top of the criteria that determine brand performance — and awareness is a measure tied to the brand name.
