If 2018 saw significant changes to how technology is leveraged for marketing, 2019 is certainly going to be just as transformative, and just as challenging. So as we enter the fourth quarter of 2018, every organization from global enterprises to challenger brands to growing industry associations needs to start thinking about making sure it has the right agency partner for 2019.

As we all know, of course, hiring a top branding agency can be extremely stressful. How do you evaluate your organization’s marketing needs and match them to a top branding agency that has the skill sets, the experienced team, and the vision to meet your revenue targets. Key to making the case for a top branding agency is recognizing that an agency with the right experience and creativity will help your business grow, and can be one of the most important investments you make.

Here are our five tips for finding a top branding agency that will take your brand to the next level:

1. It’s the Creative. First and foremost, creative can make or break every brand. The first question you need to ask before selecting a top branding agency is if it has a range of creative designers bringing different options and creative approaches to the project. A small team will never have the range of styles of a successful agency. With a small shop, it’s not long until all creative tends to look the same. Check out the creative that’s on the agency’s website. Does it look too much the same, or is there a wide range of styles and concepts across the site? Do you like what they are promoting? If not, find an agency that you do like.
2. What About Consistency? How is the quality of the branding work? For agencies where branding is not their core focus, we often see that the work is inconsistent, both in quality and in tone. A top branding agency recognizes the importance of consistency to your brand.
3. Can They Handle Brand Management? Can the agency take you through your projected growth as an organization? A top branding agency isn’t valuable only on the one project but will be with you for the long-term. That means that as your brand grows and evolves, it lessens the risk of diluting it as new ideas are explored and boundaries pushed. The right agency team can make sure that new directions are kept within the context of the brand style guide. A great branding agency can lead the development of new deliverables and can deliver on the vision for the brand.
4. Industry Insights. Is the agency’s team viewed as a thought leader in the marketing industry? The best agency partners work across a variety of industries and keep on top of trends and styles across many verticals. Read their blog posts. Do they practice what they preach?
5. Can They Create a Vision and Stick to it. Can they help you tell your story? A top branding agency has the expertise and creativity needed to develop a comprehensive brand that is consistent and tells a compelling story. It takes lots of work to develop that skill and requires significant know-how and ability to both see the vision and execute on that vision. The right firm recognizes the intricacies of taking a brand from concept to completion at different stages in their client’s business lifecycle. That skill – to see the big picture of your organization and help you bring your brand to life – is critical and valuable.

Considering a Branding Agency? Learn how Bluetext can help.

Choosing a new name for a brand or a product is never easy. This is particularly true for companies that, through private equity acquisitions and spin-offs or other M&A activity, find themselves needing to quickly find a new name to separate them from their past affiliation. But finding a name that is original and conveys the right tone and attributes is difficult. Add to that the requirement that a URL be available, and it becomes seemingly impossible. Yet, as top branding agencies know, finding a strong new name can help launch a new brand that gets noticed, or re-ignite an old brand that is need of a new direction. What it takes is a proven and disciplined approach.

Finding the right name is hardly a new problem. Ford Motor Company notoriously faced this issue in the mid-1950s when launching a new line of vehicles into the U.S. market. Recently retold in an article in The New Yorker magazine, Ford searched long and hard to find a name for its newest car, even turning to a poet for help. She came up with a long list of suggestions that didn’t sound like a car, including the Intelligent Bullet, the Ford Fabergé, the Mongoose Civique, the Bullet Cloisoné and (my favorite) the Utopian Turtletop. Instead, Ford chose to name the car after the founder’s son and called it the Edsel. It went on to become one of the most notorious failures in automotive history.

Would a better naming strategy save the car from its ignominious demise? Maybe not, because the vehicle had other issues that didn’t resonate very well with consumers.

Flash forward 60 years, and the name challenge is even more difficult, with the modern twist of the proliferation of URL “squatters” that buy up every word combination in the hope that they can sell it at a profit, making it nearly impossible to find an available word without paying a fortune for the domain. Today, bad naming decisions still plague the corporate world. Earlier this year, the Tribune Publishing Company, owners of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune among other papers, decided to rebrand itself as a content company and chose the name Tronc, short for Tribune Online Content. The name was not well-received in the market, and the company has since put itself up for sale (and has seen a half-billion-dollar sale to Gannett fall through). Any branding professional would have seen that coming.

Why? First and foremost, because it’s an ugly sound, that’s a key criterion for a new name. As The New Yorker article points out, there is lots of research about how people respond to words and sounds. So, for example, front-vowel sounds – ones that are formed in the front of the mouth like the “i” in “mil” – evoke “smallness and lightness.” Those that come from the back of the mouth, such as the “a” in “mal,” emote “heaviness and bigness.” Softer consonants, like “s” and “z,” seem lighter than so-called “stop consonants,” like “k” and “b,” which seem weightier. When George Eastman invented the name Kodak in 1888, he did so because he liked that “k” was “a strong, incisive sort of letter.”

Bluetext’s Four Pillars of a Good Name

We’ve developed our own four naming pillars that we strive to meet when working with our clients. We believe that a new name should:

* Be easy to say
* Be easy to spell
* Be easy to remember, and
* Most important, Tell a story

We know that hitting all four of those elements is not always possible, especially as URL and trademark issues often require the use or words purposely misspelled, like the car service Lyft. Tronc fails on several fronts. It doesn’t tell a story about the brand, nor is it obvious on how it should be spelled. As The New Yorker puts it, “Tronc wants to seem light, fast, forward-looking, and unburdened by the media industry’s past, but its back-vowel sound and its leaden ‘k’ ending sonically convey something heavy, slow, and dull.”

Real words when used as names need to make a connection between the underlying meaning and the brand itself. So, for example, Tesla was a genius on the cutting-edge of innovation. Bluetext is the color that text turns when hyperlinked in a document, and thus is the window to the digital world. Made-up names don’t always have this connection, and thus need to rely on the root syllables and sound for their meanings. Lexus suggests luxury, Viagra both vitality and virility. Inspirata, a medical analytics company we recently helped to brand, suggests inspired data.

Names are the first exposure that key target audiences have to the brand or product, and need to be carefully thought out. A disciplined process for evaluating the key messages, the nature of the audiences, the competitive landscape and what that brand aspires to be in two-to-four years all need to be part of the process.

A Private Equity acquisition that creates a new entity requires a distinctive brand that conveys value and stands out in the crowd. This is particularly true for newly acquired companies that need to quickly and effectively establish a credible and competitive brand platform for their acquisition.

Perhaps the oldest and best-known example of that is Coca-Cola. Its flagship soft drink is mostly carbonated water, coloring and a little bit of flavor. Don’t get me wrong, I like Coke and drink a glass almost every day. But what distinguishes it as a brand isn’t only the flavor. It’s the 100+ years of brand equity, based on a simple color scheme and a curved bottle that make it so instantly recognizable. Without those brand assets, it’s simply another cola, a commodity that would need to compete solely on price rather than its distinctiveness.

And that may be the most valuable lesson of why a strong brand is so vital: Without it, you’re a commodity competing on price, not value. It really has little to do with how a company or product functions or its selling proposition, but it is the core elements that make the brand different and recognizable. These unique elements – in the case of Coke, the shape of the bottle and red and white color palette – and known as its “distinctive assets.” These are the crown jewels of the brand. The more distinctive, the more recognition and brand loyalty from customers. And that means revenues.

And that’s why selecting the core elements of the brand, including color, iconography, style and the logo itself, is so important. Marketers can control a brand’s prevalence in the market. More media buys, sponsorships and advertising translate into prevalence. But uniqueness is more difficult to maintain, for the simple reason that competitors may be using or decide to use those same brand elements. But if you’re using a brand element that is too closely tied to others in the market, that means that your marketing and advertising dollars are being spent at least in part to help your competitors. Identifying those key brand elements and monitoring the competitive landscape to ensure that others aren’t using the same elements is key to a successful brand management strategy.

Here are three key tips for managing your brand’s distinctiveness in the market:

1. Ask your customers what they think about your brand’s uniqueness. They are your early warning system to what’s happening across your market.
2. Leverage your distinctive assets across every campaign to maintain consistency. And do the same for advertising and marketing creative.
3. Monitor the industry closely for anything that looks similar to your brand assets.

Is Your’s a Distinctive Brand? Let Bluetext Assess Your Brand in the Market.

Hiring a top branding agency can be stressful. We know from our clients and from top corporate CMOs that making the decision to bring on an outside firm in the first place – let alone deciding which firm to bring on, is a major decision. First and foremost, it’s a marketing cost that might not have been allowed for in the budget. Justifying the ROI, especially off-cycle, looks like a heavy lift from a distance. Second, shifting work on something as integral to a company as their brand raises fears of losing control to a team that’s not in your office or under your control. Key to making the case for a top branding agency is recognizing that an agency with the right experience and creativity will help your business grow, and can be one of the most important investments you make.

Here are five reasons to hire a top branding agency:

1. It’s the Creative. Even if a company has a top designer in-house, it’s often better to turn to an outside source for several reasons. Number one, a top agency will have a range of creative designers bringing different options and creative approaches to the project. An in-house individual or even a small team will never have the range of styles of an agency. Pretty soon, all creative tends to look the same. In addition, we can bring our team specialists in strategy and content to the job.
2. Consistency. What we often see with in-house teams is that they turn to the branding task in their spare time and that they never have enough spare time because their services are always in demand around the office. As a result, the work is inconsistent, both in quality and in tone. A top branding agency recognizes the importance of consistency to your brand.
3. Brand Management. A top branding agency isn’t valuable only on the one project but will be with you for the long-term. That means that as your brand grows and evolves, it lessens the risk of diluting it as new ideas are explored and boundaries pushed. An agency team can make sure that new directions are kept within the context of the brand style guide. A great branding agency can lead the development of new deliverables and can deliver on the vision for the brand.
4. Industry Insights. Top branding agencies work across a variety of industries and keep on top of trends and styles across many verticals. That is not something that an in-house team can do.
5. Creating a Vision and Sticking to it. A top branding agency has the expertise and creativity needed to develop a comprehensive brand that is consistent and tells a compelling story. It takes lots of work to develop that skill and requires significant know-how and ability to both see the vision and execute on that vision.The right firm recognizes the intricacies of taking a brand from concept to completion at different stages in their client’s business lifecycle. That skill – to see the big picture of your organization and help you bring your brand to life – is critical and valuable.

Considering a Branding Agency? Learn how Bluetext can help.

Top branding agencies are always looking for new and refreshing approaches to logo designs that resonate with customers. Every designer’s dream is a new logo that is memorable and unique. But customers react to logos that interesting and different, but not too different. If a logo adheres to a style that is out-of-date or too far out of the mainstream, it may stick out from the crowd, but it won’t generate the positive feelings that it would if it were within the boundaries of the top logo trends that are hitting the market. With that in mind, here are six top logo trends that we are seeing both with our clients and across the industry:

1. Flat Designs Retain Their Strength. When Microsoft released its latest new logo, the design was flat with no shading or 3-dimensional effects. The result is a logo that is straightforward, maintains its integrity and brand equity, and looks good across all channels and in all sizes. It’s also easy to print and reproduce. A flat design shows off the brand and colors well and shows off the brand in its simplest form.  
2. Negative Space is Your Friend. Pinterest, Instagram, Toyota and scores of other iconic brands all use negative space – sometimes with hidden shapes and symbols includes. As an article in Lifebuzz.com reveals, the three ellipses in the Toyota logo represent the heart of the automobile, the technology, and the customer. More importantly, negative space can draw attention to the brand in a way that is memorable and different. 
3. Stacking is Back. For many years, the logo with letters had to be simple initials in a simple design. But as a way to grab attention in a way that stands out and is easy to see and absorb, stacking can be a strong alternative – often with different fonts for each word. This offers a solid way to highlight different fonts to challenge viewers while giving them something they can quickly comprehend. Here’s an example of a recent refresh (minus the different fonts) from the American Library Association. 
4. Turning a Flat Logo Up a Notch. One recent trend is taking otherwise flat logos and adding a two-tone approach to add depth to the color but also to give it a hint of three-dimensionality. Dividing symmetrical images into two “zones” of shading gives depth and visual interest to a flat design. It can also add a symbolic touch to convey the brand’s core mission and direction. Check out how Pineapple Resorts turned its logo up a notch to make it more distinctive. 
5. Go Wide. Shapes that elongate from right to left are thought to be more recognizable for humans that narrow, tall images. With online platforms (such as websites and social media) favoring a wide design, strong brands are turning to this approach with their logos. When combined with contemporary fonts and colors, it can also convey a brand that is on the move and ready to dominate its market.
   

Want to explore how to apply top logo trends to your brand? Bluetext can help.

As every top branding agency knows, the brand style guide is a key component in a brand’s visual identity. It sets out how brand elements, including color palette, imagery, iconography, and layout should be incorporated into every piece of collateral or content that represents the brand. In essence, it’s the brand bible for every designer and marketer in the organization.

Yet, for a typical top branding agency, it’s often an afterthought. Only after the new brand elements are designed, options are provided to the client, the visual identity is applied to the website, collateral templates, and signage, and all is approved, does the team turn to the style guide. And even then, it is often lacking in the type of detail and content that will make it useful for more than a brief period. It needs to be thorough and future-proof.

Let’s face it: The brand style guide isn’t the sexy or fun part of the project. Oftentimes, it’s delivered as a thinly printed document and other times as a PDF with limited detail. We understand that digging through a lengthy document to find out precisely how to use the logo, fonts, and imagery can be frustrating. Here, then, is the Bluetext guide to a good – and useful – brand style guide.

1. Make sure the style guide is comprehensive. The goal of the guide is consistency, in how the brand is represented regardless of platform, outlet or venue. It will be used by a wide variety of people, ranging from employees to partners to media. This doesn’t mean it has to cover every random or infrequent scenario, but more detail works in your company’s favor.
2. Go deep in coverage. Even the term “brand guide” is sometimes misleading. While it is important to include details on the specific usage of a creative asset, such as how much white space needs to pad a logo or how a logo should play out depending on the background color, this should be only a part of the what the guide includes. Don’t neglect core brand-building guidelines, such as what the organization’s tone and voice need to be in different contexts, or how employees should use branded imagery on social media. Provide enough detail so that anyone reading the brand guide from cover to cover will feel like an expert on every aspect of the brand.
3. Update the guide on a regular basis. With the prevalence of eBooks, articles, and infographics, brands are experiencing a faster rate of evolution than ever before. That means it is important to do a regular review of the guide to keep it up to date.
4. Make it easy to find, share, and update. Many style guides look great in a printed, bound volume. But those are hard to find, hard to distribute, and really hard to keep updated. And if the brand guide requires time and money to update, executives will be reluctant to refresh the guide to match their evolving brand until they absolutely have to.

Our recommendations as a top branding agency: Make the style guide a dynamic window to your brand. Include intangible elements that come from the brand’s core message platform, like tone, voice and the types of language to use. Use a digital platform that is easy to share and easy to update. Make it comprehensive. And make sure you review it at least once a year.

Style Guide Examples:

Learn How Bluetext Can Help With All of Your Branding Needs!

In a recent post, Bluetext Creative Director Jason Siegel described the differences between a top digital marketing companies, top marketing companies and top marketing agencies. The answer was in the range of services they provide. In this post, we’ll answer another frequently asked question: What’s the difference between a marketing firm and a marketing agency? This is more than a trivial question, and and it can be confusing. But here’s one reason why it is an important question to address: The term “marketing firms” (as well as “top marketing firms”) is by far the most widely used search term when looking for information on vendors that provide marketing services.

In the traditional use of these terms, there was a real difference. Agencies were typically made up of a collection of “agents,” or independent individuals who operated under one brand for their own marketing and support services. Think about insurance agents who all sell State Farm services but run their own separate businesses. The same is true for real estate agencies and investment services. All sell one brand’s services, but in the traditional sense act as their own companies doing so. Firms, on the other hand, tended to include individuals all working for the same company as employees (or partners). Yet, this hasn’t been the cases in marketing for several generations.

What’s particularly interesting about the use of the term is that most companies that provide these types of services–including Bluetext–don’t refer to themselves as firms, but rather as agencies. There are several reasons why we prefer the term “agency” over “firm”, none of them scientific or based on a common standard of use. First and foremost, a firm implies a smaller group of specialists that provide a limited range of services, in this case in the marketing field. It can be high-level strategy, but often not wide-spread implementation or execution. In other words, it limits the company in terms of perception about what it looks like and what it does. So for example, a research firm will only provide that type of service, while a communications agency might include research in its full scope of services. In the case of Bluetext, we provide a full-range of marketing and communications services–including high-level strategy–that includes implementation and not just consulting.

Second, the term “firm” is more often used to describe a smaller company that specializes in traditional public relations services, so that “PR firm” is an  accepted term for those types of service providers. As a provider of a full range of marketing services, including public relations and media outreach, the use of the term “marketing firm” is too limited for what we do. Marketing firms like ours do so much more than that, we cannot take the chance of being confused for a pure-play PR firm.

For clients, it’s important that they recognize this distinction so that when they are looking for the right marketing partner, they know they are getting one with the broadest range of services. We tell our prospects that the advantage of an agency like ours is that once we understand your challenge, the problems you are trying to solve and the successes you are trying to achieve, we can craft an integrated campaign using all of the marketing services that will allow you to reach those goals. That might mean a combination of traditional public relations, content marketing, advertising and paid syndication, and a digital campaign to reach the target audiences. Only a full-service marketing agency can provide that type of solution.

And in today’s communications landscape, there is no one magic bullet to drive customer engagement. It takes a range of options and approaches that require a full-service agency, and not a specialty firm. To learn more about the range of services Bluetext offers and view our Hall of Fame.

Planning for the New Year? Is Your Branding Up to Snuff?

With a new year comes new expectations. More qualified leads. Better content. More PR coverage…just some of the areas that b2b marketers are measured against.

The New Year marks a great time to unveil a new brand identity to the market. Usually in January there is the company wide sales kickoff meeting where the team is hungry for something new. Out with the old and in with the new. A new look is always a smart way for b2b marketers to kick off the year in style.

A lot goes into creating and launching a new brand. Determining the new brand identity, then doing all the steps to launch it are critical for success. How well you handle the transition process from the old to the new and how that plays out can go a long way toward determining the success of your launch. As you only have one chance at a first impression, every step you take in in the process must be executed flawlessly.

So let’s think about audiences. First and foremost is the internal audience. They say that more than 50% of the success of a rebranding effort is determined by how well it is received by your internal champions. These are the people that will be the first line of defense when presenting the new brand to their customers and partners. They should love it. They should feel inspired. They should be prepared to scream about why you did it and what it means to the market from the mountaintop.

To best do this, they need key messages delivered on a silver platter. And they need to be easy to communicate. Having a consistent story to tell is critical. Think of it like a game of telephone. Once you tell them why you did this you have no idea where the message will go. By the time it reaches a hot prospect it may lose its impact. And remember, you only have one chance at a first impression.

Once key constituents understand why you did it, the next critical question for b2b marketers to answer is how will the news and message get communicated, and when can people talk about it. From the smallest requests (when will by new business cards arrive) to the most critical brand story telling channels (when will the website get updated), no detail should be overlooked. A detailed rollout plan is critical for success.

Say it Loud and Say It Proud
Many brand marketers don’t get the respect they are due. Their efforts are reduced to simple questions from others such as “what hours do I need to be working at the tradeshow booth?”

A new brand identity is the time to make a splash, and what better time than the New Year when we are done celebrating past years’ success and are now ready to move forward with the new branding. If you are like most b2b companies you have a big sales kickoff where everyone is hungry to see what is new for the near year. If you coordinate efforts well, all materials are ready, all messages are crisp, and you have the perfectly captive audience of internal influencers to get behind your efforts. Leverage the promotional opportunity the kickoff presents to make it memorable.

You Made the Splash, Now What?
Let’s face it. Launching the new brand is just the top of the iceberg. There are a million things to do and pieces of communication to coordinate. People have questions, and you should have answers. Now is the time to move back into your measured marketing roll and create a perfect spreadsheet to show the team how things will roll out. Use the rebrand as an opportunity to create a cadence of messages for partners, prospects, and customers. This is your new brand platform to deliver a new message for 2017. The market should experience it in everything you do, from your tradeshow booth to your website to your lead generation campaigns. A coordinated effort will enable you to get rewarded for your efforts while successfully launching the new brand identity to the market.

Don’t forget What Got You Here
If you are thinking about rebranding for 2017, you have been successful in your job in 2016. That means that you had something valuable for the market and did a good job delivering it. Now is a good time to meet with your core audiences to get their feedback. What is resonating about the new branding and message? Have you and your team done a good enough job clearly explaining why you did this? Does the identity fit the company you want to be? Does the market understand the meaning behind the new brand?

Ready to Get Started?
At Bluetext branding is in our DNA. We work with organizations across many industries to help them create and launch new brands to the market. From logo development to corporate visual identity to responsive web design to trade show booths and new collateral, we have the resources and expertise ready to tackle whatever challenge you are facing with your brand. Now is the time – the New Year is just around the corner. Do you have the platform to deliver a powerful message to the market? Reach out today to find out how Bluetext can elevate your brand.