Exploring the Brand Building Pyramid

Many of our start-up clients come to us with a website/business idea that they need brought to life. While building a great website is the primary goal, start-up clients often also require a brand identity upon which to base the design elements of their new site.

One of the fastest ways of developing a new brand identity is to build a ‘brand pyramid’ whereby a communication strategy is developed by exploring and identifying the features and attributes of a service or product and refining those ideas into a simple ‘brand idea’.

One of the fastest ways of developing a new brand identity is to build a ‘brand pyramid’ whereby a communication strategy is developed by exploring and identifying the features and attributes of a service or product and refining those ideas into a simple ‘brand idea’.

Here’s a simplified version of how we’d normally go about helping a client define their brand.

• At the base of the pyramid we’d start by exploring the clients products and/or services, asking a broad set of questions that provoke a broad range of responses and keywords, all of which are recorded for subsequent use in the exercise.
• Once we have a broad range of ideas recorded we need to start sorting through all of the content from the first level, looking for similarities/grouping and themes that help refine the brand identity.
• Once we have a number of defined categories we list out customer needs and how those needs can be met through the cate
• Next we look at customer needs and how the themes that have been uncovered meet those customer needs. Customer needs may be physical (‘I need to buy a widget at the right price with free, fast delivery’) or emotional (‘I want the trendiest widget to help me impress my friends’).
• At this point of the conversation some themes will begin to emerge as more relevant/important than others and the real essence of the brand is beginning to emerge. Ideally, a common denominator drawn from all of the lower levels of the pyramid begins to emerge as the primary offering and a brand is born.