At a Glance

Modern brand-building is in fact experience design. Every brand touchpoint, whether physical or digital, must enforce the brand identity and deliver a cohesive experience. Often, brands work with one partner or set of partners to conceptualize a brand and another to bring the brand to life through design and advertising. This disconnect leads to communication challenges, bloated costs, and lengthy timelines. Said Differently drives advantages for clients by supporting all aspects of brand-building, including developing a brand strategy and identity, creating a brand design toolkit, building beautiful websites, and launching end-to-end advertising programs. 

Insights:

→ By entrusting a singular partner to create the brand strategy and bring it to life, organizations can get to market faster, with cohesive, high-quality results.
→ Brand is more than pretty pictures. Designing brands through a user experience lens leads to experiences that look and feel beautiful, while meeting user needs.
→ Brand strategy, brand design, and brand advertising must reflect a digital-first, omnichannel strategy to ensure a cohesive experience for customers and end users.

Foundational brand strategies that stand up to an omnichannel world

Brand strategy is the foundation of effective marketing, advertising, and communication. To develop your brand strategy, you start with an in-depth understanding of your target audience, your competitors, and your distinct space in the market. Then, you must define your mission, vision, values, and purpose, your brand personality or characteristics, as well as how you want your customers to feel — the emotive component that complements your utilitarian promise. This is hard to do alone. That’s where we come in. 

Between our executive leadership and network of creative talent, we have helped some of the world’s leading brands make a name for themselves. Our brand strategy and identity work has put a direct-to-consumer brand on the map, catapulted a travel brand to the top of its category, and turned business around for a luxury retailer. We have built strategies for complicated conglomerates in highly-regulated spaces, as well as budding nonprofits with heart-felt missions. Every strategy we create reflects omnichannel realities. Every brand toolkit we design accounts for physical and digital touchpoints.

Brand design toolkits that are beautiful and functional 

Brand design can be a work of art. But our clients need art that works. Certainly, we want the visual expression of a brand to be beautiful. But we design through a digital-first lens with an omnichannel understanding. Iconic brand elements need versioning for every channel. Our identity framework encompasses offline and online components that work on owned entities and in retail environments and come together to create a holistic identity. 

These frameworks are the guides for our world-class visual and graphic designers, who have conceptualized seemingly every brand element possible, including logos, signage, product packaging, store endcaps, digital footprints, and brand advertising campaigns. 

Website design is an important execution of brand identity. We have designed web experiences for legendary retailers, subscription-based services, B2B companies, and nonprofits, including The Families & Workers Fund. For the Fund, Said Differently created a brand strategy, designed a brand logo and brand identity system, and launched a website that reflected the organization’s purpose. The homepage we designed prompted peer organizations to reach out to the Fund and ask, “How do I get one?” 

Articulating powerful brand strategies across brand advertising programs 

It pains us when a brand strategy falls short of its potential. We have seen too many brand strategies prove rather unuseful when they are handed off to other agencies to execute. The new partners rework the strategy in their execution process because they need to, or because of a disconnect between the teams. 

Said Differently is unique because we have the teams and experience to deliver end-to-end brand-building. Our team has articulated brand positioning work across advertising channels, including TV campaigns, email marketing, and performance channels, for government-regulated companies, direct-to-consumer leaders, and luxury brands. 

Let’s use Brightspeed as an example, a new internet carrier that inherited legacy systems through a merger. Brightspeed did not have the luxury of pressing “pause” on its existing marketing program to develop a brand strategy. The telecom had to move fast to repair relationships with customers it inherited through an acquisition, while developing a strategy for acquiring a new generation of customers.

Through a customer-led research process, we helped Brightspeed develop and execute a brand strategy in which it positions itself as the “invisible internet provider” — the one you don’t need to think about, because it just works. We brought the brand to life through digital touchpoints and experiences, while our performance marketing teams launched programs that delivered immediate results for the brand. We are currently conceptualizing the brand advertising program, which could include a customer testimonial campaign and a speed test campaign that allows customers to test out Brightspeed’s connection.

“Through customer research, we identified that when it comes to utilities, a consumer’s number one wish is reliability. They don’t want to have to think about their internet provider. Said Differently brand experts are working together with Brightspeed’s internal marketing team to position the brand as the ‘invisible internet provider.’”
-  Sophie Dick, Principal, Said Differently

In sum: experience-led brand-building

Advertising is just a component of brand building. Think about it. Some of the most iconic brands in the world don’t need to advertise because their experience design is so strong. The core of building a brand is defining the strategy and expressing it across a multitude of touchpoints. 

At Said Differently, we articulate a brand’s DNA, define the experience principles that bring the brand to life, and figure out how to weave them into every customer interaction. We do this for organizations of all shapes and sizes, by assembling some of the most creative, diverse, and experienced teams in the world.