Creative-Ops offers a 6-Phase Branding Program that differentiates your company from its competitors, both visually and verbally.

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Phase 1: Brand assessment

Our first step is to identify existing marketplace perceptions — how your company, its products and services, and your brand are perceived. Our goal is to obtain a range of updated and accurate marketplace perceptions by:

• Surveying your employees, customers and strategic partners
• Reviewing existing materials and previous research reports.
• Evaluating top 4 competitors’ websites and marketing materials.
• Interviewing 3-5 key executives.
• Augmenting existing quantitative research with qualitative research, such as one-on-one interviews with customers, non-customers, partners/influencers.

Phase 2: Brand platform development

Armed with a fresh, efficient and relevant body of research, Creative-Ops develops a comprehensive business positioning, branding and messaging platform. We will recommend strategies to close the gap between existing marketplace perceptions and where your company wants to be, to neutralize negative perceptions and replace them with positive ones, and to convey your company’s key verbal and visual messages and unique competitive advantages.

Phase 3: Creative development

In Phase 3, Creative-Ops’ print and interactive designers define concepts that establish your visual brand expression in the marketplace and align with corporate messaging. The agency will pursue visual solutions that exploit researched opportunities and solve stated problems. Design concept development will be presented in the form of thumbnails and half-size layouts, showing only those ideas that the design team feels are viable, appropriate and meet prescribed criteria. Based on client feedback, successive rounds of layouts will focus on meeting any emerging criteria and reflecting the opinions of the client review team until one design solution is accepted.

Phase 4: Messaging development

In Phase 4, our marketing copywriters make certain that your messaging lives up to its potential. We understand that your company has an important story to tell — one that interests customers, prospects, partners, analysts, employees and investors — a story with character, set in a particular place and time, with energy and perspective, a story that defines and differentiates. Using our proven messaging methodology, we’ll help you define who you are, what you stand for, and what you offer to the world. Only then can you speak clearly and consistently to all of your company’s key stakeholders.

Phase 5: Brand development and refinement

In Phase 5, the design team will refine the accepted design, which may include a grid, colors, selected typefaces and other elements, and the assignment of illustration and/or photography. The agency will also make recommendations regarding color schemes and secondary typography and show how concepts will be used for various venues such as trade show graphics, collateral, etc.

Phase 6: Style deployment

In Phase 6, Creative-Ops creates a global reference document from which to standardize all company trademarks and marketing assets. This will include:

• Visual identity for your logo, photography tone and style and proper usage, color palette and proper usage
• Desired tone and manner of corporate, initiatives and product messages
• Instructions on how to use the corporate brand concepts

Call 866-781-8195 (toll-free) for a free consultation. Based in San Jose, California, Creative-Ops specializes in company, corporate and business branding and positioning.