Story

Branding & messaging

Clarify your story in the market with five foundational, sequential questions: Who, what, why, where, and how? Then build a visual brand around the essential story.

Details

Message

Perhaps you receive the question, "What does your company do?" and have a hard time explaining it succinctly. Or perhaps your marketing isn't as effective as you'd like it to be, or your sales conversations are slower and longer than they should be. These are messaging problems. You have a problem with your story.

With our Story+System+Send process, we begin from the ground up and with the end in mind, processing and documenting a holistic story for your brand to educate your buyers and help them make a decision more quickly.

Visual brand

A visual brand is how you represent your company in the myriad channels and assets across the web and IRL. In addition to your messaging and story, it helps to convey your tone, your vision, and your experience to your customers, employees, and suppliers.

This includes a logo, color palette, type styles, and any graphic considerations.

Process

Step 1: Discovery & brand import

Our goal is to surface the brand identity already in place for your organization and help draw your brand into something deeper and more substantial.

We'll interview the leading representative of your brand—perhaps the founder or owner or head of marketing—for about an hour to gather information related to five core questions:

Who is your ideal audience?
What market are you in?
Why would they buy?
Where are you competing?
What makes you different?

And if applicable, to gain an increased understanding of your brand, we’ll also sort through any of your existing websites, brand messaging guides, and style guides to fully “import” your brand.

Step 2: Define messaging

At this point we’ll draft a comprehensive brand messaging guide containing everything you need, and we’ll work together to finalize a version for you and your team to leverage when stewarding the voice of your brand.

Our messaging starting point stems from our philosophy, which we will expand, refine and shape to fit your organization.

Step 3: Define visual brand

Once we’ve defined your brand messaging, we will extract any visual terminology or ideas and shape it into a visual brand identity.

This may involve collaborating on moodboards to dial in visual preferences.

Logo. In building your logo, we will include a light and dark mode, as well as any horizontal, vertical, and emblem style variants.

Color. Our standard brand has 1 to 2 main colors with 1 to 2 accent colors. More colors can be accommodated by request.

Type. We typically do one font for display headings and another font for paragraph typography. We prefer using Google Fonts for the ubiquitous usage across the internet, though we can utilize Adobe Fonts for more bespoke fonts (which may involve additional installations on your end).

We’ll work together to finalize these visual assets, in addition to any supporting gradients, meshes, or textures.

The final output will be delivered via Google Drive.

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Deliverables

1 stakeholder interview
1 messaging Google Doc
1 brand guide
- 1 Logo with up to 12 layout and color variants
- 2-4 brand colors with Hex values (more by request)
- 1 heading font and 1 paragraph font