Do you know what your brand is? It’s not your logo. Your brand is the gut reaction your audience has when they hold your product or visit your site. Brand strategy lets you shape that feeling so it’s magical to your audience and they can’t live without it.
We make more people more loyal to your brand for way longer.
Crafting your brand is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle—every piece matters but they’re scattered all over the place. Brand strategy brings them all together, even if some are missing.
In the end, we’ll make sure the picture that forms will turn your audience into a loyal tribe of passionate believers.
Copying your biggest competitor will keep you locked in the number 2 slot at best. If you want to truly improve your business, you need to find your most radical differentiator. We’ll find the special thing only you do that will change the game.
You shouldn’t settle for flaky clients and customers just looking for a bargain. Through brand strategy, we'll strategize your brand so that it speaks right to the needs of the high-quality clients you value most.
Having the best quality in the business doesn't help you when you keep it a secret. You need to communicate your offer in a way that's compelling, trustworthy, and speaks your audience's language. Brand strategy will help with all that.
When you're just blasting deals and promotions on social, new followers show up for the deal, then leave. If you have a strategy built to specifically solve your customer’s problem, they become loyal believers and advocate for your brand to others.
When the world is unpredictable and the market is uncertain, brand strategy and market research will help identify opportunities to pivot or flex. We build strategies that are firm but extendable so that you can evolve based on market needs.
Have you struggled to decide when to build a new brand or explore a new audience opportunity? Our brand architecture and audience research services create brand strategies so you can maintain a portfolio easily, smoothly, and strategically.
Brand strategy services align your brand execution and business strategy. We research your audience, stakeholder goals, and market opportunities to make you an irreplaceable solution to your audience’s problems.
We’ll find your brand’s heartbeat and we won’t need a stethoscope. It’s a big deal because people don’t buy what you sell, they buy why you sell it. We’ll help identify what you stand for so you can attract a tribe of believers.
No one became the best by blending in with a sea of sameness. You want to be noticed, remembered, and irreplaceable. We’ll unveil your strongest differentiators and ensure your audience won’t settle for anyone else.
If you’re managing a portfolio of brands or products, it’s hard keeping things sorted when you’re growing all the time. We’ll formulate guidelines so that new additions maximize value and don’t cannibalizes business.
Your brand design is only half of your brand’s personality. The other half isn’t even visual—it’s words. Your verbal identity is how your brand resonates in writing, and we ensure your audience will hang on every syllable.
The only thing more foundational to your brand identity than your logo is your name. We craft well-written, one-of-a-kind names for businesses that want to kick things off the right way.
Brand messaging is more than writing; it’s the engine behind it. We take your value proposition and tailor it to your audience. In the end, you’re equipped to express your brand’s core across every medium.
[36] was impressive from the jump. The team understood our voice and place in the market and crafted fresh & creative ways to breathe new life into our brand. They’ve quickly become an extension of our team and we really value the seamless back and forth that moves our projects forward efficiently.
It gave us such a jumpstart. The entire team spent countless hours on our brand and making it pop, bringing it to life, and really changing the trajectory of our business. Making it a premium brand, which is really what we wanted to be.
Crafting brand magic isn’t about following a script. Whether we’re developing a fresh brand, making strategic tweaks, or building an extension, the roadmap isn’t always linear. It’s a dance that you refine as you learn more.
Brands are tailored for their audience, not just the boardroom. Of course, we always kick things off by aligning with stakeholder ambitions. But true success? That's rooted in understanding your customers.
After all, to check off a win for the visionary leaders of your business, we need to build for a strategy that makes sense to the people you serve.
If we're talking broad strokes (and we are), your stakeholders and audience are still only three slices of a delicious strategy pie. We also need to understand your competition inside and out so that you stand out.
Once we totally get you and your market, we can begin to formulate a solution to whatever obstacle you face.
No one goes to an agency because they need something they can do themselves. You come to 36 because you have a challenge ahead of you! Our clients are all a bit different, so we need to really dig into what you're trying to achieve.
Whatever it is that has you losing sleep, we keep asking "why" until we've diagnosed the cause of the symptoms your struggling with.
Let's keep going with the doctor analogy (no disrespect to any readers that actually went to medical school). Once we've identified your ailment and its prognosis, we're going to to get crackin' in the lab. We need to create a strategic cure to your problem.
Different strategies take different shapes, but we work collaboratively on the solution. The outcome is alignment, clarity, and clear next steps.
Building a brand without strategy is like driving with your eyes closed. On the other hand, a strategy without design and writing is like a restaurant that just brings raw ingredients to the table. Yeah, we know hot pot is a thing, just bare with us.
The point we're making is our strategy and creative teams are uniquely aligned so that what comes next is charismatic and calculated. We didn't go through all that work for your branding to be anything less than magic.
Can we launch without a test? Yes. We're no strangers to a challenge with time or budget. But why hope for the best outcome when you can test? By using a pilot, focus group, survey, or other research, we'll show the ol' razzle dazzle to a small segment of your audience.
This phase is valuable because we can learn what your audience thinks and make refinements that ensure your brand is everything they didn't know they needed.
Brand activation is a big deal, and we do it quite well. This phase is getting into marketing territory, but it's important that we talk about it here too. We want that launch plan to be perfectly aligned with your strategy in the same way that your creative is.
Whether we're talking events, social activation, preparing your employees for a rebrand, or making sure everyone hears about your new website, no detail is too small to sweat.
Our brand strategies aren’t just talk: see the transformations.
36 brand strategy is uniquely formulated to inform design and writing. We find your “why” and show you what’s next.
Our brand architects focus on authenticity, shelve preconceptions, and place your audience first.
Only four words? Seriously?
Partner, Brand / Strategy Director, Birds
Only four words? Seriously?
Got questions about brand strategy with 36? Give Steve, one of our managing partners, a buzz.
Our designers are super mega ultra talented. Their work absolutely speaks for itself. That said, if you asked them this question, you’d find that they’re the loudest voices when it comes to advocating for strategy.
Going through brand strategy ensures there is a clear brand personality, goals to achieve, and concepts to communicate through design and writing. It creates alignment for everyone involved, and keeps us all focused on the same vision.
In the brand strategy process, we draw information out of you that you may not have otherwise thought to share, and we often discover things that you never even thought of at all.
Ultimately, brand strategy sets you up with tools that guarantee your branding is tailor-made to your audience without any confusion or disagreement on who that is. There are fewer revisions, fewer questions, and less research needed from designers and writers from the start. It’s a win, win, win.
Glad you asked. What you *get* is the strategy. You're paying for the research, planning, and guidelines that will be used to achieve your goals. What we create will equip anyone managing your brand with the tools they need to build a successful, branded empire.
If you're curious about deliverables, it varies by project and client. Often, there's a comprehensive brand strategy document that presents the research and strategy. Sometimes, you might have audit documents and research reports. In other cases, you may need a brand standards guide, which we often host on a website, or ongoing consulting work.
Basically, how we package the strategy depends on what you need help with.
This really depends on your problem and budget. There's a big misconception that strategy should be skipped when time is short. In fact, the time lost by skipping strategy is often far worse.
Strategy projects with longer primary research can be split into sprints, ensuring we're moving forward with agility. Sometimes, the solutions you need also don't require a lengthy engagement. Sometimes they can be found in a workshop, a survey, or something quick.
The key takeaway is that research and strategy can be lengthy when necessary, but they can also be speedy when we've had the chance to strategize the best approach for your project.
If you're asking this, it seems like you've experienced workshops that dragged on with less than exciting results. Don't worry, that's not how we roll.
Can we skip a workshop? Sometimes, but we usually hold one because it's crucial to gather important information from your team. We need you to make decisions quickly, and that's tough to achieve with one-on-one conversations.
Our workshops are generally shorter than most and, on average, about 90% less cringe-worthy.
If you are diligent about collecting data, you've had other brand strategy work done recently, or you're in a unique market, this is all together possible. We would just say that the brand strategy should be built for the target audience, not for the stakeholders alone. If you haven't spoken directly with your audience or didn't ask the right questions, there's a possibility the way you view your brand's value internally isn't the way your audience describes what they need.
If you build your brand for everyone, then you're not building it for anyone. It's also important to point out that 33% of startups fail because they don’t spend the time researching whether there is a market need for what they offer.
If you're unsure of who your audience is and whether you're bringing something viable to market, we can help you uncover those answers.
First, we're sorry that happened. Brand strategy is a word that sometimes gets thrown around without knowing the weight that goes with it. Let's take a look at your strategy documents, talk about your objections, and identify the best way to help you move forward.
