Companies go through a natural growth and evolution process, from startup, to scaleup, to global enterprise. Brand building and development are essential for navigating the identity and image changes that happen during that growth.
A comprehensive yet adaptable brand development strategy aligns all stakeholders and ensures your brand remains recognizable and relevant to your target market.
What is brand development?
Brand development is the strategic approach to shaping and growing a brand’s identity. It’s a long-term initiative rather than a short-term project, and aims to keep the brand relevant as market conditions change and customer preferences evolve.
Unlike brand management, development is an ongoing process that focuses on the long-term shape of the brand, and key campaigns to support it, rather than day-to-day execution of brand-related tasks.
It’s a crucial initiative for brand teams, as brand development builds customer loyalty, increases brand equity, and differentiates companies from their competitors.
How brand development pairs with your marketing strategy
Brand development can guide and influence your marketing strategy. Your brand defines your company’s personality, tone, and values, which are all expressed through your marketing campaigns. Once your brand identity is clearly defined, your marketing campaigns can bring it to life.
Integration is essential: your brand development and marketing strategy shouldn’t be siloed or created in isolation. Instead, they should work hand in hand. Involve brand teams in decisions about marketing strategy, and marketing leaders in brand development conversations. This helps ensure alignment between your brand and marketing efforts.
As well as strategic alignment, you want to create consistency and cohesion across your marketing campaigns and channels. Make sure your visual and written identity remains consistent — from ad copy to social content. This consistency boosts brand recognition and creates a seamless customer experience.
Why you need a brand development strategy for business growth
A brand development strategy is essential as it becomes the guiding light for all your brand projects and initiatives, which all aim to build brand awareness, recognition, and drive long-term business growth. Here are some of the ways your brand development strategy supports your company’s growth goals over time.
Drive lasting customer loyalty
Customers feel loyal to brands they know, trust, and like. Loyal customers don’t happen by accident — brands need to invest in and nurture those relationships. People buy from brands they feel connected to, and brand consistency creates the foundation for that emotional bond.
When your brand shows up consistently across every touchpoint, customers start to trust it. Whether it’s a familiar tone of voice, a signature color palette, or a clear brand promise, those consistent signals reassure customers they’re in the right place.
Brand development is so important because it provides the strategy and blueprint for how your brand should look, feel, and sound, and how that brand identity shifts over time. It gives you clarity on the core elements of your brand identity, so different teams can adopt and implement it effectively.
Stand out in competitive markets
In competitive markets, companies need a way to stand out from the crowd. Your product may be the best out there, but if potential customers don’t know, it won’t matter. Your brand is how you stand out and make sure people know who you are.
Effective brand development informs your positioning in the market. It helps you understand your competitors — their strengths and weaknesses, as well as the main differentiators your brand has to its advantage. This information guides your value proposition and messaging, as well as marketing campaigns and product development, to make your brand stand out in a competitive landscape.
Enable scalability for growing businesses
How your brand looks and operates today is (probably) very different to how it will be in five years’ time. Your brand development strategy future-proofs your brand. It helps your brand scale as the company grows and evolves, without becoming disjointed or unrecognizable.
A strong brand development strategy will guide you from here to there and help your brand adapt to changing conditions along the way. For example, you might expand into new markets or global regions, or launch new products that require some changes to your core brand positioning.
Improve team alignment and efficiency
Your brand development strategy guides the evolution of your brand — and how it’s rolled out across the business. This helps companies maintain a consistent identity and message. This helps internal teams align with the brand, ensuring external-facing communications (like marketing materials, sales presentations, and website copy) remain cohesive and consistent. Additionally, it reduces inefficiencies like misaligned communications or inconsistent branding.
The core elements of successful brand development
Strategic brand development requires a mix of elements that work together to shape perception, guide direction, build trust, and drive loyalty. Here are the core elements that a successful brand development strategy should include.
Clear vision and brand identity
Your brand needs a clearly defined identity. This is the foundational layer that the rest of your brand development is built on.
A strong identity helps everyone in the company feel connected to the brand and its mission. It can also become a real differentiator for your business, essential for standing out in a crowded market. Your brand’s identity is a combination of your company’s values, principles, and vision. It comes from a number of places, including:
- Company mission statement
- Company or brand values
- Founder and executive values (these often contribute to company values)
- Brand personality
- Brand positioning and how you differentiate yourself from your competitors
Alongside your brand identity, you also need a clear vision for the brand. This guides its development in the future, as you have a clear idea of what the brand will be, as well as how it is today.
Unified guidelines for consistency
Detailed brand guidelines are essential, as they help people implement your brand identity consistently. Your brand guidelines should cover the visual elements of your brand, like your logo, color palette, fonts and typography, tagline, and any core visual elements. They should also cover your brand voice, so all your brand communications feel cohesive.
Centralized, digital brand guidelines like Frontify help enforce brand consistency as everyone can access and follow the same guidelines. Any changes made to your guidelines automatically update for all users, so you don’t have people using outdated brand materials. Even better, you can make core brand elements downloadable directly from your guidelines, so people can easily find and use your brand elements.
Templates for scalable branding
Standardized templates for common branded materials — like presentations, social media posts, email newsletters, or product one-pagers — make it easy to scale up content production, and reduce reliance on your core brand or marketing team. You can create templates with lockable and editable areas, so people can change parts of the design to meet their needs, while leaving your core brand elements unchanged. This lets other teams and individuals create on-brand materials, without risking brand inconsistencies.
Templates help companies scale up their branding activities, helping teams self-serve while maintaining control over the direction and development of the brand — essential for ensuring brand consistency.
Advanced asset management systems
As brands grow, they have more assets and files to manage. Over time, their established systems of shared drives and files sent back and forth over email can’t keep up with their evolving needs. So a centralized digital asset management system (DAM) becomes the best option for managing and organizing their brand assets.
Forward-thinking brands will look for advanced DAM software that will scale with their business. These make it easy to store and organize your brand assets, as well as control who can access different files — both from your internal team and external partners and collaborators.
Additionally, many let you set up separate portals or libraries for different sub-brands or regional branding, if your brand expands into new regions or you launch other brands in the future, meaning your DAM is a scalable asset management solution that meets your brand needs now, and in the years to come when your requirements become more complex.
6 actionable steps to strengthen your brand development
A clear brand development strategy will support the ongoing growth of your brand while also bringing efficiency and consistency to your brand operations. These six actionable steps will help you build a brand development strategy to support the future growth and evolution of your brand.
Step 1: Audit your current brand assets and strategy
Start by reviewing your existing brand assets, elements, and strategy. Look at what you’ve already got, and what is missing.
For example, you might realize that your existing brand strategy was created five years ago and hasn’t been reviewed since. Or you may find you have brand elements distributed across multiple tools and platforms, with no clear systems to help keep them organized.
As well as reviewing your current brand assets and strategy, consider any gaps or inconsistencies. These may be the biggest opportunities for your brand development strategy.
Step 2: Define and document your brand identity and values
Next, define your brand identity and your core values. Document them somewhere centrally-accessible and visible, so people can easily view them. This could be on your website, the company intranet, or on a central brand portal — just make sure they are easily accessible to everyone, not just your brand team.
Defining your brand identity is essential for providing the “north star” that will guide all the future decisions you make when developing, evolving, and growing your brand and the business. This will help keep everyone aligned around those values and your core brand image.
Step 3: Centralize your resources
Bring all your brand related materials together in one central tool. Having a single platform that’s home to your brand guidelines, important information (like your brand values and identity), assets, and communication about the brand makes it much easier to increase brand adoption across the business.
It also makes it easier to develop and evolve your brand over time. Any changes you make to your brand in your central brand platform will automatically be visible to everyone, meaning everyone is up-to-date with your latest messaging, visual identity, and brand assets. A comprehensive platform like Frontify is ideal for centralizing all your brand-related assets and resources in a single location.
Step 4: Establish dynamic templates and workflows
Many brand managers find their brand development stalls because they spend more time on everyday tasks — like sending logos or checking teams’ creative assets — than long-term initiatives.
Creating dynamic, editable templates gives teams the autonomy to create their own brand materials without input from your designers or the brand team. You can lock key elements like your logo or fonts but let people edit other areas, so they can create commonly used branded materials independently without compromising your brand identity.
Establishing these templates and encouraging team members to self-serve frees up your brand and leadership teams to focus on the long-term development of your brand.
Step 5: Monitor and measure your brand positioning
An essential part of your brand development process is understanding if and when it needs to evolve, to keep up with changing customer needs and market conditions.
Use brand analytics tools to track your brand performance and positioning. Track metrics like brand mentions, brand search, and customer sentiment to understand your brand’s position in the market. Additionally, track metrics like brand asset usage and brand guideline views to understand its adoption internally, and measure brand engagement across your business.
Tracking these metrics will help you understand changes in the market, and how those affect perception of your brand. You can then develop your brand and messaging to adapt to changing market needs.
How Frontify accelerates the brand development process
An industry-leading brand platform like Frontify supports and accelerates the brand development process. Here are some of the ways it helps solve common challenges and streamline the process.
A unified platform for brand consistency
Frontify provides a central platform for everything related to your brand. You can have live, digital brand guidelines in the same platform as all your brand assets and editable creative templates.
Having all your brand resources, information, materials and assets in one central location makes it easier to drive brand adoption across the business, which helps improve brand consistency.
For example, Lufthansa uses Frontify as the single source of truth for its brand. “The effect of Frontify was immediate. We increased the quality of communication through a higher brand consistency, we strengthened individual work due to better access to information and measured a considerable cost reduction,” says brand designer Ronald Wild.
Real-time collaboration and dynamic workflows
Frontify enables teams to collaborate on brand projects in real-time. You can create dynamic workflows to streamline the process of creating, reviewing, and approving new brand assets and adding them into your DAM.
With Frontify’s role-based permissions, you control who can approve new assets — for example, only allowing managers or team leaders to sign-off materials for publication. You can also automatically assign items and tasks to specific users, so if you have one person (like your brand manager) who oversees all design approvals, new materials automatically get assigned to them.
Frontify accelerates and streamlines the content production process, which is one of the main benefits for Borussia Dortmund. “Our feedback loops are a lot more detailed thanks to the collaboration capabilities of Frontify. We're now able to discuss assets and campaigns faster and more granular than ever before – both internally and with externals,” explains brand manager Rebecca Müller.
Scalable tools for global growth
The Frontify platform is scalable and can be used to manage multiple brands in one central location. This means if you acquire additional brands or launch sub-brands as your company grows, the platform grows with you. This supports your brand development goals if you aim to expand globally or enter new markets.
For example, Telefònica uses the Frontify platform to manage all its regional brands in one central location. “To be able to manage all brand materials and workflows at the same time in one unique space for all countries and brands is the main benefit [of Frontify],” says account manager Cristina Terrón Moreno.
Data-driven optimization with analytics
The Frontify platform also provides analytics data to help you measure the impact and adoption of your brand, to guide your decision-making process when it comes to your brand development strategy.
Understand how your brand assets are being used, adoption levels across the business, and how often your brand guidelines are consulted. This data will help you track brand consistency and adoption, so you can monitor brand usage over time. This is particularly valuable when your brand undergoes a period of change — such as a rebrand or refresh — as you can check people are using the new brand message and materials to ensure a cohesive rollout of the new brand.
Build your brand with Frontify
Developing your brand is essential for making sure it stays authentic, relevant, and maintains a long-lasting connection with your target audience. A solid strategy and the right tools make it easier to organize everything related to your brand, and for team members to access all the valuable information, assets, templates, and resources needed to bring your brand to life.
See how Frontify provides all the tools and resources to support your brand and enables scalable and consistent brand development. Book a demo today.
