Your brand is at the heart of all your marketing activities. With the right foundation in place you can scale, differentiate, and even attract the right talent.
So how do you create a great brand? Our workshops are the perfect way to get you started.
Whether you need a brand for your new company or are looking to refresh an existing brand, Sublime can help you at each step of the way. We start with your brand foundations —your mission and values. From there, we use insight from customer interviews, competitive research, and your team to build out your brand story, messaging, positioning, brand voice and personality and visual identity (including logo).
We tailor each element of your brand to your customers—engaging them emotionally and creating loyalty to your products and services.
The result:
A brand that truly pops and differentiates you from your competitors.
Our branding process is designed to get everything in place to make your marketing a success:
A few situations usually trigger a rebrand. Your messaging or visual identity no longer reflects what you actually do or where you’re headed. You’ve acquired one or more companies and need to figure out how the brands fit together. Or the company has hit an inflection point — new leadership, a new direction, a significant shift in the market. Any of those is a good reason to take a hard look at your brand.
The brand itself is only part of it. A rebrand needs a planned rollout that covers three audiences: your internal team, so everyone understands the new message and can communicate it consistently; your external market, so the change lands clearly; and your partners, vendors, and customers, who need to know what’s changing, why, and what it means for them. When each audience gets the right message at the right time, the transition feels steady rather than disruptive.
It depends on the scope and the size of your organization. A focused rebrand typically takes six to eight weeks. A more involved engagement — one that includes research, workshopping, full brand development, and rollout planning — can take up to six months.
At minimum, a brand refresh should address your design system, messaging framework, brand voice and personality, mission, values, and positioning. These elements work together — updating one without the others often creates inconsistency that shows up in your marketing and sales materials down the line.
It depends on your market position, reputation, and business goals. A name change makes sense if the current name has a negative association, is too close to a competitor’s, or is hard to find online. Keeping it makes sense if you’ve built real equity with customers over the years, or if the cost and effort of a full name change rollout isn’t practical right now. We help clients work through that decision as part of the branding process.
The first step in ensuring consistency across all media types is through the creation of a detailed brand standards document. This document will cover the use of the logo, typography, messaging, tone of voice, and much more. As part of each rebranding effort, Sublime helps create a brand standards document that makes sure all involved parties are on the same page for consistency across your website, social media sites, sales presentations, and print materials.
You get a complete brand foundation: mission and values, brand hierarchy, visual identity system, brand story, and voice and tone guidelines. We also deliver a brand guidelines document, social media graphics, and a homepage mockup with design and copy.
We start with research. That means customer interviews, internal team interviews, competitor analysis, and persona work. From there we move into a workshop where we review what we learned, work through brand hierarchy, and brainstorm messaging and design direction together.
Once the research and workshop are complete, we build out your brand foundations: messaging framework, brand story, voice and tone guidelines, and your full visual identity system. Everything gets reviewed and refined until it’s right, then we deliver a finalized brand foundations document your team can use across every channel and touchpoint.
We start with customer interviews, internal team interviews, and competitor research. From there we move into a workshop where we review what we found, work through persona profiles, discuss brand hierarchy, and brainstorm messaging and design direction. The brand is built on what we learn, not assumptions.
