By Fresh Produce Marketing founder Lisa Cork

I find it interesting to do project work. I love the fact every project is different and I particularly love that even after 20+ years in produce branding and helping produce companies find and bring their brand story to life, I continue to learn new things with every project. It reminds me of the Julia Child quote that says, “You'll never know everything about anything, especially something you love.”

I’ve recently been involved with an extensive branding project and I wanted to share some behind-the-scenes insights gained doing this work.

The first insight is an effective brand begins by understanding the big picture. What is the company’s mission? Vision? It is important in a branding project to understand what the company is about because believe it or not, this drives brand development decisions further along in the project.

The second behind-the-scenes insight is what is the company’s positioning? The product’s positioning? I recently read an interesting article that positioning is the DNA of marketing. After reading the full article, I think it is a great analogy. Just like our DNA defines who we are, it is similar with a company. A company’s internal DNA is what makes a business a unique business. Identifying your positioning, your DNA if you will, is critical to being able to establish an effective brand strategy for your business.

The third behind-the-scenes action is to develop the company’s brand framework; taking the content of one and two and using it to create a brand framework, which then becomes the guide from which all brands and taglines are created.

Let me give you a hypothetical example.

Let’s say a company is about bringing high flavour varieties to market. Their vision is using taste to drive consumption and create healthier lives. And their mission is to commercialize the most flavourful varieties across a range of products.

Their positioning is based on the level of investment they make in new varieties, the taste standards set and where their products are grown.

Feeding this information into a brand framework might look something like this:

Brand Essence: Bringing taste to life
Brand Story: Growing high flavor foods consumers love.
Brand Guidelines: Proven Taste, Unique Varieties, Grown for Flavor

It is time for the company to commercialize their first variety and they want to give it a clever and unique brand name. In my experience, most companies approach this really important decision with no strategy and no use of a brand framework.

Carrying through our example, the company decides to call their first product Happy Valley Tomatoes. Why? Happy Valley reflects where the product is grown and it sounded like a good name at the time.

Soon after, the company is ready to commercialize a second variety. Again, with no strategy the second brand becomes Red Sweets because it sounded good and they decided to name it based on colour and taste.

Can you see the problem? From a brand strategy perspective, we now have two products from the same company with no brand link. The company’s vision is to use taste to create healthier lives but nowhere in their brand strategy are they being true to their vision, mission or positioning. It is a missed opportunity.

Let’s create a second scenario. Same company. Same vision, mission, positioning but this time they decide to follow a process like my brand framework process.

When they commercialize the first product this time, I build their brand essence into the naming. Their brand essence is ‘bringing taste to life’ so I name the first variety Tastees. I follow the same process with their second variety and based on taste, the second brand is SweetEaties.

Can you see the difference? The brands are related to each other, related to the vision and mission and were created in an intentional way because I followed the brand framework.

It is a powerful way to approach branding and the end results are always more successful than a haphazard approach that lacks strategy.

Of course the process is a bit more complicated than how I have explained it here, but this describes the essence of the process. And please remember, all examples noted above are made up and any similarities to real products are simply coincidence.

If you are considering brand development or rebranding, feel free to give me a call. My passion is helping produce companies find their brand story and bring it to life via effective brands and packaging and I would love to help you bring a brand framework to life.

www.freshfruitportal.com