Branding is the collective effort of services and content that defines how a brand presents itself to the public. It is a strategic effort of having values, a tone of voice and a mission being central pieces of your brand. This strategic endeavor can make for a smoother and more thorough brand managing, creating unity and a strong foundation for its market presence.

At Harmo, our Branding projects are divided into two main categories of projects: The visual and the verbal.

It encompasses all of the visual planning, rules and decisions for the brand. This will guide all future creative decisions for visual pieces, social media planning and how the brand presents itself visually to the public.

Visual Identity is crafted for brand recognition, tying the key concepts and values of a company into a cohesive visual style. A recognizable aesthetic is much more than just a logo or your media platforms. It conveys your company’s story, your values and uniqueness through graphic components.

It is related to all of the conceptual decisions of a brand, how it positions itself in its niche, including the reasons it is unique in regards to the competition. These decisions include values, concepts and the core aspects of a brand.

The importance of having good positioning cannot be overstated. It improves the message you brands wants to deliver to the public, reinforces its values and will build market differentiation.

The strategy in which a brand operates takes in consideration the positioning and identity to better suit the methods to achieve its goals. Therefore, the strategy will take into consideration the brand core values and identity and figure out ways to achieve them. These strategies include which media and materials the brand marketing will end up interfacing with.

At Harmo we look at this development as a complex and intricate research process. There are many aspects that cannot be quantified or translated into numbers, but are qualitative, subjective and abstract concepts. We take the challenge to deal with perception, context and meaning-making processes wholeheartedly.

We like to explain our strategy as our compass, something that guides us and shows us the way forward, and not something that is restrictive and constricts our actions.

The choice of words, tone of voice and overall language decisions are some of the core aspects of verbal branding. These decisions will build up the brand’s speech, how it presents itself to the world through text and how its persona sounds like.

Text is capable of expressing much more complex values, concepts and ideas than what your visual universe is capable of. Being precise and thorough with how you express through words is very important so that your complex ideas are properly developed. These complex ideas are the details that make your brand's personality rich, they create an uniqueness to the tone of voice of your brand.

The name of a brand is the first contact most people will have. It is important to contain its core values, a key concept and deliver some of its essence. The naming process will take the core values of a brand and work it into a name of its own.

A key aspect of a good brand name for your product or service is the storytelling behind it: a clear message and a well-defined story. It could be derived from a feeling, a concept, a myth, a tale: it should be inspiring and filled with meaning.

Making a story relatable creates bonds with the people interfacing with it. Storytelling is the process that ensures that the core concepts and values of a brand are being delivered through its text material.

A story should include the public as an important aspect of it, they are integrated in a narrative, a collaborative effort that moves the brand forward. Therefore, the concepts and values should be well-defined and strongly built. If these aspects are not strong enough the public will have a hard time relating to it, making their bond with the brand weaker.