HubSpot’s Global HEART Award acknowledges one partner yearly who is actively making a difference in their company around diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

As much as health is a personal journey, businesses are responsible for employee health at work. By supporting your employees’ wellbeing, you will have a happy team and a more resilient company overall.

Fun fact. The majority of HealthTechs found that, after increasing the marketing budget, their return on investment grew by 10 or more percent. So says this 2021 McKinsey survey.

Buying behaviour trends have changed dramatically in recent years. Many more people are buying online as a proportion of their budget and yet those same people have less money to spend overall. Both individual consumers and businesses are being extra careful with their budgets. So, their business is harder to win. Sales teams need to look beyond their usual tactics and adapt if they want to meet targets.

Once upon a time SEO was a dirty word associated with ‘black hat’ operations manipulating rankings for their evil bidding. Now, some consider it a sort of alchemical conversion: tin to gold, content to customers.

In reality, neither is true.

It’s no secret that times are tough. In the face of a global healthcare crisis, economic turbulence and other stressors, the majority of businesses are (rightfully) responding to these issues by putting employee wellbeing at the top of the agenda. Despite this, CIPD’s annual survey found that nearly one in five are still not doing anything to improve health and wellbeing in the workplace.

2022 was an award bonanza for our company. Small Employer of the Year (Investors in People), Best for the World Honouree for Governance (B Corp), three HubSpot Impact Awards... And just last week our Chief Happiness Officer won the Positive Leadership Awards.

Hello. You’ve found this article. That means, this information is interesting to you in some way.

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'Sales is no longer a firm handshake, but a meeting of minds.'

- Toby Hurst, Lead Consultant at Articulate Marketing.

Articulate Marketing has been named a winner in the both the Platform Excellence and Platform Migration Excellence categories in HubSpot’s Q3 2022 Impact Awards.

Round one… Marketing vs. branding. Ding ding!

‘Stop apologising! It’s OK if your ideas are different, your goals are big — don’t be afraid of what others would say. You are skilled, capable, and talented — you deserve to be a leader, and you are enough.’

— Joy Fitzgerald, author and DEI advocate

At Articulate, we work on one founding principle: that differentiation is the key to success.

Just as a successful leader will fearlessly make the most of their ambitions, differences and talents, so can your business.

Only one business in any given market can be the cheapest, all the others compete based on their differentiation and positioning.

Today, we show how differentiation helps you grow your business, accelerate sales, defend margins and outpace your competitors. And, we unveil our powerful differentiation framework: The Difference Engine.

Table of Contents

1. The power of differentiation
2. Introducing ‘The Difference Engine’
3. What fuels the Difference Engine
4. The outputs of the Difference Engine
5. Components of the Difference Engine
6. How do you build your Difference Engine?

The power of differentiation

More than 50 percent of respondents say their positioning and marketing failed to differentiate their business, according to 2022 data from our High Performance Marketing Scorecard. Those same respondents had low scores in other key areas such as lead generation. There is a correlation between undifferentiated businesses and poor performance across marketing more generally.

What do we mean by the term ‘differentiation’, then?

Well, we mean your identity as distinct from others. The things that make you original. Maybe even odd. Worthy of attention, expressive, diverse, value-added, authoritative, helpful, customer-focused, people-led, more than the sum of your parts.

Differentiated businesses stand out. People sit up. They take notice.

OK. That’s differentiation, so what’s the “engine” all about?

Glad you asked. Grab your anorak and enter our weirdo workshop. Watch out for things that go whizz or possibly bang.

Introducing ‘The Difference Engine’

The Difference Engine is a philosophy of marketing and differentiation best practices that we’ve honed as an agency over the twenty-something years we’ve been in operation.

It’s the brainchild of our collective experience, innovation and expertise.

It’s also a process of steps and activities that businesses can follow and adopt themselves. We won’t go into too much detail about every step here because it’s a huge topic that we’ll be exploring in other articles and papers (watch this space). What we will do is outline the framework so you know where we’re coming from.

The Difference Engine, then. It’s refined. Balanced. Thoughtfully constructed and validated.

With a Difference Engine firmly embedded in your business, you will have the power of differentiation at your fingertips. It will help you accelerate your growth and build the momentum you need to reach even your most ambitious goals.

>> Engine stalled? Test your business with our B2B Brand Differentiator <<

A brief history lesson

The term ‘Difference Engine’ originally refers to the works of Charles Babbage, the founding father of computing, and Ada Lovelace, the first computer scientist.

These two worked together to engineer new technology, invent ground-breaking solutions and solve complex problems. They started the computer revolution that has changed the world.

As fellow technologists, geeks and inventors, we’ve made the Difference Engine our own.

However, we’re not keeping it to ourselves. Oh no. We think EVERY business should have their own Difference Engine. That’s why there’s content all over our blog on how to build yours, DIY-style.

(Naturally, if you’d rather expert engineers did it for you… you can hire us.)

The schematic

Through various iterations of the Difference Engine, and the thinking outlined in later works, Lovelace and Babbage created the principles of computing that we use today.

After some experiments, the Difference Engine was envisioned as a crank-powered “computer” made of stacks of gears. Those gears or “figure wheels” interlinked in a complicated fashion to calculate numerical problems and then print the results. These calculations unlocked future innovations. The types of innovations that got us the internet and space travel.

Paying homage to the original, in our Difference Engine, eight pillars — or columns — make up the main part of the engine. They are comprised of 48 components that stack, interlock and impact one another. Every one has a part to play. The more parts are in motion, the better, bigger the results, and the more advanced problems you can solve. Conversely, if too many components are not moving they will likely jam your engine and halt progress. We don’t want that, do we?

Marketing is a system. It’s a complex machine. Everything is connected to everything else. Our Difference Engine reflects that reality.

What fuels the Difference Engine

Engines convert one form of energy into another.

That means they require an input, like fuel, to feed into a mechanism for transformation, calculation or good old-fashioned combustion. Only then do you get the outcomes you desire. Car goes vroom. Apollo 11 gets to the moon. Quantum computer solves the answer to life, the universe and everything…

So, what do you need in order to fuel your engine?

The better quality your fuel, the more efficiently the engine will run. Plus, the bigger the engine, the more you can put in, the faster you can go and the more you get out at the end. Quality and quantity both play a part here.

Despite all this talk of engines, it’s not, in fact, rocket science. You need to put in the usual resources:

• Time
• Motivation
• Attention
• Expertise
• Stakeholder buy-in
• and, of course, budget (10 percent of revenue, the Gartner gods decree)

That should about do it.

The outputs of the Difference Engine

On the other side, for all that energy you put in, what do you get out?

We’ve talked a bit about this already, but let’s get specific. A differentiated business will grow bigger, faster. It will get record profits, because it stands out from competitors and attracts an engaged audience of paying customers.

We’ve told you more than half of respondents to our survey felt that their business was not properly differentiated. Clearly, there has never been a greater need for a consistent, tried and tested framework for companies to construct better positioning and engineer sustainable differentiation.

In actual fact, there’s more to differentiation than the bottom line. It triggers a chain reaction that leads to even more valuable outcomes that boost innovation, employee wellbeing and other positive impacts.

Think about what you would do if you had such a healthy pipeline that you end up with a waiting list of potential clients. You could pick and choose who gets to work with you. You’d go from order-taker to esteemed partner. Got a disengaged client that takes up too much of your time? You no longer have to hold on to them just for revenue’s sake. Let them go their own way and focus on the people that want to partner with you. Conversely, the joy of having keyed-in clients cannot be underestimated. Have we mentioned how much we love our clients, lately?

Businesses in this position get the chance to work with companies that share their values and that are a force for good in and of themselves. They become part of a community that drives positive change. They can lead the charge. Why not? There is no rule saying you can’t be a for-profit business that is sustainable, contributes to important causes and treats employees well. You could have a business that is an ideal place to work, which attracts and empowers the best talent, with a culture that makes clients want to work with you. All while having a net zero impact. How about that.

Lastly, what wouldn’t you give to be a household name? A brand name that is used as the generic term, even? Hoover. Biro. Google. If you were the most trusted voice — the “thought leader” in other words — for your audience, you get to set the terms of the conversation. You become the authority in the market. The advisor. The one everyone else looks up to and tries to copy. That also means you’re the one innovating so you can give the best advice and make the smartest moves possible. That’s how you future-proof your business.

Components of the Difference Engine

Now we understand what fuels the Difference Engine and what the benefits are, let’s take a look at the engine itself.

Here is where we get to the heart of it: the parts that make the engine work. These are the components that have to be in place to achieve all those lovely outcomes. First, take a look at the eight pillars that house the 48 parts of the Difference Engine as a table:

Now, let’s look at each pillar individually. We’ll explain a bit about what the pillars mean and how you can think about implementing the components for your own situation.

Your mission

The analysis, metrics and strategies that will help you achieve your goals as a business. These are contextualised within your industry and benchmarked against competitors. This is how you position your organisation based on where you are, now, and where you’d like to get to in the future.

You need stand-out ideas, ambitious goals and to measure your activities in order to succeed.

• Industry analysis - “What is happening in the industry and where do we fit in?“
• Competitive positioning - “How does my business compare to competitors?“
• Product-market fit - “How well do our products and services solve for the client?“
• Business vision - “What needs to happen and how do we align objectives to get there?“
• Reporting and metrics - “What can I measure to see the value of our activities?“
• Marketing strategy - “What are the best ideas that we can implement this year?“

Talent and culture

The people. The company culture that empowers them to do their best work and the purpose and values that makes that work worth doing. And, the repeatable, scalable processes that keep the wheels turning.

All differentiated businesses have a distinct culture, one that attracts and retains talent, operates efficiently, inspires others and tells a story worth hearing.

• Company culture - “What holds our company together?“
• Purpose - “Why?“ (see Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with Why’ TED talk)
• Sustainability - “How do we make choices that have a positive impact on the world?“
• Employer branding - “How is my business viewed by potential recruits and existing talent?“
• Skills and resources - “How does my organisation get the best work done?“
• Processes - “What steps will it take to be effective and efficient?“

The toolkit

The platforms, channels and playbooks that power your marketing and put your customers at the heart of your business. These tools, when integrated as part of a fit-for-purpose tech stack, enable real-time collaboration, data visibility, analytics and sales and marketing automation.

You need the right tools to craft a Difference Engine that works well.

• Customer relationship management software - “Where do we keep data about leads, deals and customers?“
• Tech suite - “How does our tech stack fit together to best serve my business’s needs?“
• Marketing automation - “How can our marketing be more efficient, with the help of technology?“
• Sales automation - “How can our sales be more efficient, with the help of technology?“
• Playbooks - “What resources can our team create and use consistently?“
• Marketing channels - “Where should we be communicating with our audience?“

Strategic blueprints

The strategic foundation, the positioning, your USP (unique selling point) — those core elements that influence everything from your content to your website. It includes the messages you want to communicate to your customers, in a voice that is all your own. Plus, who that audience is, what they care about and how they can be targeted at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

• Positioning - “How do we make the business and our offerings more memorable?“
• Tone of voice - “What does my business’s ‘voice’ sound like and is it recognisable?“
• Messaging - “What are the key messages we want to get across to our audience?“
• Ideal client profile - “Which sectors, verticals, and customer and company profiles are we targeting?“
• Personas - “What is an ideal representation of my customer(s) and what they care about?“
• Buyer journey - “How does my customer’s journey look from the first touchpoint?“

Brand architecture

The visual assets for your brand and how they are experienced, both by search engine crawlers and by your audience. So, your logo, search engine-optimised website and overall brand imagery.

Often, this is your first foot in the door with prospects. Here is where you can make an instant impact and a lasting impression.

• Logo - “Does my company logo stand out from the crowd and accurately represent my business?“
• Design - “How do we represent ourselves visually as a business?“
• Brand book - “Does my organisation have a well-documented brand rulebook that ensures consistency?“
• User experience - “Is it easy for site visitors to find what they need on our website?“
• Technical search engine optimisation - “Is it easy for Google to crawl our website and does it find the site fast, accessible and authoritative?“
• Website development - “Does the company website both look good and function well to bring in business?“

Thought leadership

The content that marks you out in your industry. This is the stuff that gets you noticed by search engines, by industry peers, by suppliers, by prospects. It’s the place where you establish your authority, knowledgeability and credentials (and personality!). It is how you communicate across channels, such as your blog, social media or email.

It’s the mechanism to inform, connect and inspire others.

• Campaign calendar - “What do we put into the content publishing schedule and why?“
• SEO keyword plan - “How does our business answer potential customers’ most pressing Google search questions?“
• Content creation - “How do I share my company’s unique knowledge and perspectives?”
• Product literature - “How persuasively do we talk about our products and services?“
• Customer evidence - “What proof can we share that showcases our business’s capabilities?“
• Promotion - “How do we tell the world about our content, offerings and culture?“

Lead generation

The way you nurture and process leads, such as with gated offers like white papers or eBooks. This is where companies must begin to build on that relationship with prospects, from first-touch onward. It covers the qualification and handover process between departments, with whatever assets are required to make that journey an unparalleled, positive experience.

• Lead capture - “What does the business do to attract lots of quality leads?“
• Lead nurturing - “How do we nurture leads so they are receptive to a sales pitch?“
• Sales enablement - “How can we align marketing with sales to enable a solid pipeline?“
• Qualification and lead scoring - “How do we define the quality of a lead, and who makes that decision?“
• Sales collateral - “What assets do our sales team have to inform and persuade prospects?“
• Upsell and cross-sell - “How do we expand existing business relationships?“

Iterative optimisation

The continuous process that really steps your marketing up a gear. This is where the work you do can get you from one-of-the-pack to the tearaway leader.

Sufficient observation, testing and optimisation means you can build intelligence into your marketing. And do so at a level that reaches each and every person directly, delighting customers from new prospects through to enthusiastic evangelists for your brand.

• Behavioural analytics - “How is my company’s audience behaving and interacting with our site?“
• A/B testing - “In what ways are we using data to test what works best?“
• Conversion optimisation - “How is my business trying to optimise conversions at every stage of the journey?“
• Personalisation and segmentation - “How do we automatically target subsections of our audience, and individuals?“
• Networking - “How do we build a connected network within and outside our industry?“
• Customer advocacy - “How do we keep customers engaged and eager to give us referrals?“

How do you build your Difference Engine?

How to create and assemble all those components is a big question. Too big to answer here, but watch this space.

Saying that, if you answer these^ questions you’ll be well on your way to getting your Difference Engine up and running. So that’s your first step.

One last thought before we leave you. Differentiation means daring to be different. The “weird kid” at school. The busker that refuses to get a “real job.” The risk-taker and the out-of-the-box thinker. The out-on-a-limber. That’s a scary prospect, for some; an enticing one for others.

Take heart! Be bold! Be different!

You’ll find your audience, your customers, your tribe. That’s the road less travelled. That’s the journey worth taking, powered by the little engine that could.

‘Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.’

— Peter Drucker, author, management consultant

A marketing strategy encompasses dozens, if not hundreds, of tactics and activities. So, what do you do, now? How can you make the next decision that gets high value results, rather than expending time, energy and money in the wrong places?

Today, we’re exploring failure modes; meaning, ways in which companies screw up their marketing strategy. The pitfalls. The landmines. And, in doing so, we’ll showcase both how to do things right and how to do the right things.

This article is based on one of our popular webinars. View the video and download the slides.

1. Zero strategy

There’s a reason why people have no marketing strategy. The cost of doing nothing is not obvious.

However, developing a strategy is quite expensive. It's time-consuming. You need help. Executing that strategy takes resources. Cost, in other words.

Back to where we started. Not doing anything = missed opportunities.

How on earth do you measure the cost of that? The people that didn't ring you up, connect with you or book a meeting? The growth that didn't happen? The traffic that didn't arrive to your website? The conversions that didn't come through?

You can’t measure what doesn’t happen. Yet, without a great strategy, you’re missing out on what could have been.

2. Missing puzzle pieces

Assume somewhere off this chart are things like good products, good people, well-run business, some sales and so on. The above chart is about marketing. For a strategy to work, you want all this stuff embedded on a deeply considered, validated level within your organisation.

You must understand your target customers and how you want to speak to them. You need to know your own brand, what that means, what your goals are, who you work with, how you go about things.

Watch this talk by Sonia Marciano on how the elements of marketing fit together into an effective strategy. It’s dead good.

3. Grand Designs

Yes, the TV show. It's ostensibly about building, but, in reality, it's about relationships under pressure. And it often includes the fatal words, “We're going to be our own project manager”.

There's a reason architects charge a lot of money and spend years learning their craft. There's a reason why you need buildings managers. Without good people at the helm, you’re going to end up delivering behind schedule and over budget. And your building might fall down.

Best intentions coupled with short-term cost-efficiency is not a strategy. It’s a failure mode.

4. HiPPOs

HiPPO. The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. The boss of “my way or the highway.” The vice president of no.

Senior leaders obviously have an important role in the marketing strategy, but their business acumen doesn't necessarily make them marketing experts. You need those strategists who are capable of speaking truth to power, too, and who specialise in marketing. They will collaborate with your Founders and your CEOs to forge the best path forward.

‘If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.’

— Jim Barksdale, Netscape

5. The Person in the Mirror problem

The person in the mirror isn't necessarily your customer. The things your customers are interested in are not always the things that you are interested in. Customers don't buy your products and services for the same reason you created them.

There's a temptation to see the world through your own lens and to assume that the customer is like you. Often, this is not the case. So, don’t build a strategy around you, build it around your target audience.

6. Confusing activity with strategy

This is very common. And the underpants gnomes from South Park sum it up nicely. They have a plan. They are going to make a huge amount of money by collecting underpants. That’s the activity. But there's a missing phase two that turns the underpants into money. Nobody wants to buy the underpants, so they just pile up.

In business, we see a lot of underpants gnoming. That is, trying to solve a marketing problem by just doing more stuff without connecting the activity to the outcome.

7. Magic bullets

If we do this one thing, it's going to fix everything. PPC, SEO, podcasting, hiring a consultant. These tactics worked for someone else, or for my last business, or my pal said she thought it was a great idea, yada yada.

It’s not to say they don’t work, but the reality is everything's joined to everything else, and you have to get it all right. You need to cast a wide net to get a pipeline of traffic, leads, and customers.

People who have a sales background, or who have generated sales through referral networks or vendors, fall into this way of thinking. That sales magic bullet is not a marketing strategy. One does not translate to the other. It isn’t scalable or diverse in the way that marketing strategies need to be to actually be bullet-proof over the long term.

8. The smooth pebble

Nobody wants to offend anyone. We want everyone in the world to be able to buy our product. “We could sell IT services to everyone in the country, so we don't want anything on our website that says we only do it for this industry sector or in this region.”

Businesses fear alienating a paying audience, but in so doing, they fail to target. And all marketing is targeting. Therefore, be the pebble with a bit of a rough edge, some interesting crevices, colourful spots and pockmarks. The smooth pebble is nice, but boring.

9. “What got us here…” (won't get you there)

The things that got you to a million pounds turnover, the things that got you your first one hundred customers — they aren't the thing that get you the next stage of evolution.

A lot of smaller companies get started because they can sell their passion and expertise and grow by reputation and referral. But if you feel like you’re now bouncing off a barrier, then you may need to radically change your marketing strategy to enable a new phase of growth.

This diagram is from ‘The Five Stages of Small Business Growth’ and though it describes business growth more generally, it maps nicely to marketing strategy as well. As your company matures and gets bigger, the gateways to growth change, too.

10. The Dunning-Kruger effect

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the theory that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You think you know something about marketing and therefore you don't know what you don't know, and you don't know how limited your knowledge and expertise actually is.

This is compounded in smaller businesses where people have been successful in one area. Technology specialists. Direct sales whizz-kids. Entrepreneurial geniuses.

Expertise, sadly, is not fungible. It’s worth bringing in a marketing specialist even if it’s just to test the depth of your own knowledge. Can they tell you something new in just one conversation?

11. All ‘what’ and no ‘why’

Check out the TED Talk ‘Start With Why’ by Simon Sinek. It’s all about figuring out the ‘why you exist as a business’ and communicating that. It’s very hard to do. It’s a big, complex question and it requires a lot of self-discovery and challenging discussions and thought.

Many prospective clients that we speak to want to and are very good at talking about ‘what’ they do. SAP migrations to the cloud. IT support. Data transformation. But that doesn’t inspire people to buy. The ‘why’ should be at the heart of your marketing strategy, not the ‘what’.

12. Lazy assumptions

If you just worked off demographic data to make your audience personas, then you’ve missed a great deal about who those people are. As demonstrated here:

(Note, the graphic was made before Charles became king!)

Based on demographics, these are the same people. However, rather obviously, they’re worlds apart.

You need to talk to people. Find out their goals, their pain points, what they need to make their working life better. Then you can build a more strategic idea of what your marketing needs to do to reach those people. Don’t be lazy. Do your research. And research the right stuff.

13. Resisting change

All strategy means change and change is hard. It’s hard because it touches on human psychology and behaviour. Marketing is ever-changing.

Change is even harder for business decision-makers because they're very invested in their expertise and their success. They identify, personally, with their business. So, if someone turns up and says, “That's all crap; don't do that, do something else.”, your first reaction is going to be, “Shut up. Who are you? What do you know?”.

When sharing your marketing strategy, bear this “death valley” of change in mind. Otherwise, your strategy may never get off the ground. You may get pushback. You may lose momentum. The most difficult part of change is carrying it through to the end.

14. Giving up too soon

Strategy is the roadmap, not the journey. It points you in the right direction. Ideally, it anticipates some of the concerns, problems and falling off points that may come up during implementation. But not all of them.

As such, it’s important not to give up too soon. Think of your marketing as an engine. You must give it the fuel it needs to actually work, whether that’s talented people or budget (around 10 percent of revenue is about average) or whatever.

Most of all, give your marketing time. You’ll find yourself putting in more effort than you get return — at first — however, the gains are exponential. It can be worth letting a strategy play out, even if you don’t see instant results.

‘Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow.’

— Leo Tolstoy

Yes, it’s true. Articulate Marketing has won Small Employer of the Year at The Investors in People Awards 2022.

‘A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.’

— Seth Godin, author and marketer

Does your brand resonate with your target audience and differentiate your business? Is it a story worth telling?

If your brand needs an overhaul, you’ve come to the right corner of the internet. Here’s how to implement a rebrand strategy quickly, effectively and on a tight budget.

This blog is based on one of our popular webinars hosted by Ioana Negulescu, Articulate’s Head of Studio and experienced designer. Watch the video here. Download the slides here.

Everything you need for a successful brand

Where a company's culture defines how the company is perceived internally, a brand defines how it is perceived externally.

Where a company's culture makes people want to work for that company, a brand makes people want to consume its products or services.

In short, a brand is the yin to the yang of company culture. It’s what you tell the outside world about your business.

To break it down further, a brand is made up of:

• Visual assets. Your logo, your website, your marketing materials, your sales presentations, and so on.
• Brand values. What you believe in and what you want others to believe about you. This includes your brand promise and vision, Simon’s Sinek famous ‘Why?’, and your competitive advantage.
• Brand language. How you communicate your messages. This includes your tone of voice, your word choice and overall communication style.
• Brand personality. A set of personality traits that represent who you are as a business and how you are perceived by others. This could include terms such as “approachable” or “trustworthy”.
• Brand experience. The experience you create for your customers during all stages (that is, every step before they make the decision to choose you over your competitors, throughout the sales cycle, and even after the engagement begins).

By implementing a strategy that addresses each of these components, your brand will be consistent, unique and recognisable.

Armed with a strong brand identity, you can go on to form positive, long-lasting relationships with clients and others. Know thyself: that’s what success looks like for this project.

Step 0: Before you get started

What is going to trigger your rebranding project?

Most obviously, if your logo, website and other assets are tired and outdated. If they were last updated several years ago. That could be a red flag.

An inconsistent, or non-existent, visual tone of voice is a glaring sign, too. Meaning, your brand style is hard to pin down, or shifts from platform to platform.

If your logo does not match your website or marketing materials, then that’s also something to watch out for. Disconnection happens when a brand strategy is not applied across the whole piece. More on that later.

Once you’ve established you actually need a rebrand, then you must get the right team on board.

My advice as a design professional is don't do it in-house unless you have a design team. Hiring an external agency means you can turn the tap on or off. A project like this is usually an intense flurry of activity over a few months, so from a resourcing perspective it makes sense to look outside your organisation for that temporary skills boost. Plus, an outsider can provide a fresh pair of eyes. They see what you cannot.

Then, there are the usual questions. Who is involved, what timeline are we talking about, how much can we put towards this? It’s a balancing act. You want a small group of decision-makers, to stay agile. You don’t want to be agonising over this project in six months; it should be over and done with by that point. You want sufficient budget to get the right results and a return on your investment. Ask an expert to advise you on what that means for your business.

A word of warning on budget brand agencies: Yes, you can go to a cheap provider and get a new logo for a hundred bucks. But that logo probably won’t have a strategic purpose. It’s likely to be a hodgepodge of stock imagery. There’s even a risk that you end up mimicking or outright plagiarising an existing logo, because the company hasn’t done their research. Lawsuits are expensive.

On the flip side, watch out for inflated prices, unnecessary extras and hype (as exemplified by the Staples logo reveal).

Step 1: Brand strategy

‘Branding is the process of connecting good strategy with good creativity.’

— Marty Neumeier, author and entrepreneur

Align your marketing strategy and design decisions to get to a brand design blueprint that is tailored to your personas, your goals and your mission. Don't jump into a design without a strong strategic foundation.

With clients, we start this process off with a kick-off call. At this call, we often hear, ”I want something that looks like what they’ve got”. We understand, but remember, you don’t want to be like everybody else. This is your brand. So avoid making the same choices as your competitors. Look at them as part of this initial research phase, but come into this project with an open mindset to create a strategy that’s all your own.

It’s at this stage that we suggest doing a series of workshops around personas, core messaging, tone of voice, mission, vision, purpose and values. We tend to asking things like, “What are your growth aspirations?”, “How do you think your existing customers perceive your brand?” and “Is there anything from the brand heritage that you would like to keep?”

Though, most of the time, the discussion is the work, it’s helpful to document the outcomes for future reference. Each document should cover one area and be about a page or two long. This forms your brand strategy, but it also lays the foundation for content marketing and website redesigns. Everything in marketing starts with strategy.

Budget tip: Sign up for our DIY strategic foundations course. It’s a free set of five lessons, emailed weekly, that will help you organise your workshops.

Step 2: Mood boards and mock-ups

Although a brand encompasses a lot of how your business communicates, we’ll focus on the visual side of things now.

Mood boards help you to compare and contrast styles, based on your preferences. We normally bring clients a few mood boards with different design directions. Each one comes with a clear through-line from the discussions that came beforehand. For example, if you want to be “the bold new voice of Insurtech”, we’d present options with a vibrant colour palette and dynamic imagery.

Once we’ve narrowed down our options, we then move on to creating mock-ups. These are examples of whatever deliverables we established at the start of our engagement with a client. That might be a website rebrand, so we’d produce a homepage design with example modules. It could be a white paper template or a PowerPoint presentation template.

A mock-up demonstrates the brand visualisation in a way that allows stakeholders to make tweaks before a final decision is reached, or before that work is put into action.

Budget tip: Make moodboards yourself by taking screenshots of things that you like and putting them together in one place, such as Pinterest. You could even use a whiteboard, cut-outs/print-outs and blue-tack. Then, if you haven’t been working alongside a designer up to this point (however, we recommend you do so!), you can create a brief for them to work from. Use your mood boards and strategy documents to advise your designer so they can put together mock-ups that you’ll love.

Step 3: Brand book

At the end of all of this, you will want to create a brand book. A brand book brings together all the visual assets that define or evolve your existing brand. It helps you maintain a consistent brand, from fonts to imagery to icons.

Unfortunately, while many businesses have some kind of brand book, only 30 percent enforce it. Sometimes, this is because the brand book is not kept up to date, or due to lack of access. We often see long brand books that are dozens of pages with strict rules that constrain creativity and confuse the average user. The book looks authoritative and may please the CEO, but the reality is it’s over-worked and unusable.

Instead, keep your brand books easy to to use and concise. Use interactive links in the contents page at the beginning to navigate to each section. Include only the most important information. Also, include links to further information or assets as needed, such as logo files, font links, templates and so on. Make it the index for all of those resources. Get different people to review the book, to check they can find everything they need.

Budget tip: Use open source tools. For colour palettes, we suggest Coolers. Google fonts are free, and we always recommend Inter as a safe, default font (we use it a lot!). To find royalty free stock photography try Unsplash or Pexels. FreePik is a great source for illustrations and icons. GIMP is a solid alternative to photo editors like Photoshop.

Example project: Logo rebrand

Let’s take a logo rebrand as an example.

Here’s the scenario. We tend to think of branding with a website-first approach. In traditional advertising, your logo was the face of your company. In the digital world, your website is. So, we can assume you’ve gone through some strategic workshops and we’re just about ready to launch your site. But. There’s a blocker. Your logo is outdated and doesn’t match your website.

Step 0: Start with the right mindset, a.k.a. this is an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) logo that you can iterate on in the future. Importantly, it’s also going to be an evolution of your existing logo. You’re not starting from scratch. As such, the process should take a few weeks, not months. You need a small team with a designer who is experienced in creating logos in this way.

Step 1: Kick-off the project. Discuss your initial preferences and goals. Look at examples of logos across your industry, and beyond. Do market research. Refer to your strategic foundations and your design blueprints.

Step 2: Brainstorm sketches for the logo mark. Stick to black and white, because every logo should work without any colour. At first, embrace the concept that every idea is a good idea. Then, pick out a few favourites to develop further. Try out different colours. Add typography. Look at it when it’s very very small, and when it’s enlarged to billboard proportions. Consider things like simplicity, legibility, contrast, harmony, colour hierarchy, accessibility and personality.

Step 3: Document your chosen logo in your brand book. Have one version that’s just the logo mark, and one with typography as well. Define size ratios. Decide if the logo changes depending on the background colour. (Always have versions that work on dark or light backgrounds.) Show how the logo should look in situ. Perhaps create some logos for special events, such as for Pride month.

Blue Peter style, here are some logo rebranding projects we did earlier:

Embrace the evolution

As you can see from that example, rebranding doesn’t have to be this scary, expensive thing. Small changes make a big difference.

To paraphrase Seth Godin, choose to be remarkable, not invisible.

If you’d like to learn more about how we do rebranding for clients, we’d love to open that conversational door. Come into Articulate’s workshop. Check out the Difference Engine. Sample our case studies. Book a guided tour. We’d love to have you.

Remember the first time you typed ‘Do a barrel roll’ into Google? And then you ran to tell all your friends to do the same?

Businesses need to pay attention to employee mental health and wellbeing. Especially remote working organisations.

It’s no secret that at Articulate, we love inbound marketing. Compared with outbound advertising, inbound lead generation strategies are non-invasive, more targeted and more profitable. Indeed, 91 percent of people think adverts have become increasingly intrusive over the last few years. This is why over 615 million devices worldwide have an ad-blocker.

However, this doesn’t mean you should abandon advertising altogether. You just need to take a different approach.

Marketers are like dragons. We have a penchant for princesses, poetry and press releases. And, we hoard leads like a precious pile of pennies.