WORK WITH SONDO, THE REBRANDING AGENCY WHO GROWS YOUR BUSINESS
Need a new brand?
We looooove developing new brands. It’s blue sky time, when anything seems possible. But the tricky question is: amongst all those possibilities, which ones are right? Don’t worry, we got you. We’ll steer you past the common traps and dead-ends to craft a brand that’s unique, authentic and effective.
REBRANDING AGENCY MELBOURNE AND GOLD COAST
Customer research
When you’re busy creating a new business or product, your focus tends to be on yourself. So it’s easy to overlook the most important person in the equation: your customer. We can help you gain a detailed understanding of who your potential customers are, and what problem they’e trying to solve.
Brand story
It’s a crowded market out there. To cut through and stick in customers’ minds, you need a compelling brand story. What’s special about you? Why do you exist? Why will customers’ lives be better if they choose you rather than a competitor? We’ll help you answer these questions and then shape them into a memorable story that comes alive in your customers’ imaginations.
360 degree branding
To introduce yourself to the world memorably, people must be told a consistent story whether they’re looking at your brandmark or reading your website or talking to your staff. We’ll help you define how your brand plays out at every touchpoint, creating a comprehensive and cohesive experience for your customers and your team.
We have so much more clarity about our target audience and how we are currently perceived in the marketplace — and how this needs to shift. We also have the confidence to charge more for our services and start initiating conversations about different services.
Our services
We offer a full suite of services to refresh your brand, launch it, and keep it purring for years to come.
Too often, projects fail because no one stopped to identify the core problem. At Sondo, the foundation of everything we do exists upon an effective brand strategy. This way, our creative projects aren’t just beautiful – they actually make a difference.
Sondo is a branding agency known for its insightful brand and marketing strategy. We’ll dig deep to understand your organisation and industry, identify the core challenge standing between you and your goals, and recommend the most effective levers to solve it.
To discover more about how we can help you with brand development and strategy, click here.
Brand design and visual identity are what most people think of when they hear the word “brand”. And with good reason. Your visual identity is only one element of your brand, but it’s where most customers’ experience of your brand starts. As a creative branding agency, our brand design will ensure that first impression wows them.
Words are the quiet achievers of branding. Your business’s voice has a great effect on how the world perceives you – and it’s one of the most cost effective ways to influence customers. We’re a creative branding agency who has developed standout verbal identities for market leaders. We’ll craft the perfect tone of voice for your business, and create key messages to ensure you’re telling a compelling, consistent story every time you snatch a customer’s attention.
Been to a great looking restaurant that was let down by crappy service? Culture is the most overlooked pillar of branding. The way every team member from CEO to intern acts profoundly affects how customers and staff perceive your business.
Sondo can help you create the foundations for a strong, positive culture that actively reinforces your brand identity at every moment of every day.
To stay current with customer (and staff) needs and expectations, your organisation may need to refresh its brand from time to time. A rebrand or refresh can be an essential tool to achieve new business goals, but it needs to be managed right to bring your stakeholders with you.
A merger or acquisition is an exciting opportunity for growth but also brings the potential for instability. Developing the right brand is key to navigating doubts and rallying everyone behind a bold, new vision for the future.
Driven by strategy.
Exploring with empathy.
Delivering real results.
A guide to creating a successful brand
Why is brand design about more than a logo?
Your brand is more than your logo. It’s the story of your business, and the difference it makes to customers’ lives. That story is told through every single part of your business that a customer experiences.
A logo alone is not enough to tell much of a story. If you saw Nike’s swoosh for the first time, not knowing anything about the business, it wouldn’t mean much to you. In fact, it didn’t ever mean much to Nike’s founder, Phil Knight. When Knight first saw the swoosh, his dubious reaction was: "Well, I don't love it, but maybe it will grow on me."
It’s all the other visual elements of a business’s brand - its colours, fonts, icons, style of photography and other imagery - working in combination with the logo that start to tell the full story.
And if those other elements aren’t carefully designed to match the logo, not only won’t they develop a richer story, but they might create ideas that clash with each other, undercutting the power of your logo and backfiring into a confusing customer experience.
So bottom line - it’s very rare you can achieve significant improvements by creating or changing just your logo. You need to design all the visual elements of your brand at the same time, so they work together like a finely tuned machine to tell the story that’s right for your brand.
As a full service creative agency, Sondo has the experience and expertise to capture the what’s special about your business and transform it into a complete, cohesive visual identity. Think of us as brand architects - we sculpt your organisation into a visual work of art. A work of art with your logo as its centrepiece, but supported by every element to tell the same story.
(Oh, and by the way, your brand’s story is shaped by a lot more than just your visuals. Your verbal identity and culture also play key roles in telling your story. So we always recommend reviewing these at the same time as you consider your visual branding. To start thinking about what your brand story might be, try Sondo’s brand positioning guide here.
Why is brand strategy important?
Your brand is your story, but exactly what kind of story do you need to tell to encourage customers to take the action you need? You may also have multiple businesses or products in your group, and you’re trying to decide how many brands you need.
We can help you find answers to all those questions and more by creating a smart brand strategy for your business.
A brand strategy is sort of your battle plan. It’s the thing that ensures your brand isn’t just pretty, but actually solving your business’s key challenges, to get it where it needs to go.
At Sondo, our creative services are a significant and influential part of what we do. But our strategic thinking is what makes our work so effective.
We start every project by diving deep to investigate your business and the wider market. By talking to your stakeholders, auditing your current brand and analysing your competition, we uncover insights that give us - and you - a fresh perspective on your business.
Based on what we learn, we’ll identify the core challenges we need to solve, explore the pro’s and con’s of different solutions, and then recommend the most effective way forward for your brand.
High-quality strategic branding can create a variety of successful outcomes, including:
- Building trust
- Achieving higher and more sustainable performance
- Navigating volatile environments; and
- Attracting higher quality staff
What’s a verbal identity and why does it matter?
Your verbal identity is how your business presents itself through language - both the words used in your written communications, and the way your team speak to each other and to customers. Sondo can help your business discover its own unique voice, expressing your brand’s distinct personality.
The best branding agencies understand how crucial verbal identity is in setting your brand apart from competitors, and reinforcing your overall corporate identity. Through your voice, you can build trust and credibility, and reflect a commitment to authenticity. Verbal identity also plays a crucial role in brand recognition and consistency across a variety of communication channels, including advertising, social media and in-house communication.
Why are a business’s purpose and values important?
One key factor shared by the world’s most successful, visionary businesses is that they have a clear understanding of the purpose and core values that drive them.
These foundations of organisational culture provide a resilient framework for better decision-making that directly links to business growth. But they also reach outside the business to attract consumers who share your worldview. This new market brings more than customer loyalty - they’re passionate brand champions who spread the word about your business with the world, supercharging your marketing.
As a leading brand and culture agency, Sondo can guide your management team (or collaborate with your people & culture team) to identify your purpose and values, and create behaviours to put them into daily practice.
We can also make your entire team more engaged with your purpose and values, and catalyse transformation of your culture, through:
- workshops
- internal communication campaigns
- brand videos; and
- advice on better ways to use the office environment to foster a positive culture.
What does brand have to do with organisational culture?
When built right, your brand and your organisational culture continually reinforce each other, making both stronger.
Your culture is one of the 3 key channels through which your business communicates its brand to the world. (The other 2 channels are your visuals and your language or “verbal identity”.)
The purpose and values you champion, and the way your team acts, say a lot to the world about what kind of business you are. Are you caring and attentive, or aloof and cool? Do you prize equality and lift everyone, or do you reward peak achievement and reserve yourself for the elite?
When you think of it this way, it becomes more obvious that your culture is your brand story in action.
At Sondo, our brand consulting agency can guide you to embed these cultural attributes as integral parts of your brand, designing them carefully to ensure they tell the same story as your visuals and brand language.
Your new brand will do more than reflect your culture. It will actively nurture your ideal culture.
By articulating your purpose and values in an engaging way, and setting practical behaviours that put your values into daily effect, you can consciously shape your culture.
And by ensuring your brand communicates your values with the outside world, you also attract job applicants who share your worldview. With each new addition of one of these brand champions to your team, that worldview will become the natural heart of your business, rather than something you need to consciously create in your culture.
Because your brand and culture will be constantly cycling, doing the job for you.
