HELPING TO CREATE BRANDS PEOPLE LOVE
Your brand is more than a logo or color palette, it’s the story people tell about your business when you’re not in the room. For small and medium-sized businesses, a strong brand identity is your edge in a crowded marketplace. It builds credibility, helps you stand out from competitors and makes customers trust you before they even meet you. A clear, consistent brand identity gives your business salience - helping your audience to recognise and connect with you across every touchpoint.
A business is shaped by the people at the heart of it. Our approach is rooted in being true to the values and purpose of those people. Through our consultancy, we can help you to define and understand that identity: the character, the visuals, the voice and the message that all make your business uniquely memorable.
We consult with and assist businesses at every stage of their lives, from inception and start up where we conceptualise a new brand; to refresh and redevelopment when a brand needs a new lease of life; to repositioning and steering of heritage brands looking to remain relevant in a new era. Read more about our toolkit below.
THE BRAND TOOLKIT
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A brand’s character gives it human-like traits that people can relate to, making the brand easier to recognise, remember and differentiate in competitive markets. Without a clear character, a brand becomes vague and interchangeable, even if its products are strong. With our years of teaching experience in a high level academic setting, we use the tried and tested theories of world renowned brand researchers to perfect your strategy and help to build a clear picture of your brand.
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Effective brand positioning requires that you know your competitors and the market you operate in - something that we highly recommend and can help you with. Only when you know who you’re up against. what their strengths and weaknesses are and why people choose them, can you really figure out how you measure up to them. Then you can occupy with confidence and success, your own space in the marketplace.
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What’s in a name? More than you might think! A name can be abstract or meaningful; it can have an obvious link to your products and services or appear to be more random. But a name should be easy to remember and to recall and hopefully - unique, or as close to unique as it’s possible to be. We can help with conceptualising names and other word based trademarks, as well as carrying out the necessary research into the trademarks register to ensure non-infringement.
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Colour is a game changing way to create a mood and feeling about your brand. Not a decison to be taken lightly, choosing the right colour palette can transform feeling about your brand - from masculine to feminine; corporate to informal; luxury to budget; and even natural to man-made. Colour has the power to bring about all these moods and more. As part of a brand development workshop and with the help of some fascinating psychological techniques, we can help to work out what colour is best for your brand. Then we can move onto typography and logo styles - it takes time to understand what represents you best and it’s how we arrive at the perfect identity for your business.
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Take the time to think about how it feels to be spoken to by the people you love in different tones of voice and you’ll begin to understand why it matters for your brand too. Tone of voice is determined by the character of your brand (and the people at the centre of it); and the audience you’re trying to resonate with. Too much humour can kill one brand, whilst for another it’s everything. Think about the difference between Innocent and Rolls Royce and you’re beginning to understand the variance and why it matters. We can help to craft and perfect the right tone of voice for your brand and find something that feels easy and natural for you to maintain.
“I hired Black Hare to work on my branding. As a start-up business this can be quite daunting but Chrissie was able to work with me creatively and visually, making insightful recommendations and supplying timely concepts with valuable rationales. She kept me informed throughout the whole process. It was a pleasure to work with her and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Black Hare.”
PACKAGES FOR START-UPS
When you’re launching a startup, every decision matters - especially how the world sees you. A strong brand identity isn’t just about looking good; it’s about building the foundation for how customers, investors, and partners perceive your business. That said, we know that starting a business is expensive and your initial outlays can quickly become unmanageable. Time and time again we see brand identity taking a back seat and businesses struggling to make an impression when it really counts.
We believe all new businesses should start out with a great identity, so we’ve created a streamlined and affordable package to supply brand consultancy and creative services for small businesses, giving them everything they need to launch with the right impact.
CLIENT CASE STUDIES
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STANFORD GOULD: GROUP BRANDING
We have worked alongside multi award-winning Stanford Gould and Stanford Gould Online for almost 10 years, initially creating a slick and professional brand identity for this start-up and its sister company in the professional services sector. Heather Stanford is widely known in the business community, not least for her legal expertise and steadfast support of SMEs and their contractual requirements. We have helped to maintain brand salience using strong and eye catching brand marks and visual elements, such as logos; character avatars; email storytelling narrative; advertising design design as well as a savvy and best-friend tone of voice with a good dose of tongue in cheek humour coupled with no-nonsense expertise.
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CLIPPASAFE: HERITAGE BRAND MANAGEMENT
As a true British heritage brand, Clippasafe started their journey in 1958 - creating safety harnesses for children travelling in cars before the availability of seatbelts. In the 70 years that followed, they expanded to create an entire range of safety products to protect children both at home and out and about. Working with the brand since 2015, we have helped to refresh Clippasafe’s image to appeal to modern parents in an age where digital takes priority and brand appeal hinges on its ability to stay current, as well as being the face of trusted and reliable products in a competitive marketplace. Our work with Clippasafe has spanned advertising copy and design, social media curation, photography and digital e-comerce positioning.
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THE QSS GROUP: PRODUCT BRANDING
As long established experts in the field of health and safety consultancy, The QSS Group in partnership with the Univerity of Derby, designed and developed a software based product aimed at helping professionals in the transport and industrial sectors to manage risk maturity in the workplace. As well as assisting with naming the software and developing visual brand marks to bring the product to market, we consulted with them on positioning the product effectively and co-produced a promotional video to launch the software. The project required careful attention to niche target markets and profiled users, with whom all copy and material needed to resonate in order to be successful and encourage longterm advocacy.
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COLIN RICHARDS: POSITIONING STRATEGY
Colin Richards is a world renowned sex therapist and director at Intimacy Matters, a therapeutic practice aimed at helping couples and inviduals to overcome barriers to intimacy. Through his ground-breaking work that combines massage therapy and counselling, Colin has helped thousands of people across the globe. The often stigmatised nature of Colin’s work placed limitations on how and where he could advertise and how his work is perceived by those with misunderstandings. Through a strategic brand positioning approach, we supported Colin over a number of years to highlight the life-changing benefits of his work in a content and PR effort underpinned by the researched and academic grounding of his work.
