Strategy First: Moncur’s Approach to Branding
By Megan Zale
Nearly every branding company claims they’re strategic. But here at Moncur, we take brand strategy to the next level. Here’s how.
Over the course of Moncur’s 30+ year history, we’ve found our sweet spot in brand strategy. Clients don’t just come to us for visually stunning branding work, they come to us for work that communicates beautifully—from the words, to the design, to the functionality, and beyond. And it all starts with laying a foundation of strategy right from the start.
A lot of our clients at Moncur, especially those in the B2B space, have really technical or complicated offerings. They’re not selling to just the average consumer, they need to communicate with highly intelligent audiences—engineers, c-suite executives, etc. In order to communicate effectively, it requires a level of understanding that many typical branding agencies just don’t bother to gain.
What makes Moncur different is that, simply put, we seek to understand. While others often “fake it until they make it,” we know that in order to communicate with the experts, we need to be experts ourselves. We get there by asking the right questions, paying attention to the details, doing the research, and immersing ourselves into our clients’ businesses.
While we integrate strategy into literally everything we do here at Moncur, some projects require a heavier strategic lift than others. Here’s a glimpse into some of the highly strategic projects we love to tackle.
Strategic Messaging
We like to begin all of our branding engagements with the development of strategic messaging. It starts with an in-depth information gathering process that enables our team to understand all the ins and outs of our clients’ businesses. We’ll weed through all the details to uncover the key messages our clients need in order to successfully communicate with their key audiences—things like who they are, what they do, and what makes them different from the competition. It’s all packaged up into a comprehensive guide that goes on to act as a foundation for all brand communications moving forward.
Brand Architecture
Often times, we have companies come to us because they’re dealing with what we like to call “brand soup.” Whether they’ve made recent acquisitions, restructured their operations, or a number of other scenarios, they’re juggling multiple brands and struggling to make sense of it all. Moncur brings the fresh perspective and strategic direction these organizations need to establish a brand architecture that both reflects the proper hierarchy and is visually cohesive.
Website Design and Development
A lot more goes into the construction of a website than many companies realize. It’s an endeavor that requires strategy on multiple levels. Whether our development team is providing strategic guidance as to what CMS is best suited to our clients’ needs, our content team is architecting a site map that organizes information in the most logical manner, or our creative team is designing an interface that prioritizes user-friendliness, every department must be in lock-step to deliver a website that will position them as a leader in their industry.
By bringing a strategic mindset to each and every one of our projects, we’re able to deliver work that effectively communicates to our clients’ audiences, and ultimately helps them sell more of what they do. To get started laying strong foundation of strategy throughout your brand, contact Moncur today.