Brand Strategy

At Drive Traffic Media we don’t simply do logos.

Our branding services are led by a media psychology professional with years of branding and marketing experience. We do extensive qualitative and quantitative research to come up with a long-term strategy to improve the persuasiveness of all your messages across media: Website design, blog posts, social media, memes, videos, email copy.

Brand Discovery

We prefer to do business with those we like. It feels safer. The same applies to the brands we choose. We give our money to those we like and trust. We choose brands because of what they mean to us and because of the way they make us feel. Our favorite brands represent different aspects of who we are, who we would like to be, or how we would like to be seen by others. Brands don’t define us but serve as symbols to represent who we aspire to be or how do we want others to see us.

Our brand discovery package is designed specifically for small to medium-sized businesses to serve as a guide for you to create your own content or hire a third party.

Persona Development

Also known as “Buyer Persona” or “Customer Avatar,” a persona is a somewhat fictionalized representation of your typical or ideal customer, based both on your professional experience and the type of clients that you want to attract. A Persona summarizes your customers’ needs, goals, challenges, and desired experience.

The goal is to understand your customers at one glance so that you can tailor your marketing efforts to capture their attention. A Persona is written in a simple way that takes advantage of people’s preconceptions, as in “she lives in Beverly Hills” v. “she lives downtown,” and comes with a short narrative.

Your Brand’s Identity

Your brand identity defines the emotional approach, the kind of feel that the experience of interacting with your brand should evoke. Your brand’s identity will be based on the needs, goals and desired experience of your Persona. For instance, if your product is an app to improve productivity, and your Persona is a small business owner, your brand is a tool for economic growth, empowerment, and financial freedom.

It is not what your company can do but what your customers can achieve when interacting with your company. It is about how your customers will feel when contracting your services.

Your Brand’s Core Narrative

Your brand’s core narrative is a fairy-tale-like story that summarizes your company’s value from your customers perspective. It is a story based on extensive qualitative research, identification of the Jungian archetypes that best matches the solution offered by your company, and your customers’ desired experience.

It is a story that answers the question: How can my customers improve their lives by contracting my services? and that you want to repeat over and over so that your customers can assign meaning to your brand.

Competitive Landscape

The competitive landscape is an analysis of what your closest competitors are doing in terms of branding. For instance, if you compare insurance companies such as GEICO, Progressive and All-State, they are all using the Trickster/Joker archetype, but with a different angle: GEICO makes you feel smart because you saved money, Progressive makes you feel taken care of, while All State uses potential threats to make you feel anxious.

Understanding what your competitors do helps you define what will make your brand different. It is not about proving that you are the best at what you do. It is about showing that your brand is the right one.

Messaging Strategy

Once the Persona, Competitive Landscape, Brand Identity, and Core Narrative are defined, we create a Messaging Strategy.

This is an in-depth document (10 to 20 pages) based on the Brand Discovery findings, brand psychology, and prevailing persuasion theories full of recommendations on how to design more engaging and thus more persuasive messages as well as examples of recommended messages. From here, you can start creating your own copy or hire Drive Traffic Media for your copywriting.

Graphics Deliverables

This is the very last step of the brand discovery process.

Identity Package: Based on the findings from our strategic research we will create a logo, come up with a color palette, a tagline, and graphics for stationery.

Brand Guidelines: A short cheat-sheet for how to use your brand imagery, since not everyone in your team will want to read the in-depth Messaging Strategy. From mood and voice to technicalities such as size and spacing to how not to use it, as well as the text for your mission statement.

Our Branding Approach

Think about the way you decide what to watch on a movie-streaming night.

You see the posters, skim the descriptions, and pick a few to check their ratings at Rotten Tomatoes. In the end, you go for the one with the highest top critics score. Cold logic alone didn’t give you the answer. The reason was heavily assisted by the feelings in your gut. How did you narrow a list of hundreds and hundreds of movie titles to just a few? If one of the titles felt like something you would like to watch, you read the synopsis, and if that felt right too, you added the movie to the maybe list. You read the reviews only to verify that you were making the right choice and because you were looking to be thrilled, not disappointed.

Your brand is like a movie poster.

You cannot tell everything about a movie with just a title, an evocative image, and a catchy tag line. Likewise, you cannot praise all the virtues of your product with just a symbol. But you can make a promise, just like a movie poster does, the promise of an experience that will bring a certain feeling, one that will capture your customers’ attention because that feeling may be precisely how they were looking to feel.

Your brand is your promise to the customer. Your brand is both the suggestion of feeling and a hook that persuades your customers to listen to your story. Your brand is a repository of meaning and value.

We can help you define that promise, develop a recognizable identity to match your target audience so that you always deliver the right message.

Branding is all about feelings.

As a matter of fact, every decision is.

Our decision making isn’t objective but subjective. We don’t do what we know is best for us but what we feel is best for us.

Feelings play an essential role in our decision making because feelings are the way our unconscious motivates us to take the right steps. Antonio Damasio, one of the most respected neuroscientists on the planet, calls feelings the “mental deputies of homeostasis,” which he defines as the tendency not toward a stable equilibrium to support life but toward improved well-being. Feelings warn us of perils and call our attention to rising opportunities.

What are the feelings that you want your brand to convey? How will your brand help you present your story? More importantly, how will your brand transform your customers? Our branding services can help you answer these questions so that you can engage your customers at an emotional level.

Whether you need to start from scratch or redefine a brand that hasn’t worked that well, we are here to help you discover your branding identity. At Drive Traffic Media we are a full-service digital marketing and branding agency.

It may feel at first like a weird new-age, mystical exercise. After all, we have been trained to use reason and obey logic when making important decisions. Talking about communicating feelings instead of facts, letting emotions speak, and recommending storytelling as the best way to persuade may feel a bit off. The truth is that your emotional impulses follow your own experience and if your experience is right, because of all the knowledge you have accumulated throughout your life, your feelings will be right too. It is only on the rare occasions that emotions provide bad advice, as when you engage in binge-watching on a school night, that we lament listening to them. But hey, what was there to remind you to be good and stop after two episodes? Was it the fear of feeling tired at work the next day?

There’s nothing mystical about storytelling either. Scientific research has shown that messages relying on storytelling can be much more persuasive than messages relying on rational arguments, precisely because of the emotional load that stories contain. Our work at Drive Traffic Media is backed up by psychological science. As a branding and digital marketing agency, we understand how emotions work and the logic behind them. Our branding team in Los Angeles combines the sagacity of a digital marketing genius with decades of experience, the smarts of a media psychology professional, whose doctoral research focuses on how to create more compelling and persuasive messages, and the artistic power of a small army of copywriters, communicators, and graphic designers. Together we understand brand psychology, but more importantly, we understand people.

Ready to work with us? We are based in the heart of Silicon Beach, in Santa Monica, California. We specialize in small to middle size businesses. Thus, our rates are quite affordable.

Check the other tabs for strategy and graphics deliverables, and give us a call at (310)341-3939 or fill out the form at the bottom of this page or click here for the contact page.