Branding Agency Cost & Brand Building Process in India

Before we jump into branding agency cost, one should know what brand is all about?

You must know your brand does not exist in your public relations team, marketing department, or your CEO’s office. A brand exists only in the minds of your customers, every interaction they have had with your company, service or your products. Each one of these interactions tells a story to your customers. If your customer believes that a product is new, creative and innovative, then those features will become part of your brand in that customer’s mind.

Branding agency is one of the most crucial for a successful business. It’s the first impression you leave on your audience, and it’s what makes you gain a competitive advantage. Your brand should act as a direct reflection of what your customers should expect from you.

It’s your tone, your vision, mission, your marketing materials, your packaging, and your website. It’s the reason people will choose you over others. For small businesses especially, it’s crucial to attract and retain loyal customers and branding will do just that.

LOGO DESIGN IS NOT YOUR BRAND

The brand is a promise towards your customer, which tells them what they can expect from your services or products as it will differentiate your values or benefits from your competitors. The brand is derived from who you are, what you aim to be, and what people perceive you do.

In simple words, your brand is defined by a customer’s overall perception of your business.

The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, says it even better: “Your brand is what other people say about you when you are not in the room.”

Your brand is your reputation! Which does not come overnight; one has to be Consistent. Strategic branding will lead to substantial brand equity, which means the added value brought to your company’s products or services will allow you to charge more compared to other identical, unbranded products command.

Building a brand is a process. However, the on-going effort will result in establishing long-term relationships with your customers. Hence only then the brand can lead to a steady increase in sales, more projects, word-of-mouth referrals, and advocacy for your products or services.

Also read : 10 Effective Branding Trends 2020

BRAND BUILDING PROCESS

Even before starting with the process of building your brand make sure you review your services or products understand its offerings, emotional and rational needs, it’s space in the market and ensures brand character should promote business.

1.Competitors Research

We discuss providing unique and distinct features and gain a competitive advantage, and then we should also be aware of what competitive brands are offering.

Hence understand their value proposition and various other features which they are focussing such as:

• Is the competitor consistent with their brand messaging and visual identity?
• What is the value proposition of the competitor’s products or services?
• Does the competitor have customer reviews on a various national and international platform?
• On which platform is the competitor markets their business, online, offline or both?

2.Discover the purpose behind your brand

Identify what is the goal of your company and to understand that ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the reason for your existence?
• What differentiates your brand?
• What pain points are you focussing?
• Why your audience should care about your brand?

3. Your Target Audience

When you reduce your spectrum from wide-angle to a precise and specific angle, then things will get more uncomplicated and easy to monitor.

Such as if the make sure you identify your target audience based on brand positioning the target audience is decided. Such as if age, gender, location, income and education should be determined and executed as per product or services. Hence this also aligns your brand messaging and overall emotion of brand.

4. Establish Brand Mission Statement

What your company is doing is your mission statement, but when we say mission, it will also include the commitment, passion and strategy we use to execute that work. Even before targeting the audience, it is essential to define the brand mission based on values, culture, and purpose of the company.

Example: The Starbucks mission

“To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time.”

5. Mark the Key qualities of your brand

Essential attributes are the reason for customers to select your brand over competitors. Hence they have to be powerful and should address customers pain points. Your brand can provide benefits in terms of quality, customer service, systematic process, save time and cost, anything which is making it’s unique.

Example: Brand Tanishq is known for GOLD based on TATA trust and affinity

6. Create a unique Brand Voice

Depending upon the brand personality brand voice is dependent. It is the way the brand communicates with its customers and how they respond to you.

Brand voice can be friendly, authoritative, technical, informative, service-oriented and many adjectives.

Desh ka Namak – TATA NAMAK

Amul the taste of India – AMUL

Kuch Mitha Ho jayey – Dairy Milk

7. Brand Personality

Brand personality is based on your target customers and overall emotion of brand, which can be funny, modern, urban, friendly, and mature. The brand personality should be consistent across all touch-points of the brand.

Example: Volvo has a responsible, trustworthy, reliable, family-man personality.

8. Build a brand story and messaging

Brand story and brand message is an opportunity to communicate the creative and emotional journey of the brand on the human level. Use language which should immediately strike an emotional chord.

Example: Amazon “apne dukhan”

9. Brand Design process

It is a systematic way of creating, communicating and strengthening the brand’s name. From logo creation, tagline and will involve various other identities which are visual recognition of your brand promise. The process will include:

– Logo Design & Visual Identity

– Website Design and e-commerce

– Packaging Design

– Print Design

10. Keep doing Brand Marketing

Website is the most critical tool for marketing your brand hence includes your brand voice, message, and personality into the content. Profile pages for social media networks should be branded visually, and with your chosen voice for engagement.

– SEO & Content Marketing

– Social Media Marketing

– Email Marketing

– Paid Advertising (PPC)

Many more in list.

COST OF BRANDING IN INDIA:

1. Competitor Research

Cost : 50000 INR – 200000 INR

Competitor analysis in marketing, branding and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. The analysis provides both a defensive and offensive strategic context to identify opportunities and threats. Small Company competitor research start from Approx. 50000 Rupee.

2. Brand Strategy and positioning:

Your Target Audience, Brand mission, Brand Voice, Brand Personality, Brand story

Cost : 100000 INR – 200000 INR 

A smaller company might spend a few days to understand company values and culture, while bigger companies will research competitive analysis. Expensive projects will involve training and overall briefing.

3. Brand Design

Brand Designing includes different design services, which only experienced design agency can strategize and do it using brand consistency:-

– Logo Design & Visual Identity [5000 INR – 40000 INR]

Pricing here increases based on logo variations done, the more brands you have, the level of detail required in your visual guidance.

– Website [12000 INR – 70000 INR]

Require user research, prototyping, content development, and engineering work. Pricing is largely based on the complexity of engineering technicality.

– Packaging [20000 INR-40000 INR]

The type of packaging, positioning, the personality of the brand, research, creative and technicality aspect will include the cost of pricing. The quality of work and the number of revisions will decide.

– Print Design [15000 INR – 25000 INR]

Visual communication is used to convey information to an audience through aesthetic design printed on a tangible surface and are designed to be printed on paper, as opposed to presented on a digital platform.

4. Brand Marketing 

– SEO & Content Marketing [12000 INR – 25000 INR Monthly]

Content and SEO go hand-in-hand high-quality content earns you backlinks, provides a high-quality user experience. SEO will function around the search engine guidelines and focuses on understanding the keywords that can drive traffic to websites. Depending upon the depth of work and technical involvement will depend on the cost

– Social Media Marketing [12000 INR – 25000 INR Monthly]

The level of post, campaigns, videos, paid as well as unpaid will decide the pricing of social media marketing. Even the form of platform is deciding factor for pricing.

– Email Marketing [8000 INR – 15000 INR]

 Depending upon the type of campaign and its strategies, the cost of email marketing will be dependent.

– Paid Advertising (PPC) [10000 INR – 20000 INR]

Type of advertisement, type of medium and duration are few aspects which are taken into consideration while finalising pricing.

CONCLUSION

Nobody knows your brand better than you; hence it is up to you to spread the word.

When hiring employees, ensure that they are a culture fit–aligning with the mission, vision, and values of your brand.

As it said, “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution” each customer will have his preferences, brand requirements, taste, likings, and unique pain points and hence agency has to prepare itself and cater customer as per their needs and requirements.

You can hire one of the top branding agencies, or you may have a family

a member who is working as a freelancer no matter which option you choose to work, branding will always be a vital part of your business that will help you to understand the brand value and communicate accordingly.

Better brands start with meaningful conversations

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Author: Megha Malik

As a passionate entrepreneur and creative brand consultant with experience of 14 years in digital, branding and packaging industry, it is my honest effort to put my experiences and knowledge of industry towards readers. A chartered accountant by degree but a marketing personality in blood has motivated her to take in designing industry as a career. With her fun-loving personality and sharp branding skills, she is a great motivational speaker on her YouTube channel, an active member in various business channels offline as well as online. Do connect me personally via my LinkedIn and I love to share my expertise with you.