Branding
Branding Services
With deep knowledge in consumer goods, lifestyle brands, and hospitality, our branding agency services clients across the globe and next door. Our core practice is focused on brand design. Design is content with intent, and creating a new brand is to manifest a vision of an organization’s future. Brand design is an agent of change.
The best branding honors who you are today but also charts a course for who you will become. It is a catalyst for growth and the bridge that takes you from where you are to where you want to be. It crafts a strategy for success and builds assets to make it real.
Successful brands are built on a foundation of business evolution. David Aaker changed brand and marketing strategy decades ago with the breakthrough idea that brands are strategic assets—growth platforms for future success that create ongoing value for an organization.
In short, branding is not about communicating value; it’s about creating value. It is not what you make. Branding is what you make possible.
Branding agencies tackle projects in a multitude of ways. Our team solves business problems through design. With this edict as a primary lens, our team crafts strategies for solutions that target goals, address challenges, and leverage opportunities for businesses. Our designers, strategists, and writers coach clients through a process of aligning brand positioning and communication with business execution.
Great branding does not describe an experience— it is an experience. It is an immersive story about the value and opportunity you provide to customers and community. That story should connect people to the core purpose of your brand, and authentically communicate with clarity, sincerity, and heart.
All of our brands are rooted in humanity and connection to culture. They tell myriad stories and speak with voices and visuals that are singular to each business. Bold challengers, elegant, elevated category leaders, heritage brands with wit and wisdom rooted in common sense—each embodies a poetry that is solely its own. Their stories reflect the values and attributes that make each business unique.
As brand designers, we take storytelling to the next level by linking stories to experiences. Our designers weave the visual and verbal into immersive experiences that inform, entice, surprise, and delight. We use our expertise and insight to infuse these moments into brand messaging, identity design, brand packaging, branded environments, digital branding, and more. Our branding services aim to make your product impactful, commanding, curious, and memorable.
The strongest brands have identities that spark brand awareness and clearly differentiate them in the marketplace. Those differentiators tie to the foundation of the business and the functional, emotional, and social value it delivers to consumers. That value is most potent when it is a result of an honest and unflinching display of authenticity.
Our best brands double down on the qualities that make them inarguably themselves. They dance to the beat of their own drum—but as real and genuine behavior rather than a “performance” to get noticed.
Designing an identity is an opportunity to personify a brand’s essence, to bring it to life, and to establish genuine emotional connections with people. Brands with strong identities are confident—they know who they are and how to convey it to connect with their target audience. In short, a clearly defined brand identity gives companies an edge and an increased chance of near-term impact and long-term success.
A strong brand identity is comprehensive and consistent. Full-service branding services encompass everything from brand strategy to logo design, brand guidelines, and marketing services, all working in service of a strategy for brand and business success. Even social media marketing, an asset that frequently fragments brand identity, must invariably embody and exhibit your defined voice and brand personality. Consistency is key in business branding.
Brand success involves three core components: compelling, effective storytelling, authentic human connection, and trust. By telling your story effectively and engaging customers in a genuine, human way, we build the recognition, trust, and affinity critical for developing and growing brand equity. That equity drives purchase intent.
Businesses with a defined verbal and visual identity and strong brand equity own an unfair advantage in the marketplace. They can charge a premium, whereas less recognizable brands cannot. Thinking longer-term, established identity and brand equity empower founders to negotiate a higher purchase price in a business merger or acquisition. The value of branding compounds over the life of a business.
Our Branding Services
We build brands from the ground up, rebrand companies that have lost their advantage, and offer full-service branding services that scale across media to catalyze immersive brand experiences. Here’s a look at the key services under our brand development umbrella.
Rebranding
We have rebranded companies and products that have been in the market for three years and one hundred and eighty-three years. Rebranding is more profound than just a new logo design—it can mean changing everything from your brand’s identity, strategy, name, and tagline to your website, marketing materials, and more. Rebranding services should be implemented thoughtfully, comprehensively, and consistently across every consumer experience.
Brand Strategy
We pride ourselves on delivering a big agency product with a small agency experience. Brand strategy services are critical to providing that level of value. The best branding honors who you are today, but also charts a course for who you will become. It is a catalyst for growth and the bridge that takes you from where you are to where you want to be. Brand strategy is a blueprint for success and a foundation for building assets to make it a reality.
Brand strategy is the foundation of your brand—a definitive framework that concisely outlines your aspirational north star, why you exist, what makes you valuable, and how your brand will come to life in a compelling and actionable way.
Brand Naming
Not all branding agencies offer brand naming services, and those that do vary widely in approach, expertise, and process. There are agencies that do nothing but name development, and also firms that do both branding and naming. We are a branding agency with deep expertise in naming.
We love working with client partners to name their brands and products, and we lead brand naming exercises with businesses across a myriad of industries each year. Choosing a name for your new brand is an important milestone, and client partners often say it’s when the ideas, inspirations, plans, and dreams they have worked on start to feel “real.” It’s an electric moment pregnant with potential.
Advertising
We are a branding and marketing agency with full-service capabilities that support brands as they scale and grow. Branding isn’t static. You can always say or do something new and find unexplored levers to pull. Building a unique brand identity rooted in market research and a strategic foundation isn’t the final piece; it’s the first. Once you know who you are and what you’ve got, you can go into the world and talk about it. Cue marketing and advertising.
The market has a noticeable education gap concerning branding, marketing, and advertising campaigns. In simple terms, marketing is identifying customer needs and determining how best to meet those needs. Advertising is promoting a company and its products or services through paid, earned, or social media ads, content marketing, influencer marketing, and more. In other words, advertising is an active component of marketing efforts.
Advertising services an ongoing, sustained conversation with consumers. Campaigns allow brands to communicate specific messages to a targeted audience in specific media channels.
Package Design
As a brand agency, we approach every project and problem we solve with an unwavering focus on the brand. With deep expertise in consumer goods, the brands we build are often expressed primarily or most immediately through package design.
Packaging is more than a container. It is one of the most intimate ways a person will experience your brand. They take it in with their eyes, hold it in their hands, bring it into their home, and even put it to their lips. Packaging represents more consumer daily impressions than any other communications medium.
Packaging is an opportunity. Of all the brand touchpoints experienced by consumers, none offer a more potent chance to connect emotionally with your audience. The best packaging design creates an opportunity for your products to entice your audience, pique curiosity, tell a story, inform, surprise, and delight. It is a powerful asset that fights for your brand in stores and online, seizing shoppers’ attention with shelf presence and scroll-stopping impact.
Brand Merchandise
Browsing through our work, it’s not hard to tell that we believe wholeheartedly in the impact of well-designed branded merchandise. Crafted thoughtfully and strategically, a branded merchandise program can be a vital component of marketing strategies for companies seeking to build and sustain a strong brand presence.
The value of branded merchandise extends beyond mere promotional giveaways; it serves as a tangible connection between a brand and its audience, reinforcing brand identity, recognition, and loyalty.
Copywriting
At Helms Workshop, our core passion and focus is building robust, vital, holistic brands. An essential part of those brands is their verbal identity—what they have to say to the world and how they say it. Verbal identity is a potent assembly of taglines, tone guides, brand personality copy, functional headlines, and more that serve to guide all of a brand’s communications. Through our expert copywriting services, we put the art in articulate.
Website Design and Digital Branding
In the digital age, having a professional, well-designed website optimized for conversion is crucial for any business aiming to establish a strong online presence. Investing in working with a digital agency with professional web designers and developers might mean a more significant commitment in terms of time and money. Still, this level of web design and development can yield significant returns.
A professionally designed website with optimized user experience leads to higher conversion rates and increased sales. A seamless and engaging website encourages visitors to take desired actions, whether it’s making a purchase, filling out a contact form, or signing up for a newsletter. Custom web development allows you to better guide the experience for your customer.
