Corporate branding is the work of making a whole company recognisable and believable: to clients, regulators, investors, partners and the people who might work for it. The visible part is the logo and the look. The part that decides whether the look works is the strategy behind it. That means a short set of written decisions about who the company is for, what it should be known for, and how its divisions and products relate to each other.
Most Philippine companies ask a branding agency for the visible part. This article is about the other part: what brand strategy should produce, whether you need it, and how to judge it in a proposal.
Corporate branding vs product branding
Product branding sells one thing to one audience. A snack, a condo project, a credit card. It can be loud, it can change every few years, and it is judged mostly on sales.
Corporate branding sells the company itself, to many audiences at once. A bank’s corporate brand has to reassure a depositor, satisfy a regulator, impress a fund manager and attract a graduate, all with the same name and mark. It has to last longer, which is why corporate branding leans on strategy and rules more than on a clever campaign.
If your company has several audiences that each need a different reason to trust it, you are doing corporate branding, even if nobody has called it that.
What brand strategy actually produces
“Brand strategy” is often a single line in a proposal with nothing behind it. When it is done properly, you should get documents you can read, argue with and sign off. Ask for these five:
1. A brand audit. What you have now, across every place your brand appears: website, signage, decks, forms, social pages, uniforms, the email signature your sales team made themselves. What is working, what contradicts what, and what is missing. It should also show how two or three competitors present themselves, so you can see where you look like everyone else.
2. A positioning statement. One short paragraph: who you serve, what you do for them, and why you instead of the alternatives. It should be specific enough that a competitor could not sign it. “A trusted partner committed to excellence” fails that test. Almost every company in the Philippines could put its name to it.
3. A messaging hierarchy. What to say first, second and third, and to whom. A one-line description of the company, three or four supporting points, and the proof behind each. Your website copywriter, HR team and investor-relations person should all work from it.
4. Brand architecture. How the company’s names, divisions, subsidiaries and products relate to each other visually and verbally. More on this below, because it is where established companies most often get stuck.
5. Tone of voice. How the company sounds in writing. Formal or plain, Filipino or English or both, how it handles a complaint. It needs two or three examples of right and wrong, or nobody will use it.
If an agency’s proposal says “brand strategy” but cannot tell you which of these you will receive, ask before you sign. If a proposal lists them and nobody in the room can explain how the logo will follow from them, that is a warning too.
Brand architecture: when one company has many names
Brand architecture matters most to the companies that are growing: a family business that has added a logistics arm, a developer with several township brands, a financial group with an insurance company, a benefits company and a foundation.
There are three broad models:
Branded house. Everything carries the parent name, often with a descriptor: Parent Land, Parent Power, Parent Foundation. The parent’s reputation does the work. Each part is cheaper to launch, but a problem in one division shows up on all of them. Several Philippine conglomerates work this way, which you can see from how their companies are named.
House of brands. Each product or business has its own name and identity, and the parent stays in the background. Common in consumer goods. Each brand can target its own market, but you pay to build each one from zero.
Endorsed brands. Each business has its own identity, with the parent shown as a guarantee: “Brand X, a member of Parent Group.” This is the most common choice for a Philippine group that has acquired companies or wants a new business to have its own personality while borrowing the parent’s credibility.
No model is correct in itself. It depends on whether your divisions share customers, whether you might sell one, and what each can spend on its own marketing. What goes wrong is having no model at all. Then every new business unit commissions its own logo, and five years later the group looks like five unrelated companies sharing an office.
Real companies often sit between two models. InLife Benefits carries the InLife name and its blue and red, so it borrows the parent’s long track record. But its own identity, built around a continuous “benefits circle”, gives it a personality the parent brand does not need to have. The brief was evolution, not reinvention. The project ended with a brand manual that InLife Benefits’ in-house designers could follow on their own.
Signs your company needs strategy, not just a new logo
A redesign alone is enough when the brand is dated but the business has not changed. You need strategy first when any of these is true:
- The business has changed and the brand has not. You moved from trading to services, from one province to national, from local clients to regional ones.
- People describe you differently. Ask five managers to explain what the company does in one sentence. If you get five different answers, a new logo will not fix that.
- Divisions are drifting apart. Each one has its own colours, its own deck template, its own version of the logo.
- You are about to raise money, list, merge or enter a new market. New audiences will judge you before they meet you.
- You keep losing to weaker competitors. Buyers often cannot see the difference. That is a positioning problem, not a design problem.
If none applies, you may only need a refresh. Our article on rebranding without losing what made you credible covers how to tell the difference.
How brand strategy work is usually run
Expect four stages, whichever agency you hire:
Listening. Interviews with leadership and a sample of the people who deal with customers every day. The best insights usually come from a branch manager or a sales officer, not the boardroom.
Workshops. One or two working sessions with the decision-makers to agree on positioning and architecture. Bring the people who will actually approve the final identity. A strategy approved by the marketing team and then overturned by the chairman wastes everyone’s time.
Written recommendation. The five documents above, in draft. Read them properly. This is the cheapest point in the whole project to change direction.
Sign-off, then design. The identity work should start only once the strategy is approved, and the design presentation should show how each design decision follows from it. If you cannot see the link, ask.
How long this takes depends on how many people must agree, not on the agency’s speed. Two founders can agree in days; a group with a board and several divisions takes far longer. Plan your launch around your own approvals.
How to judge a branding consultancy’s strategy work
When you compare branding companies, ask each one:
- Show us a strategy document, not just the logo that came out of it. A redacted one is fine.
- Who leads the strategy, and are they the same person who briefs the designers? If strategy and design are done by people who never talk, the identity drifts from the strategy.
- How do you handle disagreement between our executives? A good answer involves a process, not “we’ll present options”.
- What will our team be able to do on its own afterwards? You should leave with guidelines, templates and a brand identity system, not a dependency on the agency.
For shortlisting, see how to choose a branding agency in the Philippines, then how to brief one.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is corporate branding?
Corporate branding is building the identity and reputation of a company as a whole, rather than of a single product. It covers how the company is positioned, what it says about itself, how its divisions and products are named and related, and the visual identity that holds it together across every audience.
What does a corporate branding agency do?
It audits your current brand, defines positioning and messaging, sets the architecture for your divisions and products, then designs the identity and guidelines your team and suppliers follow. Many also apply it to the website, collateral, signage and reports.
What is the difference between brand strategy and brand identity?
Brand strategy is the set of decisions: who you are for, what you stand for, and how your brands relate. Brand identity is how those decisions look and sound: logo, colour, typography, imagery and voice. Strategy comes first. An identity without one is just a style.
Can we do brand strategy ourselves?
Partly. Your leadership knows the business better than any agency. An outside team adds distance: staff and clients talk to it more freely, and it can tell the chairman things the marketing manager cannot. A workable middle path is to run your own audit and hire help for positioning and architecture.
How much does corporate branding cost in the Philippines?
It depends mainly on how many businesses and audiences the brand has to cover, how much research and how many stakeholder interviews are involved, and how far the identity is rolled out afterwards. A single-company identity and a group-wide architecture with several sub-brands are very different projects. Ask agencies to price strategy, identity and rollout as separate lines, so you can compare quotes and decide what to do now and what to do later.
Where designblue fits
We are a boutique branding and web studio in Makati, working with Philippine and regional organisations since 2007. Our brand experience design work starts with strategy (audit, positioning, messaging and brand architecture) and carries through to the identity, the brand manual and the places it has to work: the website, reports, collateral and signage.
We are not the right fit for a one-off logo on a tight budget. A good freelancer will serve you better there. If your company has outgrown its brand, or its divisions no longer look like they belong together, talk to us. The first consultation is free, and we will tell you honestly whether you need strategy work or just a refresh.
