As a specialist brand marketing agency with a decade of expertise, we at Flintlock Marketing know that every sector has unique challenges, pressures, competition, and growth potential. Getting your branding spot-on can make a massive impact on your revenues, market share, reputation, and all-important customer loyalty and advocacy, which are essential for remaining resilient.
However, few trading environments move as rapidly and dramatically as retail, where a brand of the moment one day might become old news the next or where disruptors and newcomers can explode onto the scene through immersive, viral campaigns to the detriment of their competitors.
Whether you’re focused on brick-and-mortar stores, e-commerce, luxe shopping experiences, or strong value propositions, you need your customers to know you, like you, trust you, and choose you.
This ties into our big question of the day: What makes a retail branding agency right for your business? How can you know, without a doubt, that your branding partners have the skill, ability, and talent to make your branding shine, and how can you avoid investing in brand marketing that falls flat?
Let’s take a look.
The Huge Importance of Branding in Retail
Before we skip ahead, it’s worth recapping why branding is so influential in the world of retail and why brands that struggle to stand out or gain traction often fail, even if their product quality and styles are incredible.
Part of the difficulty is the sheer size and complexity of the market. For instance, a new sports clothing brand might harness the latest in wearable tech and advanced fabric selection. Still, the moment they hit the ground running, they’re in direct competition with the likes of Adidas, Nike – and all the other brands you can think of.
Brand experts don’t simply work on publicity or advertising. Instead, we analyse the core of the company, its personality and values, and the unique propositions and intangibles that make it a brand their target demographics will want to be associated with.
Amazing retail branding should mean that:
- Customers recognise your brand, get what you’re all about, and perceive you as different and more memorable than others.
- Buyers trust you to consistently deliver on expectations and quality—and they resonate with the lifestyle, identity or community your brand fosters.
- You build brand equity, which means the brand itself holds power and value, not just as a logo or a colour palette, but as an integral aspect of your business—a key element if you require investment!
While this is a very quick run-through, brilliant branding isn’t a one-and-done project. It has the capacity to adapt and change as markets, appetites and trends shift, giving you a foundational brand that works but that isn’t cemented into an identity that might become outdated.
Key Factors in Selecting a Great Branding Agency for Your Retail Business
As a retailer, start-up, designer, or owner, you’ll know that strategy underpins everything you do. It gives you the space to set goals and targets and plot a map to define how you’ll achieve your aspirations, highlighting all the stages and steps along the way.
Our very first pointer is that your branding agency needs to be a firm you’ll be happy to work with collaboratively, often over the long term, with access to the expertise that will help you build a fantastic brand, one block at a time.
Branding isn’t something we can dictate, but a process where we ‘spark’ with you, your colleagues, workforce, clients, partners and all other stakeholders to go beyond the superficial and visual aspects of branding and develop a brand identity that can stand on its own two feet.
Therefore, step one is to meet with a branding agency in person, have a chat about what you’d like to achieve, where you are now, and the challenges in front of you, and ensure you have a great rapport and feel truly listened to.
We know that relationships, transparency, and open dialogues are important. They mean we can talk freely about our ideas, thoughts, feedback, and research without avoiding mentioning areas where we think your branding, digital assets or visual identity could work harder.
Questions to Ask Prospective Retail Branding Agencies
Into the nuts and bolts, and if you’re comparing two branding agencies, both with retail specialists within their teams or a strong track record in the retail space, any of the following questions might help you find the differentials and make a good choice about the agency for you.
1. How Does the Retail Branding Process Work?
The process is key because a formulaic or generic approach to retail branding simply cannot work. Rather, you need an agency that offers a broad scope of service with the talent within its team to meet your needs.
Our tried and tested sparking philosophy enables us, and you, to see the big picture, get a grasp of your brand from the perspective of everybody inside and outside the company, and go back to the basics to envisage what your brand would feel and look like in its own tone of voice.
You can also ask about deliverables. Are you expecting a new logo, website interface, and lettering style, or do you want a complete outline to create a fresh, ambitious, forward-thinking brand strategy that can feed into every aspect of your business?
There is a tremendous difference between agencies that concentrate on the basics of typography and band image and those that do the work to pin down what the brand is and means and then build visual assets around that persona.
2. How Will You Get to Know My Retail Company?
A great retail branding agency will work as an extension of your team and want to know everything possible about what you do, how you do it, why you make the choices you do, and the feedback, reviews, market research and audience you currently have.
Taking the time to fully understand your business means we don’t miss anything that matters and can discuss what we’d like from you as our client to make the process smooth, streamlined, and ultimately successful.
3. How Long Will It Take to Get Results?
Now, this is a tricky question and one there isn’t an exact answer to – and any guaranteed returns or unrealistic turnaround times are a red flag. While there are instances where an urgent project can be completed faster due to a specific pressure or deadline, branding doesn’t always deliver outcomes on a predefined timescale.
Our advice would be to review past case studies and real client testimonials, look at quantifiable results and outputs where these are relevant, and consider branding as the initial background work you need to create a brand that will stand the test of time.
4. What Is Your Experience in the Retail Sector?
Finally, we’d suggest that you only work with a branding agency with a solid reputation and proven abilities to catalyse growth for other retail brands, because the nuances, opportunities and nature of each industry or niche is wildly different.
Never be reluctant to ask a question you might consider awkward. If a branding agency is perfect for you, it’s best to start with an attitude of collaboration and ensure you feel comfortable asking as many questions as you like to ensure you are 100% confident this is the agency for you.
