What is a Creative Advertising and Branding Agency?
Creative Agency or Branding Agency? Which is better for aspiring brands?
What should an aspiring brand know about Creative Agency & Branding Agency?
The Covid19 lockdown proved to be a turning point in Mr. K’s life.
He was an amateur baker who used to bake on weekends and special occasions. But during the lockdown, he mastered the art of baking and even created some new recipes. He then started to share the goodies with his friends and family.
The initial response from them was very encouraging. Soon orders started coming in from outside his friend circle and Mr. K found it difficult to manage both his job and his fledgling bakery business. So, he discussed it with his family and his boss and decided to quit his job and pursue his new entrepreneurial venture!
Today he has his own bakery business and is now looking to expand. To attract new customers and to create a brand which he could scale up, he thought of getting some professional help. When he spoke with his friends, he got a host of suggestions. Some said to hire a creative design agency, while others said to get the help of a branding agency. These discussions left him totally confused about what exactly he should do.
Mr. K is not alone as most growing brands face this dilemma sooner or later in their life. While they are clear that they need some professional help in creating a brand, they don’t know which one is a better option of the two – a creative agency or a branding agency.
Here is what you should know about both of them before you hire their services.
What does the creative agency do?
As the name suggests, the creative design agencies specialises in making creatives! By creative we mean ‘communication’ here. It could be in the form of posters, leaflets, advertisements etc. Anything that will convey things about your brand is a piece of communication and hence a creative.
They conduct research to know the customer pain points that the brand is trying to address or search for the customer’s latent needs that the brand could fulfil. Thereafter, the creative agency would develop multimedia communication which would help the customer to choose a particular brand over others.
What are the limitations of a creative agency?
The strong point of a creative agency services is its ability to create communication. But unfortunately, this is their weakness too, because communication is just one part of the many that create a great brand! A creative agency does not fare well when it comes to managing the non-communication aspects of brand building. For instance, formulating a Digital Marketing Strategy is not a strong point of a creative design agency. However, if they get the strategy document in their hands, they can do total justice to it.
In short, a creative agency is good at executing the communication aspects of a marketing strategy and not creating the marketing strategy itself!
What does a branding agency do?
As the name suggests, a branding agency helps to build a brand! Unless a customer perceives a brand to be better than others, she will not choose it over others. A branding agency’s services are to create that positive differentiation which will allow the brand to stand out from the crowd.
While communication is an important aspect of brand building strategies, there are many others too that complete the brand. For instance, in the case of Mr. K, the design of the container which holds the cake or cookies plays an important role. When there are 5 different brands of cakes on a shelf, the one which grabs the most attention gets picked first. Obviously, pricing, ingredients, past experiences etc. do play a crucial role after that, but a brand that stands out first gets picked up first.
Talking about the food business, brands like Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and McDonald’s spend huge money on designing their outlets, team uniforms, packaging design and even the looks and feel of their website and apps. These aspects are researched thoroughly and only then implemented. Uniformity of looks and practicality of usage become key differentiators for any brand.
The type of fonts, their size, their colours and even the tagline play a crucial role in creating a positive perception in a customer’s mind. A creative agency falls short of managing these aspects, but a branding agency service can do both – strategy making as well as bringing to life the various aspects of the strategy.
What makes a good branding agency?
When you are enlisting the help of a branding agency to help grow your brand, you must approach the best one! A good branding agency has the following attributes:
- It has a range of clients in different industries.
- It has a strong creative development team
- It has an experienced brand-building team
- It can manage all aspects of a brand like communication, brand identity, brand strategy, employer branding (Digital Employer branding), Brand Management, marketing, competition analysis, consumer and market research, and competitive benchmarking. They have a strong digital marketing team which understands when to use the unpaid Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM) & Social Media Marketing inputs.
- A strong social media management team to create a positive word of mouth and a buzz about the brand
- A strong market research team which can delve deep to understand the consumer behaviour and also what other brands or competition is doing.
One of the prominent branding services, branding consultants and branding agencies in Pune is Velocita Brand Consultants. Velocita works with some of the leading brands in India in different segments like Amazon.in, Bajaj FinServe, Infosys, Bosch, Lupin etc. over the years, Velocita Brand Consultants has learnt some of the best brand-building practices from these brands and is now able to use this learning while creating the brand-building strategies for client brands in its portfolio.
So, if you too are a brand like Mr. K’s, which is aspiring to become big, then you should approach branding agencies like Velocita Brand or any other good brand consultant to take your brand to the next level.