Audiences have always gravitated toward authentic brands. But consumers have only grown choosier, and with good reason: Audiences encounter more brands today than ever before.

Meanwhile, digital has changed how we tell brand stories. Social, mobile, and next-gen innovations have given businesses of all sizes the ability to share their story – if they can be heard over the noise.

In this environment, the most successful brands have a strong relationship with their audience, and a clear understanding of who they are and the values they stand by. That takes strategic clarity, a focus on authentic connection, and a lot of personalities.

With more than 7 years’ experience transforming brands, Blue Fountain Media understands how companies find success and build loyalty in digital. We provide the strategic leadership brands need to discover, rethink, and refresh their identity for today’s marketplace.

Branding is a serious investment of both time and effort – you should be confident in the team you’re working with. Whether you’re looking to refresh an existing brand or start from scratch, find a partner that is:

Driven by research. No brand strategy should be based on a hunch. Smart teams make research a top priority from day one and base their strategic recommendations on what they learn.

Naturally collaborative. Your brand is the sum of many parts. Branding experts understand that. They’ll seek out creatives, marketers, analysts, and more to make sure the recommendations made are grounded in true best practices.

Focused on solutions. Brands exist to be seen. Effective strategists find exciting opportunities for activation, giving your team the tools to execute on branding recommendations.

Your brand is the unifying force behind your business. Building it takes a creative heart and a strategic brain. Our team goes hands-on with clients to identify goals, gather information, and draw their branding roadmap.

Gathering Insights
Listening in
We kick off work by meeting with you for a series of critical stakeholder interviews. It’s here that we hash out the strengths, weaknesses, and aspirations of your brand, align on a vision for the future, and set our goals and objectives for the rest of the project.

We often add in quantitative research, such as surveys, in order to measure internal and external brand perception and understand how the brand is currently positioned.

Competitor Analysis
Knowing what you’re up against
With more brand stories being told than ever before, there are usually plenty of rivals to learn from. By studying how competitors are presenting themselves and engaging consumers, we identify brand territory that’s occupied, as well as whitespace your brand may be able to exploit. Beyond direct competitors, we also look for inspiration in other industries.

Audience Research
Meet your future fans
Our team prioritizes audience research throughout the brand strategy process. To help us speak to your audience with a human touch, we build personas – representative user profiles that build a picture of the different types of people your brand will appeal to, and how your new brand will connect with them. These personas are informed by all the data and research compiled on the project to date

Insights + Concept
Bringing our research together
Our strategy deliverable organizes our recommendations into an intuitive, 4-stage framework. The first stage, insights, lays out what we’ve learned and how it will inform the rest of the project.

We move directly from insights into the second stage, the brand concept. This is where we explore stylistic territories at a high level, narrowing down a direction and charting a course for future exploration.

Story
Putting your brand in words
A verbal identity is the sum of many parts: vision, tone, values, mission, voice and tone, and more. To craft yours, our strategy and copywriting experts team up to offer their insights and experience.

Our role is not just to create the different parts of your identity, but to link them together into a powerful story that can be told across channels to employees, partners, customers, and the world.

Shape
Visualizing your brand transformation
Once we have the story, we can start to tell it visually. Our gifted designers can equip you with all the assets your brand needs to look its best – everything from logo design and usage, to brand palette, photography and social media direction, to the creation of brand collateral for your sales and marketing teams to show off.

Activation & Outlook
Moving toward the future
Having a dialogue with our clients is essential as we hone your brand vision into something your team believes in. That’s why every brand strategy is presented to the client with ample time allowed for feedback. Post-presentation, our team is standing by to put plans into action and take the next step toward branding transformation.

Once, digital disruption loomed as an extinction-level event. Today, it’s an ongoing process. Constant innovation is the only way to outthink competitors and outpace change.

The challenge: building a digitally enabled business is tough.

Siloed teams, talent shortages, data quality issues, and outdated processes stand in the way of transformation. And while you’re battling these problems, you can’t take your eye off the operations that are bringing in revenue now.

When you’re on a digital transformation journey, Blue Fountain Media can serve as a guide and a fresh pair of eyes. With intellectual firepower, deep curiosity, and a unique perspective on emerging technologies, we’re here to draw up a roadmap for your digital future.

Selecting a team to work on business-critical projects is no easy decision, but there are must-have qualities for an effective partner:

Digital-first. Digital isn’t just about technology – it’s a set of philosophies and practices that influence how and why you work. Your digital transformation partner isn’t going to ‘get it’ unless they’re digitally immersed.

Range of skills. Vision and brainpower are non-negotiable, but you need a team of thinkers with a strong bias for action. UX experts, designers, copywriters, data scientists and developers can ensure ideas are practical and help you follow through.

Generate ideas. A good partner will come with many ideas. A great partner will maximize all the resources at your disposal, collaborating to unlock ideas your employees and customers didn’t know they had.

In a digital transformation project, you can’t plan the solution until you define the problem. While every engagement is different, we draw on a toolkit that has successfully driven previous change initiatives

Digital Audit
Mapping the landscape
We start with a diagnosis of the current situation, taking a close look at the business landscape. We take a discipline-by-discipline approach, with multiple expert teams weighing in.

An audit can show you what’s standard practice and what’s best in class, identifying emerging competitors, new tactics, and changing audience behaviors. More importantly, audits can help you spot risks and opportunities – giving you a head start in preparing for what’s next.

Innovation Workshop
Putting our heads together
An innovation workshop brings together our team and yours in a structured process with open-minded facilitation. The goal is to frame a business problem and then generate ideas to solve it.

By calling on a diversity of expertise and thinking styles, and exploring ideas fearlessly, we can generate new possibilities and refine our strongest ideas.

We prioritize ideas according to value to the organization and readiness to complete, evolving high-value, high-readiness projects further with a tool such as a Business Model Canvas.

Minimum Lovable Product
Turning ideas into action
Change initiatives can generate many ideas but few outcomes. Fortunately, TTM is an implementation partner as well as an ideas partner.

Once we have high-priority ideas, we start defining a minimum lovable product – the version of your idea that delivers the most customer happiness with the least possible initial effort and expense. We determine what the MLP would look like and what it would take to build.

Once we understand that, we’re into project management: cost estimates, dependencies, and budgets and resourcing, and we’re ready to start making it happen.

Consumers see more logos today than ever before, but they only remember a select few. Great logos embody their brand, tell a unique story, speak values loudly – they stand for something.

While most brands know what they stand for, realizing their ideals in a symbol is a daunting challenge. And more than 7 years of building brands have taught us that memorable logos don’t happen by accident.

At The Team Matrix, our logo design process is informed by high-quality research and sound strategy. Our team goes hands-on with clients to create a logo that makes a real impression – something your audience can rally behind and rep with pride.

Smart brands know a logo is a powerful storytelling device. Today’s iconic brand symbols enjoy their status because they have instant associations with moments, emotions, and attitudes. But they don’t start like this. They earn that space in the consumer’s mind.

To forge this bond with an audience, your brand must take the time to learn and listen. That process opens up big questions about the brand you are, and the brand you want to be one, five, or ten years down the line.

Impactful brand storytelling should make waves, but if it doesn’t have a foundation of research justifying it, success is just luck. That’s why our logo design process starts with research every time.

Creating a new logo is a crystalizing moment for brands. We approach the task with clear objectives and a steady hand. Our process is grounded in research, iterative by design, and informed by years of hands-on work building brands across practically every industry.

Discovery
Getting your point of view
Our process begins at the source – with the client. Frank conversations about the state of a brand are integral to creating a logo that reflects (or positively changes) brand identity. Questions about external and internal brand perception, identity and aspirations, and competitive whitespace act as our compass as we move toward research, ideation and logo creation.

Research
Laying our foundation
Research and study are at the core of our logo design process. Before even our earliest sketches, we add context by spotting trends, studying competitors, and identifying promising audience segments. This lays a strategic foundation to guide the rest of the project and solidifies our understanding of brand identity, client vision, customer sentiment, and more.

Exploratory
Setting an artistic foundation
The themes we’ve pulled from research allow our team to curate a range of materials for design and logo inspiration. From mood boards to competitor research, this is our chance to see what does (and doesn’t) resonate with brand stakeholders.

Design
Crafting the heart of a brand
In a collaborative process, our designers and strategists meet to act on insights, inspiration and client feedback. It’s at this stage that we translate our body of research into logo concepts, which is as exciting for us as it is for you.

Workshopping
Honing in on a winning design
Clients are never shut out of the logo design process. We take an iterative approach to the approval process, presenting concepts to stakeholders, gathering their input, and refining until we’ve checked all the boxes. From black-and-white concepts, to color mockups, to finalization, your feedback drives the process.

Implementation
Ready for the digital landscape
From app icons to push notifications, modern brands rely on their logos to say and do a lot. Once a logo design is approved, our team is ready to pinpoint essential use cases and build out creative assets to fit a range of digital situations, ensuring visual identity is consistent across the board.

While design expertise is important, only a partner that blends the art of design with marketing science can have a real impact on your business. Here’s what to look for:

A holistic view. Great designers pay attention to the smallest design details, but also have a big-picture perspective on the role of collateral in building your business.

A tactical mindset. Great partners think strategically, creating designs people can relate to, customers feel empowered by, and which perfectly capture a brand’s personality.

A wealth of experience. A strong design partner has worked with brands both big and small across multiple industries – and has the experience to prove it.

TTM started as a design agency over 17 years ago, and we’ve been honing our design process and capabilities ever since, winning numerous awards along the way.

Product Packaging
Sparking interest in your products
Customers are used to seeing dozens, if not hundreds, of products every day. TTM designers are experts at designing packages that get noticed on the shelf – and online – visually communicating the quality and care you put into each product, and adding the unique creative touches that separate your brand from a sea of hungry competitors.

Business Cards
Making first impressions count
Great business cards help your company stand out when it matters most. To ensure every face-to-face interaction has an impact, our designers apply your logo and branding to striking original designs in your preferred format and finish.

Signage + Booths
Keeping your brand on customers’ minds
Whether it’s your office, storefront, or a trade show booth, your physical locations should catch the eye with high-impact branding. From storefront and trade show signage to banners of all sizes and formats, our designers leverage TTM’s marketing expertise to create sleek, modern indoor and outdoor designs that capture customer attention and bring in new business.

Promotional Items
Giving your swag an upgrade
Let’s face it: people like swag. When a coffee mug, tote bag, USB stick, or t-shirt gets in the right hands, it’s a unique marketing opportunity. TTM designers are skilled at applying high-quality custom designs to products your customers use every day.

Marketing Collateral
Making branding work for your business
Working collaboratively with our copywriting team, TTM designers put our marketing expertise on display, creating attention-grabbing designs for brochures, fact sheets, sales materials, packaging, and other print collateral to engage customers and connect online and offline experiences.

Print + Display Ad Templates
Duplicating the formula for ad success
Advertising offers big opportunities but can be challenging for brands without an in-house designer. Whether print, social, or display is part of your paid media objectives, our designers are experienced at creating templates for ads in every size, file type, and format imaginable.

Consumers today are more inundated with ads, more jaded with marketing, and more skeptical of brands than ever before. Yet the very same consumers have rocketed so many digital brands into overnight success.

While today’s customers are choosy, they still gravitate toward brands that look, speak, and act authentically. But creating a genuine brand identity – let alone one that aligns with your business goals – is a daunting task.

Here at The Team Matrix, we know it what takes for digital brands to succeed. With an eye for storytelling and an enthusiasm for strategy, our team helps companies stand out through art direction, engaging content, and bit of soul-searching too.

You shouldn’t trust your brand with just anyone. Your brand is best in the hands of an agency that is:

Story-focused. Today’s consumers want and expect to know what drives your brand. Find a branding agency that gets what makes a good story and has the chops to tell yours.

Always strategic. Your branding partners should be strategic in their approach, basing their decisions not on hunches but on research, data, and best practices.

Ready to market. Ultimately, a new brand has to be marketed. When the people that build your brand deeply understand marketing, you can be confident your branding will resonate in theory and practice.

Our approach to brand identity is as creative as it is methodical, where design and content meets research and experience.

Discovery + Research
Meeting your brand
For any branding effort, we consider stakeholder interviews to be mission-critical. We ask frank questions to get an understanding of what your business goals are, what your brand is now, and what it wants to become.

We also lay the foundation of critical research on which we build the project. We place particular focus on your major competitors, your audience’s behavior, and branding trends within your industry.

Brand Storytelling
Uncovering the narrative
The modern brand has a story – a driving manifesto that explains what they’re doing and why their audience should care. Taking what we learned during Discovery, our branding and content teams help identify and develop the narrative behind your business, putting in writing your vision, mission, positioning, values, and core promises.

Verbal Identity
Finding your voice
Our content team is at the ready to help build the on-page identity of your brand. We often help with naming – either a new product or service offering, or the brand itself. We collaborate to develop names that approach your brand from a range of creative directions, paring down the choices until just one remains.

We work with clients to craft taglines – taking on the always-challenging task of condensing a value proposition into a few pithy words. Finally, a consistent and distinct brand voice is a core part of your identity. To arrive at one, our content team refines your brand story into a consistent personality that jumps off the page.

Visual Identity
Focusing on look-and-feel
In addition to creating amazing logos, our design and branding teams have vast experience creating visual guidelines for digital brands.

We can help choose a brand color palette that works together beautifully and strikes the ideal tone. We can create custom iconography, set photography direction, or build out other brand-defining visual elements. And we can expand your visual identity into any channel – including websites, advertising, and even animation – where consistency and authenticity are both key.

Implementation
Bringing it to life
As a full-service digital agency, Blue Fountain Media is ready to execute on our branding recommendations and seamlessly transition into an implementation phase. In the same way, our marketing team is standing by and ready to put your new brand in front of consumers.