Way back at the start of This is Milk our founders sat down with the task of choosing the colours that would represent our brand in a traditionally corporate landscape of blues, greys, blacks...dull... boring... yawn .. .. .. .. .. .. sorry, we nodded off for a second there! Now come on, why does corporate have to mean boring?

​Well it doesn't and we relished at the opportunity to buck the trend, stand out, and more importantly create a brand that represents who we were as people as well as professionals.

If you would like to dive deeper into the world of colour, here is a fantastic blog taking you through the psychological meaning of the colour Pink. 

It's a colour of compassion,  understanding and insight. It's empathetic and hopeful. It is a positive colour inspiring warm and comforting feelings and a sense that everything will be okay.

Sounds exactly like This is Milk!

This is Milk are proud to lead the way in gender parity, with a business that treats everyone as equals, as humans and will continue to strive for change in the workplace. 

For more on This is Milk and the above topic we recommend you check out these two blogs:
​
​Raising a baby and a business 
​How to kick-start your dream business
​How to build a string brand strategy 


Thanks for reading and be sure to comment or even share.

A strong brand strategy lets you influence how your company is perceived in the outside world. New businesses who spend the time crafting their brand strategy from the outset have a distinct advantage over the rest. 

​Starting a new business is exciting; there’s no doubt about it. But it’s easy to get carried away with the ‘rush to market’ and lots of businesses miss out on valuable time spent at the outset developing a solid brand strategy. And by that I don’t just mean the visual representation of brand, such as your logo, and the colours you use on your website. Your brand identity is much more than that. Here's one of my favourite answers to the question 'What is brand?':

'Brand' is the entire picture of your company as perceived by everyone who interacts with you - either directly or indirectly. Pinpointing your brand strategy – what you stand for, your core message and your vision – is crucial.  Great brands have the power to make people desire, trust and place a value on their services. They are managed carefully to ensure that the core message and values of the company is conveyed through everything they do and is simple, clear and consistent across every touchpoint. Clarifying this information from the very outset can save a lot of time and effort further down the line. A stable brand is your anchor, that should act as a constant reminder to your customers and employees of what your company stands for. If you want to achieve your business goals you need to define your brand strategy clearly.

Where to start?
 
Did you name your business and start sketching your logo from the moment your business idea took hold? Stop a minute…. Before you go anywhere near logo design, naming or tone of voice, there are some crucial components you need to get straight first. Ascertaining these will make all of the foregoing far easier to create, and far more relevant. It will also make the final product closer to your vision, and truly reflective of what makes your business tick.
 
Be clear in your mind about exactly who you want your brand to be - I like to think of brands as people. What are they like? Who are their friends and network (think customers/supporters)? What do they sound like? What do they stand for – and what do they stand against?  I describe this as figuring out what your brand is INSIDE before unleashing yourself to the OUTSIDE.
 
What defines a brand?

• Mission: what does your company stand for? What's the core message that you want to express to the world?
• Values: what do you care about? What are your beliefs?
• Customers: who are you trying to resonate with? What do they care about? What are their goals?
• Products: What do you offer your customers to improve their lives?
• Behaviours: how do you conduct yourself?
• Culture: what does it feel like to work there?  Who are the people that represent your business?
• Competitive Edge: what makes you different from the rest? How do you stand out?
• Experience: how will your customers work with you and use your products/services?
• Channels: where will you conduct your business and where can people find you and interact with you? 

Take some time to really explore these facets of your business. Do all of these areas align to your core message? And if not; why? What needs to change to ensure that they do? The time you put in at this stage of the planning process is time well spent. It’s far easier to design your brand with a blank canvas than it is to attempt this feat further down the line. People tend to be good at imagining things but not so good at reimagining them. 

Creating Your Visual Brand Identity
 
OK, so now you’ve done your homework and laid out your strategy (the what and the why – your core message) – it’s time to work out how to bring it life . What will your brand look, feel and sound like?

• Name: what are you going to call yourself and what associations does this name elicit?
• Logo: what icon, colours and typeface will you use, and how will these be perceived?
• Style: what identifiers, aside from your logo, will you have, such as imagery, site design and typography?
• Tone: how do you want to sound – cool and hip? Wise and experienced? Corporate and classy?

 
If you’re not a designer, outsourcing your visual brand is something you can and should do. A word of warning  - vague, incomplete or generic briefing is dangerous and could waste you money, resulting in a number of false starts.
So before you start, think. Do your research, outline your strategy, study your competitors, identify what drives you and forecast your future. If your business plays out the way you imagine it should, will the same branding still fit your company five years from now?
 
This might seem like a lot to factor in when you’re probably more concerned with getting your business off the ground. But take it from me, when it comes to devising marketing campaigns, pitching to investors and presenting to industry leaders further down the line, you’ll be grateful you nailed your brand strategy before so much as a Photoshop logo was mocked up.
 
One of the things we love to do at This is Milk is help companies articulate and visualise their brand. Before we delve into plotting social media strategy, re-marketing campaigns, web design and umpteen other tasks, branding is the first thing we look at.
 
Struggling to define your brand? Get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.

​More about what we do.

How to use your brand's enemies to connect with your customers without alienating them.
Annina Claesson

​Here at This is Milk, we’re fond of busting some myths every now and then. Here's one from a Harvard Business Review article to shake up some assumptions you may have about what your customers want from your brand: what matters most for your customers is not how much you engage with them, but whether or not they share important values with your brand.

Many marketers tend to run according to the principle of 'more is more', but this is not an effective way of encouraging brand loyalty. Customers are susceptible to information overload. We are all getting bombarded by hundreds of messages every day – why would your brand stand out by simply adding to the torrent?

If you want customers to feel a connection with your brands, you have to show that you share something important with them – their ideologies, beliefs, and feelings about what matters most to them.  "Of the consumers in our study who said they have a brand relationship, 64% cited shared values as the primary reason", as the Harvard Business Review article states. You need to clearly communicate your brand's core philosophy in order to reach out to those customers who will identify with it.

At This is Milk, we knew this from the get-go. In our previous blog post about how we chose our name, we described how this all came down to the values we wanted to represent. For us, that circled around adjectives like accessible, aspirational, and authentic. However, brand values are just words and pictures until you practice and prove them in everything that you do, only then can you build trust and relationships with customers.

So how do you show what you stand for?

By far the easiest way to do this is to demonstrate what you don't stand for. In our blog post, we wrote a bit about our thoughts around this when searching for our brand identity:

"We also looked at what we didn’t want to be, and how we wanted to set ourselves apart from our competitors. The competitive landscape was clogged with ‘men in grey suits’ with fairly meaningless names (in our opinion)"

We wanted to be a refreshing, colourful alternative in the sea of grey suits. So what are the ways a brand can show what they are not?

Many (like this article from HelpScout) argue that brands should be bold about this. It's not just about identifying what you want to set yourself apart from – you need to make an enemy! Think back on the 1984 Apple advertisements. As the HelpScout article describes:

"You may remember the clear picture that Apple painted of Windows’ users — they were unhip, corporate drones that loved boring beige-shaded boxes and Excel spreadsheets.
 Conversely, Apple was the cool, savvy product for young people doing creative work and fighting the system."

Who would you rather be? Apple's 1984 TV ad is one of the most memorable examples of 'enemy' branding

Who's the real enemy?

There's no doubt that this helped to fuel Mac customers' (sometimes quite fervent) loyalty to Apple. The 'enemy' strategy makes a lot of psychological sense. We humans tell stories that are all about conflict and tension, with clear heroes and villains. Our brains like polarity and clarity. There's little room for grey. In order for your brand to stand out, the advice goes, you need to stop being afraid of painting it in black and white.

Often, people have one of two responses at this suggestion: they either go on board with it with a little too much enthusiasm, or they become apprehensive. The latter is probably more common. All this talk of enemies feels too much, too confrontational, too aggressive (and perhaps even a bit too American?). It's easy to see how this can go too far and become unprofessional.

Not so, say the enthusiasts. The key issue to keep in mind is that most of us are not Apple and cannot afford to call out competitors directly. In fact, that's not really what 'making enemies' is about. Your enemies are not your competitors, but the ideas and values that go against your purpose as a brand. Something that your brand opposes, finds unacceptable, unjust, or just unappealing. For Apple, those values are boredom and conformity. For you, it might be unapproachability, convoluted processes, unfriendly user interfaces, or unwillingness to change.

For us, those enemy values might be defined as 'sameness', just being one more grey suit in the crowd. We'd also say we take a stand against not being responsive to the client's needs, against one-size-fits-all.

Is this useful?
​
Thinking about this strategy made us wonder if 'enemy' is really a useful term for brands. The word 'enemy' invokes an image of a person, someone painted as wholly bad. It may tempt brands to go too personal and start taking jabs at competitors.

​Moreover, we think it's not ideal to dwell too much on what you are not, as opposed to what you are. This can be a tricky balance to strike – you want to differentiate yourself and show how you're special, but you can't just point at all the values, practices, and processes that you don't believe in like items on a checklist, saying 'this we don't do, that we don’t like’. You're still not giving anyone an actual reason to pick you. Instead, you're giving away your time in the spotlight to your 'enemies'!

A better way to frame it is in terms of problem-solving. You can use your 'enemies' as examples of problems in your industry, and then presenting yourself as a solution to the problem. Then, you can go straight into the positive stuff, and show your customers everything that your brand has to offer.

​So, in summary...

• Your brand needs to demonstrate that it stands for the same values as your customers
• You can do this by showing what values your brand opposes
• But don't go too far! Know what your real enemy is – the values that go against the purpose of your brand. Most of all, your enemy is being forgettable.
  ​

Concentrate on what your brand is, not on what it isn't!

Interested to learn how we can help you with your brand? Learn more about our services!

This is Milk...a business change consultancy – but how did we come up with the name?
​Angela Prentner-Smith

If This is Milk has any frequently asked questions, the one that tops the list is “How did you come up with the name?”
The truth is the name was the end-result of some serious deliberation about our brand. It went a little like this.

Gillian (This is Milk’s co-founder) and I began by batting about some ideas about what and who we wanted to be, then taking the time to refine those statements into the words that best described how we wanted to appear to the world. We wanted to be different, to stand out from the crowd, to be a breath of fresh air.

At the same time as thinking about what we were going to call ourselves, we were also considering our Vision, our Mission, our Ethics, and our Visual Style.

How it all started

Here are our original company description and some thoughts we had about our corporate identity and brand.

• Company Description

This is Milk provides services to business in response to specific problems, perceived needs and complex processes. We will understand and articulate the problem, provide a plan of action and work with companies to improve their capacity for change, their growth and their market offering.

• Corporate Identity

A consistent brand is key to our company’s growth and identity. This brand includes all communications - verbal, visual and written - as well as the services we offer. Our brand will be developed around the concepts of simplicity, authenticity, accessibility and aspiration.

• ​The Brand Spectrum

We looked at the brands we thought personified these concepts and plotted them on a spectrum.

The Competitor Landscape

We also looked at what we didn’t want to be, and how we wanted to set ourselves apart from our competitors. The competitive landscape was clogged with ‘men in grey suits’ with fairly meaningless names (in our opinion). When we looked at the brands that embodied what we wanted to be, many of them had simple, everyday names. So we focussed our hunt for a name to something simple.

What about Milk? We liked it. But a quick search, and we realised there was already a digital agency in England called Milk, and they had bought up the domains. But This is Milk was available.

​Making a Declaration

It was a declaration, not just Milk, but This is Milk - it made a statement. A statement of who and what we were. It was simple, yet effective – like us! When we thought more about it, milk embodied many of the qualities of change – the very premise of our business, and our ethics and values.

Change, like milk, is an essential thing - it’s ubiquitous and everyday. Yet it's also transformative and adaptable. Milk can change your coffee; become a tart or pudding. It is also nourishing and versatile. Milk feeds your baby, and if cow’s milk isn’t for you, there’s soy, oat or almond.

We also liked some of the cultural connotations around milk, such as pouring fresh ideas; or Milk – it’s natural and does a body good.

The Visual Language

​Our name, our vision, our mission and our ethics, once defined lend themselves nicely to a particular visual language. We sought out a graphic designer and created a design brief around all of these elements.
​
The words we asked them to embody were:

Now we have our logo, our colour scheme and a developing written brand. We are also working hard to define our culture to make sure This is Milk is as brilliant a place to work as we envisioned it being. 

So what’s in our name?  A lot of thought and ultimately our company values leading to a brand that we can be proud of and will continue to develop as we go. 
​ 
It wasn’t just about a name, but in the end, the name works for us. ​

​Interested to find out more about us?