So there is a chicken sandwich war brewing recently between Popeyes and Chick-fil-A. Popeyes’ newest addition to the menu prompted long lines in the establishment. The long lines even became a meme showcasing how people would line up for a chicken sandwich but not to vote.
Popeyes’ sandwich was so popular it sold out in just two weeks. Then Chick-fil-A had the last laugh as people started returning to the fast-food chain popular for its chicken sandwiches since 1967.
Not to be outdone, KFC jumped into the fray by testing a chicken sandwich with doughnuts as the buns. Ugh. But as KFC said in its press release: “Consumers are seeking novel, crave-able flavour combinations that give them the best of both sweet and savoury worlds to create a unique taste experience.”
The competition is stiff and so these notable fast-foot brands are making sure they can one-up the other in this chicken sandwich wars. It seems like McDonald’s is getting worried. According to an Inc. report, the iconic American brand McDonald’s is changing advertising partners in order to reinvent the brand and allow it to connect more to the masses.
Branding agency San Francisco could do wonders in turning a company’s direction around.
How branding works
McDonald’s is one of the most popular brands in the world. As the Inc. report indicated, while Burger King is known for its creative marketing, Chick-fil-A is noted for its fun brand. Taco Bell is considered high-energy. But McDonald’s is just McDonald’s. This is not a bad thing, really. This means that the branding for the company really worked as people look at McDonald’s as distinctly McDonald’s.
Essentially though, monotony just gets boring eventually.
This is why a branding agency is important in every company—from startups to giant chains like McDonald’s. The chain doesn’t want to be boring anymore. Hopefully, the new advertising agency could amp up its brand without losing its corporate identity, which was introduced in America in 1940.
The power of creativity
There is power found in creativity, and the top branding agencies are banking on that creativity to have the power to change the course of a brand. A failing brand can easily rediscover success through the power of creativity.
A branding agency could be the key to the success of a startup. For already successful companies with solid brand identity, the agency can keep them relevant with the ever-changing trends.
It takes creativity to craft a strategy and design that will have the power of conversion. Every business needs to make a profit. McDonald’s, a large chain, continues to need a profit. This is why no matter how large a business is, it will never slow down its marketing and advertising campaigns. But at the same time, it needs to contain its branding image.
Based on the Inc. report, the McDonald’s brand has reached a plateau. It is no longer as interesting as it was decades ago. So the chain is looking for a fresh start. It thinks that a new agency will do the trick. Creativity will play a great part in how a popular brand like McDonald’s can provide fresh content for its followers.
Branding company as glue
In this modern age, a business needs more than just a top-notch product or service to compete. It will need a functional and informative website by a strategic design firm. A business will also need promotional activities by advertising agencies to be on the people’s radar, and marketing campaigns to make a profit.
In all these activities, the brand strategy will be at the core. This means that the branding company will be the glue that will keep all activities cohesive. A business wants the brand identity to be consistent in every campaign.
Branding agency San Francisco
If you are looking for a great branding agency, San Francisco will be a great place to start. The area is crawling with tech startups. Silicon Valley is home to the geniuses who invented a lot of today’s important products, services, and mostly mobile applications. The city of San Francisco created the most tech jobs in 2018.
Technology giants have also made it a home. While headquartered elsewhere in the U.S., some of the biggest companies made sure they had at least one agency with offices in the San Francisco Bay Area.
With that many startups in the area, San Francisco has also become an important place for branding agencies to take root. It is the home of Ramotion, a branding agency that creates visual identities and develops brand strategies for growing startups and tech companies.
Aside from branding firms, the Bay Area also houses many web design agencies as well as UI / UX design agencies.
Building the corporate identity
The biggest brands of today: McDonald’s, Nike, Apple, and Mastercard among others, all started as a startup. But how come these companies have reached global success?
A big part of their success is branding, which is the creation of the business identity. This involves the logo design, which is essentially the face of the brand. The creation of a logo is very important and the design agency should be working on it with the guidance of a branding firm. This is to ensure that the face of the brand will clearly personify the company.
Sometimes, you don’t get the right logo on your first try. In the case of McDonald’s, while it was launched in 1940, the popular M logo wasn’t used until 1968. But the golden arch was already part of the business in the 1940s, except that they were individual arches and not stuck together forming the letter “M.”
Indicative of how globally huge the company is, wherever you are in the world when you see that yellow M, you know that it’s McDonald’s—even when the food has their own cultural twist in it.
But branding is not just a singular thing: it’s not just a logo. It is a holistic representation of a company—from the colours to the tagline to how its people greet its customers. The goal is to create an emotive brand, where a company receives an emotional response from its audience. When the audience treats a company like an entity, then branding has succeeded.