Enhancing Your Brand with Campaign Branding
Most companies look at their brand as a ‘set it and forget it’ exercise where, once it’s done, you can move on to business or operational goals. Brand, however, is built not with a logo and not with a flashy website but with an ongoing series of campaigns that collectively shape a cohesive experience from customers to employees to competitors.
Often, when companies consider a brand refresh, they face a disconnect between their current brand and an initiative they are driving or a market they’re trying to break into. These situations would be better served by a campaign branding exercise rather than an alteration or adjustment of the master brand.
In this article, we’ll cover the difference between master brands and campaign branding, when to use campaign branding, the benefits and successful examples of using campaign branding, and how to get started with your own campaign branding effort.
Master Brand vs. Campaign Branding
Your master brand, also referred to as an umbrella brand, is your primary brand identity and visual presence in the market. It represents your overarching brand concept and core messaging.
Master brands work to build long-term visibility and loyalty, ensuring that every touchpoint consistently reflects the brand's essence. This includes everything from your logo, fonts, and colors to your overall messaging framework. Your master brand is what most people consider the result of ‘branding’ work.
Campaign branding, on the other hand, is more flexible. It can be implemented to support major initiatives, new product or service lines, partnerships, and more.
Campaign brands are one step outside of standard brand marketing. They are designed to push the envelope of your existing brand identity and attract attention to specific or new aspects of your brand. This dynamic approach allows brands to remain relevant and engaging without altering the core identity.
When to Use Campaign Branding
Major Brand Initiatives
Campaign branding is particularly useful for significant brand initiatives. These can include social causes, CSR efforts, market repositioning, announcing new ownership, or significant business or product improvements. For instance, a company undergoing a major shift in market positioning might use campaign branding to communicate the new direction effectively without confusing the existing customer base.
New Product or Service Lines
When launching new products or services, especially in new markets, campaign branding can build hype and drive promotion. This is where you may see the most overlap with traditional brand marketing efforts. Campaign branding will go beyond just product announcements; it will use a specific and unique visual and tonal treatment for the campaign. This can also be done using event branding, which can help support a new launch.
Partnerships
Partnerships also benefit from campaign branding, enabling splashy, co-branded campaigns that highlight the collaboration. Campaign branding should purposefully merge the identities of both partners, creating a unique visual display that will stand out in the market and appeal to both audiences. This is most often seen in the fashion industry with independent designers partnering with larger brands to produce a limited run or branded collection for a set period of time.
Benefits of Campaign Branding
Campaign branding offers several advantages for businesses looking to build something new. Creative campaigns can capture the attention of new audiences while reinforcing support from existing ones. It can also help enhance overall brand expression, enriching it without causing brand erosion. Flexibility in using campaign branding can help add layers of interest to a master brand and help test responses in the market.
Fresh Assets and Materials
Campaign branding allows you to create fresh, engaging content that can invigorate your brand without compromising its core elements. This is particularly useful for brands that want to stay relevant and trendy.
Audience Engagement
Creative campaigns can capture the attention of new audiences and solidify support from existing ones. Take Dove’s "Real Beauty" campaign, for example. This campaign resonated deeply with both new and existing customers by aligning its message with the brand's values and presenting it in a fresh, impactful way. Now, this campaign is most of what Dove is known for in the marketplace.
Overall Brand Expression
Campaign branding adds to your brand’s overall expression without sacrificing existing brand equity. It allows for periodic refreshes that keep the brand lively and engaging, ensuring it remains top-of-mind for audiences.
Examples of Successful Campaign Branding
We’ve mentioned a few ways that campaign branding has shown up in the market, but consider these others. Don’t read ahead here. Can you name the sponsoring company behind the “Got Milk?” campaign? We bet that you can’t. For the record, we couldn’t either.
That campaign was sponsored by the National Milk Processor Education Program but was an entirely unique campaign branding effort that became an entity in its own right. While that’s an extreme example, you can also see this with Google and the way they partner with artists to create themed versions of their logos based on major current events or initiatives. They use their existing master brand framework and overlay a campaign branding effort to add interest, share a message, and delight their users.
You can also see a more subtle version of this overlay of campaign branding with Nike’s “She Runs the Night” campaign, which aimed at driving home a memorable and empowering message specific to one segment of their audience. Leveraging Nike's existing brand equity, they created imagery, copy, and campaign materials that broke from their ‘traditional’ storytelling themes to create a memorable and impactful campaign brand.
Getting Started with Campaign Branding
If you’re looking to get started with a campaign brand, you first need to determine if it’s truly a campaign branding effort or just a brand marketing effort. Here’s a quick set of questions to help you with that decision:
Does your effort require an entirely new narrative?
Are you aiming to gain attention in a new, saturated market?
Are you launching a social initiative within your company?
Do you need to present a unified front with a partnership?
Then you’ll need to define the boundaries of the campaign. Clearly outline which elements (logo, colors, fonts, copy, tone, imagery) will stay aligned or identical to the master brand and which can be adapted for the campaign. This preemptive determination will help you ensure consistency while allowing for creative flexibility with the firm that you partner with.
Once you know the boundaries of the campaign, choose the right partner. You’ll want to work with a firm that is comfortable adopting and operating within existing brand guidelines while also being able to creatively break them in service to your brand. A good partner will help you maintain brand integrity while pushing creative boundaries.
With your firm, you’ll need to establish specific goals and a clear timeline for the campaign. What do you hope to achieve? How long will the campaign run? Having a clear idea of success will help you determine if the campaign was successful.
Finally, plan for an absorption strategy for when the campaign ends. You’ll want to have a specific outline for how the campaign brand will transition back to the master brand seamlessly or live in a specific, public archival area, ensuring continuity and consistency.
Campaign branding allows your brand more flexibility, nuance, and creative freedom, all without losing brand equity.
With eight years of campaign branding experience, we specialize in crafting strategic brand and design services that complement and build on your existing brand identity, ensuring your business continues to grow and evolve. By leveraging campaign branding, you can create a dynamic and engaging brand presence that resonates with both new and existing audiences. Reach out if you need help determining and launching your campaign brand.
Ready to Build Your Brand?
If you’re ready to get started on building a brand and a business that stands the test of time, we’re here to help. Get in touch →
