In a free-market economy, growth may be the most widely accepted, and commonly held goal for businesses.
The path to achieving growth is less obvious. This explains why there is an endlessly growing literature on the subject.
For companies in the fintech and financial services space, sometimes the path to growth gets reduced to a simplistic formula: more advertising + more budget + better tech = growth.
That approach is incomplete.
The true formula for growth is like a recipe for great cuisine: it has a list of ingredients (aka, creative assets) and a precise set of preparations (aka, tactics) to bring those ingredients into an edible finale.
But there’s a critical step that comes first: establishing a brand model.
A brand model is to a business’ growth strategy what a chef’s expertise and vision are to a recipe. You can have two recipes with the exact same ingredients, but if one wasn’t developed by someone who understands the fundamental chemistry of food, the dish will taste terrible.
Likewise, you can’t just toss ingredients together and hope they turn out well.
A brand model is the framework you use for every marketing decision, providing guardrails to protect your brand from rogue strategies, unscrupulous behavior, or simple human inconsistency.
In this article, we’ll answer the question “What is a brand model?”, explore what goes into it (and what doesn’t), and explain how at CSTMR we craft unique brand models to fit the brand marketing and performance marketing needs of every client.
A Blueprint for Clarity and Consistency
Before we get too deep, we need to define what we mean by “a brand.”
The internet is full of opinions on this topic, but we prefer the version that is simple and instructive for building great companies and marketing:
A brand is a promise of quality, consistency, and future experiences.
It’s also a reflection of how your audience thinks, feels, and talks about your company.
It is not a logo, a tagline, a product, or a person.
A brand is like a garden: you can choose what to plant and how to carve out the landscape, but you can’t fully control how things grow or what people feel when they walk through it.
Brand building is also an ongoing act of cultivation, not a coat of paint you only refresh when it gets dingy.
Successfully cultivating a brand requires intention and vision. You need a blueprint.
Architects use blueprints to build the structure virtually before breaking ground. It’s time intensive on the front end, but without it, you’re guaranteed to make unnecessary and costly mistakes in the real world.
That’s why every business needs a brand model to guide their marketing efforts. A brand model is a document that guides your company to growth by establishing clear visual standards, values, and language that any employee can follow—with predictable results.
A brand model allows your team to make small and big decisions faster and more confidently.
It also provides a layer of risk mitigation that fintech and financial services companies need. In the process of developing a brand model, you establish compliance-approved standards that offer a bright line between what’s acceptable and what isn’t.
Everyone is accountable to the brand model.
Quick Note on the Use of AI in Brand Development
It’s becoming increasingly popular to throw a pile of documents and graphics at a GenAI tool such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude and see what comes out. It feels as if you’re saving a lot of time and money, but it’s a fundamentally flawed approach.
By their design, large language models (LLMs) make selections based on probability, and often fail to highlight problems or opportunities that a human branding professional would understand based on years of experience and context.
A brand needs to be distinctive on purpose. The creative output of AI models tends to be distinctive in the mistakes they make, not their excellence or originality.
To quote the business author Frank Sonnenberg, “If you’re running in the wrong direction, speed doesn’t matter.” Don’t confuse the speed and low cost of AI with meaningful progress.
5 Core Elements of a Brand Model
At CSTMR, we focus on five pillars or elements that make up each client’s brand model.
Each pillar helps support the brand as a whole. Together, these five components allow you and your team to understand your brand holistically and build out the rest of your strategy.
- Whom you serve: This includes your ideal customer profile and, if you desire, your buyer personas. The goal is to define the companies and/or people who will benefit from your product or service and can be converted into paying customers.
- The transformation you deliver: Here is where you clearly define the pain that your company is solving and the various benefits associated with buying your product or service.
- Your approach: What’s the unique aspect of how you deliver the product or service that sets it apart from the competition or makes it appealing?
- Your proof: How do you demonstrate that your product or service delivers results? Look for provable differences and claims that you can substantiate.
- Your core message: In one concise sentence, express the promise your brand is making to your customers and prospects.
We’ll use CSTMR’s brand model as an example of how these pillars can look in real life:
- Whom CSTMR serves: Fintech and financial brands that want to optimize, launch, grow, or scale.
- The transformation CSTMR delivers: Grow revenue by building brand strength and awareness.
- CSTMR’s approach: We put customers first, every time.
- CSTMR’s proof: Our creative, strategic, and technical expertise gives our clients a competitive advantage and lasting growth.
- CSTMR’s core message: Where fintech and financial companies grow into captivating brands.
After establishing these five pillars, you can define the components that go into a comprehensive brand model, including:
- Brand name usage
- Positioning statement
- Brand theme
- Graphic design standards
- ICP and buyer personas
- Brand mission and promise
- Values
- Key points of authenticity
- Brand personality and archetype
- Language style guide
- Strategic messaging
Again, each element should build with and upon each other, rather than become a disaggregated set of definitions. Keeping a focused intention mind when developing a brand model helps you tie it all together.
The 5 Qualities of a Clear Brand Model
Because a brand is experienced by humans, and human experience is, by definition, unique to each person, it can be difficult to paint clear lines around what a brand does or doesn’t include.
For our purposes at CSTMR, we talk about the qualities that a good brand needs. The goal is to spend your marketing efforts building something that will last, be remembered favorably, and help your business grow.
These are the five qualities that we imbue into every brand we work on:
1. Coherent
In a business’s lifespan, it will likely create hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of customer touchpoints. Some will be poignant and meaningful, others fleeting and forgotten.
The goal is to have all of those touchpoints “singing from the same songbook” so that each customer recognizes the brand, because they’re coherent with each other.
2. Consistent
Coherence is a function of consistency. An effective brand model is a bulwark against cacophony.
Typefaces, colors, logo lockups, design ratios, as well as voice and tone, are all opportunities to create consistency. When you zoom out from any single aspect of your brand model, is the entire model consistent, and will it help create consistency in the future?
Consistency isn’t about sameness—it’s about standards that help your team produce high-quality work across all executions.
3. Honest and Provable
Can you draw a straight line between what you promise to your customers and what you deliver?
Your brand must make promises that reflect reality (honest) and can be seen or measured (provable). Your brand should help you set and fulfill customer expectations.
Every business makes mistakes, but honesty is the best policy, even when it gets painful. You must reinforce your authenticity with the action to prove you mean what you said.
A strong brand builds trust and does the hard work to make repairs when things inevitably break down.
4. Memorable
The inimitable P.T. Barnum is often quoted as saying, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
He certainly had a point: your business will not survive if people don’t remember your brand, thus controversy and drama can be allies.
However, this isn’t an approach we recommend for financial brands.
The goal is to be remembered as trustworthy. Thankfully, these two traits build on each other if you incorporate them into your brand intentionally.
5. Scalable
All businesses change as they grow, but some businesses struggle when that growth interferes with highly manual processes or inflexible policies.
Your brand model should help you transition to new levels of success and expand wherever necessary to sustain the other four characteristics we just covered.
The CSTMR Approach To Building Your Brand Model
When we begin work with a new client, we follow a roadmap that helps us reveal and collect the information we need to build a strong brand model.
In broad strokes, this process includes researching your existing brand by learning how you (and your team) see it, as well as the current perception in the marketplace.
We calculate a brand equity score to clearly establish the value that your brand can and should bring to your business. After all, we believe that your brand is your biggest investment.
Once we’ve completed our analysis, we identify the brand themes and brand archetypes that will allow us to build out the rest of the model.
For established businesses, this process includes pruning negative traits and enhancing positive ones; a refinement of the work you’ve already done. For startups, this process includes more imagination and discovery as you work to make the vision of your nascent business a reality.
At every step—there are 16 major ones—our team works to create a harmonious vision for where you want to take your brand, and a strategic foundation to help you achieve your goals through marketing.
A Brand Model Isn’t Just Pretty on the Outside
Creating a brand model is an in-depth, nuanced process that pulls from a vast array of data points, anecdotes, and contextual clues.
It also requires wisdom and discernment about what’s really important.
By working with an experienced team, you can actually compress the time it takes to establish your brand model and put it into practice through brand marketing and performance marketing tactics.
Many business owners feel tempted to take shortcuts and “just make it look good.” But here’s a word of warning: if you take this path, you may find yourself in the category of companies that are “too cheap to do it right, but have plenty of money to do it twice.”
We empathize with the dilemma that leads people there. A great brand looks effortless, beautiful, and compelling—but building it isn’t easy.
Great brands are built on a tremendous amount of thought, craft, and strategy. That’s why a brand model is vital for every business that wants to grow.
If you’d like to learn how a brand model can help your business, reach out to our CEO Rory Holland to get started.
