Why brand Laboratory at “DAMU RG” or how to choose a branding agency.

While a brand creation, one of three types of consultants’ services are used:
• Market Research Agency
• Advertising Agency
• Design Studio.

Each of consultants has its own distinctive, strong and weak sides in the brand creation. If you decide to build your brand and want to entrust this task to professionals, the question arises which consultant’s service to take to get a working brand. In order to understand which of the three types of consultants more competent in creating a brand, let's briefly clarify what the "Brand" is.
In simple terms, the brand is a quintessence of the following key elements:

• Management and quality control process of a brand creation;
• Opportunities and market potential;
• Physical attributes of the brand (packaging, taste, name, logo, etc.);
• Motivation of the buyer (consumer habits, motivations and behaviors of the target audience);
• Means and methods of communication with the target audience.

The neglect of any of these issues can lead to serious negative consequences, which will be much more expensive to fix in the future. Thus, the consultant that you want to involve to the brand creation should be not simply informed, but must be a real expert in all these matters.
Which of the consultants will be able to better cope with the tasks? The following table, where the most important problems (the steps for creating brands) and the level of consultants’ competence and professionalism are stated can help to get an answer to this question:

X - refers to the consumers’ specialization, O – does not refer to the consultants’ specialization.

The table above shows that none of the consultant is able to capture absolutely all aspects of the brand creation. The highest coverage of stages, as seen from the table above, can offer only research agencies. The advertising agencies and design studios are limited to the work on brand’s outer shell, ie, package design, logo, and various promotional materials. The analytical part of the work that is research, testing and identification of the most perspective option of package design, logo, and promotional product can be carried out only by research agency.

In practice it happens that the client company, the owner of the brand, passes on all strategic functions on brand’s creation and promotion to the contractor. However, it is extremely important to make strategically correct choice by selecting a consultant, capable of the most widely and professionally capture all stages of the brand development and promotion. It is our deep conviction that only research agencies can pretend to the role of general contractor, creating and managing brand promotion, as only they can make intellectual management of the branding process, while advertising