How to Build a Strong Brand on a Tight Budget — Investment Decisions That Drive Growth
Building a strong brand doesn’t always require substantial financial investment. Let’s explore how to optimise your branding investment for growth.
By Adam Charlton · 03/02/2025
Posted in Insight
Think of brand building like constructing a house. While creating an impressive structure on a modest budget is possible, success depends entirely on where you invest. Just as you wouldn’t save money by weakening the foundation, certain aspects of brand development require proper investment to ensure long-term success.
The most successful brands prioritise strategic development before visual execution. When working with limited resources, this might seem counterintuitive, but investing in brand strategy provides the framework that makes every subsequent decision more effective and efficient, saving money over the long run.
Brand spending will depend on your company’s context, your stage of growth and team expertise.
Research shows that businesses that invest in proper brand strategy are two to three times more likely to see consistent growth.¹
This involves understanding your market position, defining your audience, and developing clear brand messaging. These elements guide all future brand decisions, helping you avoid future expensive mistakes and pivots.
— Key messaging for Raw Lily
Your brand’s key messaging serves as the blueprint for all communications. When developed thoughtfully, it helps maintain consistency across all channels without requiring constant oversight.
Communicating your brand’s purpose is fundamentally important to building a strong brand:
79% of consumers are more loyal to purposeful brands. 78% of consumers said they would tell others to buy from their companies, and 73% would share content about that company.²
Purpose-driven brands grow 3x faster than their competition.³
While saving money on design is tempting, investing in a flexible, well-thought-out visual system reduces costs.
A proper visual identity system helps you maintain consistency while creating new materials efficiently, reducing the need for constant design support.
— Brand guidelines for HKU School of Computing & Data Science
We talk at great length about how important consistency is for brand building. The fact is that brands that maintain consistent visual identity across all platforms can boost revenue by over 20%.⁴
How to make your budget work harderInstead of trying to implement everything at once, consider a staged approach.
Start with the most critical brand touchpoints and expand systematically as resources allow. This approach helps maintain quality while managing cash flow effectively.
Our Brand Creation and Brand Transformation projects usually follow three core stages:
1. Creating your brand strategy
2. Designing your visual identity
3. Strengthening & growing your brand
Whether we’re creating a brand from scratch or rebranding an existing company, clients come to us in various stages of brand development. Clients with experience in marketing sometimes prefer to conduct a lot of the initial strategy themselves, which is why we’ve created a free brand-building toolkit. In this way, when engaged in visual identity work, we can quickly be up to speed and help our clients finalise their positioning, core values and mission statement.
Focusing initially on digital applications often provides the best return on investment. Digital assets are typically more cost-effective to produce and easier to update as your brand evolves.
Investing in well-designed templates for common materials helps maintain brand consistency while reducing ongoing design costs. This approach is more cost-effective for businesses with regular communication needs.
Understanding the impact of your brand investment helps justify future spending and identify areas for optimisation.
Key metrics to track include:
Customer acquisition costs
Average transaction value
Customer retention rates
Website conversion rates
Social media engagement
When deciding where to invest your brand budget, consider these factors:
Which brand elements directly impact revenue?
Where do your customers first encounter your brand?
What aspects of your brand receive the most interaction?
Which improvements would most affect customer perception?
Remember that brand building is a marathon, not a sprint. Small, strategic investments consistently yield better results than sporadic, large expenditures. A thoughtful approach to brand investment helps create sustainable growth while effectively managing resources.
Budget is more of a concern than ever when starting a new business or evolving an existing venture.
We also know that communicating your purpose and raison d’etre is more fundamental than ever to build a loyal customer base. This is why we’re always keen to understand our client’s constraints and business models and work out how to create the maximum value and impact.
If you're ready to make your brand budget work harder:
Assess your current brand performance
Identify your most critical brand touchpoints
Develop a phased implementation plan
Focus on high-impact, foundational elements first
Whether you’re just starting your brand journey or looking to evolve an existing brand, strategic investment decisions can help you achieve significant growth without overwhelming your resources.
Looking for guidance on your brand investment strategy? As a Brighton-based branding agency, we help businesses make smart decisions about brand development. Please contact us to discuss how we can help you build a stronger brand while maximising your available resources.
Are you a Brighton-based business looking to rebrand or create a new brand? We might have something in common…
We’ve been busy building our sister agency in Hong Kong and recently relocated to Brighton! As we establish our branding agency, we’re looking to partner with local companies that want to refresh their brand. We’re running significant discounts to help build our local success stories.
If you would like more information, please get in touch with us at studio@attendtheway.com
Sources:
1. Business Insider, 2022
2. Cone/Porter Novelli 2018
3. Deloitte, Purpose is Everything
4. Harvard Business Review, The Lure of Global Branding
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About the author —
Adam is the co-founder of Attend The Way, a Brighton-based branding agency. Adam helps build brands for companies at every growth stage, from startups to industry leaders. Adam has consulted and built brands for some of the world’s most recognised companies.
