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The Elements of a Brand Pyramid

brand pyramid

The Elements of a Brand Pyramid

Building a brand, one brick at a time.

At the core of any good, recognizable, sticky brand is an idea. A simple idea that hooks their consumers and keeps a brand top of mind when it counts. We call this a Capstone because it’s the idea that tops your Brand Pyramid, similar to the golden and bejeweled capstones found on ancient pyramids. But once the idea is in place, how does a business go about turning that idea into a reality?

Our Brand Pyramids are more than a gimmicky framework to fill in over a Leadership Seminar, they’re the foundation for communicating your brand internally and externally as you successfully grow and scale your business.

Using a Capstone idea to guide execution, we “build out” the brand by thinking of each project as an individual “brick” within the Brand Pyramid. Each brick has its own unique needs, be it technical specs, budget constraints, or production implications, but the purpose of the brick’s existence is to elevate and communicate the Capstone idea to the public.

Every brick—touchpoints and opportunities to directly connect with the audience—is a chance to impress or convert a consumer, from the smallest display ad to a highly anticipated experiential moment. The most critical brand executions sitting closest to the Capstone at the top of the Brand Pyramid, while further down you get smaller brand executions that are more functional and specific to the format required.

These bricks help define your brand and can be paired as needed with the capstone.

Foundational Bricks

These bricks help sell your brand and come after foundational work.

Activation Bricks

the capstone pyramid

Recommended Essentials for CPG Brands

Identity & Naming

Logo is often the first thing that comes to mind when people talk about brand as a whole, making it an essential piece to any emerging business. Whether it’s itty bitty or scaled up big, the logo is the primary vehicle for a whole bunch of brand elements like name, colors, and personality (Which is why, while not every branding project needs a new name, when it does, naming and identity should always be done together.

Packaging System

Whether you’re working with three highly curated products, a system of hundreds of SKUs, or skipping the shelf entirely and selling DTC, a cohesive packaging system is a blank canvas to tell your brand story. Good package design will do more than just get people to convert in the aisle, it will make a shopper’s choice so easy, so obvious, that they don’t even think to look at other product options.

Brand Story

Who are you, anyway? It’s a good sign if consumers are looking at your brand story because they’re open to building affinity with your brand. They’re looking for authenticity, consistency and, above all, a brand who just gets them. How that gets communicated is critical to building long-term brand loyalty.

Website

The internet is not just for eComm and DTC brands. A branded website is a unique opportunity to execute your brand with essentially no limitations. This is where your Capstone ideas can truly come to life and connect with consumers where they already spend a whole lot of their time. Even at the very least, a strong brand website can provide a positive customer experience that doesn’t leave them with a bad taste in their mouth.

bricks

Campaign Concepts

When growing your audience or brand awareness, campaigns are a fun way to flex the Capstone idea for short or medium durations and focus on communicating a specific, timely message. Campaigns, no matter how short or long they run, don’t replace the brand-building and positioning work achieved by a Capstone, instead it’s like a riff on the idea. Campaign concepts should still relate to and support a Capstone idea while promoting whatever is relevant at the time.

Brick by brick, your brand comes to life. And the more bricks a brand has the bigger a Brand Pyramid becomes. (Regardless of brand scale or the number of “bricks” in a pyramid, the quality of those bricks is what sticks with consumers long-term.) Every brick working together to uphold the Capstone idea that guides the brand and makes it memorable to consumers.