Learn About CBX: Brand Strategy, Design, Experience

We create brand experiences designed for cultural and commercial impact.

Strategy

BRAND POSITIONING & PURPOSE | BRAND & PORTFOLIO ARCHITECTURE | RESEARCH & INSIGHTS

We believe in strategy that is dynamic, actionable, and clear.
Strategy anchors the CBX approach. Whether alone or integrated with our verbal and visual design practice, our Brand Strategy team blends analytical rigor and design thinking to bring simple, powerful ideas into focus.

Influential brands rest on narratives that stand the test of time. Our brand positioning frameworks—the “who,” “what,” and “how”—capture the soul of your brand, ensuring stakeholders and brand advocates have a clear understanding of your beliefs and mission. With tools designed to decode a brand’s DNA, we reveal core brand truths, human motivations, and cultural relevance, ensuring your brand’s point of view comes through crystal clear across all touchpoints.

Our brand and portfolio architecture practice recognizes that brand portfolios change often, be it the result of mergers, acquisitions, or successful innovation efforts. The result will help consumers navigate at shelf and provide a clear and distinct differentiation of product pillars, while making room for future innovation. Through portfolio modeling, asset audits, and product hierarchy evaluation, we create new rules for a brand’s architecture and guidelines for growth.

Consumers are integral to everything we do, so research revealing actionable consumer insights is integral to our work. They reinforce our belief that connecting with people is paramount, and that grounds our creative work in human behavior and truth. We firmly believe there’s no methodology that works better than an honest discussion. No deep primal plumbing or motivational mumbo jumbo here, just highly focused qualitative and quantitative research capabilities that get to simple truths around attitudes and actions.

Verbal Strategy

NAMING, LINGUISTICS, & NOMENCLATURE SYSTEMS | BRAND VOICE | MESSAGING STRATEGY | SOCIAL STRATEGY & COPYWRITING

Great branding is as verbal as it is visual.
Our Verbal team works in lockstep with Design, to make sure what you say and what you show come together cohesively, on shelf, on social, or even as a digital assistant. We approach brand naming, voice, and messaging in ways that help brands communicate instinctively and connect instantly.

A brand’s name is the first word in a bigger story. Great brand names aren’t just words, they’re tools for understanding brand portfolios and building equities. We approach brand naming with a strategic, thoroughly tested process, combining trend & culture analyses, linguistic best practices, and our own secret sauce. Our naming output is distinctive, evocative, and cleared for trademark.

Every brand needs a voice that’s unmistakably “theirs,” not only for authenticity, but for relatability. We ground brand voice principles in a brand’s positioning, belief, and purpose, to bring its personality to life. Our brand voice guidelines provide clear criteria for how a brand should write, speak, sound, and feel.

They say a brand is the combination of all experiences a consumer has with a company or product. In turn, every touchpoint needs to reflect your brand, staying true to who you are. Our brand messaging road maps leverage brand equity while guiding copy development—across pack, social media, web, and even at point-of-sale. Good messaging gives brands the opportunity to express their point of view; great messaging is how brands win.

Brands are expected to meet their customers where they are, and the majority of yours are on social media. Brands that properly tap into social have increased opportunities to stay relevant and engage in meaningful conversations. We develop content strategies that flex in real time with consumers’ expectations of social platforms and within the larger cultural context. Our social-savvy strategists and designers translate brand equities into social assets, driving brand attention, equity, and growth.

CREATIVE & DESIGN 

Design is more than aesthetic.
Brand Design is how we help our clients think and act in ways that influence consumer behavior. Our approach is disciplined. Our methods are agile and collaborative. And our success is measured by the impact we deliver.

Our design strategy team works seamlessly within our brand design discipline, translating marketing language into verbal & visual equities. Rooted in the belief that design goes beyond mere aesthetics, design strategy reimagines how brands think, behave, and engage with their audiences. As a design agency, we believe the foundation of any successful design initiative begins with a strategically sound point of view. Our work, rooted in deep consumer insight and brand truths, serves as a springboard for design inspiration. Our proprietary methods break down cultural semiotic codes and design cues to form a unique visual and verbal language that informs and inspires the design process. The end result is nothing short of inspirational.

Brand and corporate identity design is the visual aesthetic consumers most associate with a brand or company. From logo, brandmark, and fonts to graphic style and imagery, we provide detailed visual principles to express brand positioning and purpose in a unique and recognizable way. These supportive elements create distinction for the brand across all mediums and platforms.

Package design is a critical piece of marketing communication. It needs to be an advertisement, a navigational shopping tool, and an experiential brand equity all at once. Our design strategy process serves as a foundation for packaging design that is unique, communicative, and engaging at shelf. We utilize competitive shelf analyses and store audits to guide our creative process, leveraging key visual elements that encourage recognition across categories and provide a distinct point of difference.

At CBX, we believe industrial design is the 3-D expression of a brand. We view structural package design as an integral component of the brand experience. Brand-led structural and industrial design elevates form and function, enhancing how people interact with brands, objects, and each other. Structural and industrial design helps protect and deepen the relationship between brands and consumers.

We are one of the country’s leaders in developing private label development—also known as own brand, store brand, or owned brand. We have deep experience across 10 different channels of trade. Our expertise lies in portfolio architecture development, naming, brand positioning, design strategy, design adaptation and rollout, and production across hundreds of categories and thousands of SKUs.

CBX has helped countless retailers generate increased business through the integration of strategic store design, the development of foodservice offers, and the creation of memorable guest experiences. Our retail expertise extends beyond brand design and into the fundamentals and intricacies of layout, design, and store operations, while providing a holistic brand experience.

A great strategy with poor execution is nothing more than a good idea. Our team of design adaptation and packaging production experts have the experience to extend programs across thousands of SKUs, every type of packaging, any packaging substrate, and all printing technologies and manufacturing processes. From concept to shelf is where we excel.

Experience & Activation

BRAND EXPERIENCE EVENTS | RETAIL ACTIVATION | BRAND LAUNCHES | INTERNAL BRAND ACTIVATION

Brands are the sum of every stakeholder interaction—from your employees to your customers. We’ll help you bring your brand to where your audiences are.
Our Experience and Activation team conceives, creates, and produces high-impact brand experiences that transform customers into advocates, and employees into evangelists. Engagement isn’t just a metric. It’s a way of bringing people into your brand experience to create loyalty, organically.

Decreasing attention spans, intensified competition, and heightened consumer expectations all call for an unforgettable brand experience. With these expectations, the pressure is on to make sure brand experiences & events are motivational, interesting, educational, on budget, and most importantly, authentically connect to the lives of people.

Our understanding of retail and brand development is a point of difference. As consumers have adapted to the convenience of online shopping, the challenge for brands and retailers is to deliver in-store experiences that are consistent with their digital expectations. We’re driven to meet this mission head-on, optimizing brand value and increasing in-store sales for our clients. Our retail expertise can support merchandising strategy, activation, and omni-channel and promotional support to build your brand.

We can develop and execute marketing plans that build on the emotional connection between the brand and its audiences, and communicate the brand’s greater purpose via digital, social, traditional, and experiential tactics.

CBX can help launch a new or revitalized brand internally by inspiring and empowering employees with a deeper understanding of the brand through corporate launches, office environments, education, and the development of engagement tools.

Innovation

BRAND & PRODUCT INNOVATION | PRODUCT PIPELINE DEVELOPMENT

Agility is no longer just for start-ups.
Brand Innovation is no longer an option—it’s a requirement. We live in beta, working seamlessly with our clients, consumers, and subject matter experts to create new products, brands, and ways of working. The brands that stand the test of time are those that adapt to the world around them.

Innovation is one of the best ways to invite new customers to your brand while reacquainting yourself with current fans. Brand & product innovation at CBX is brand-led, which means our work supports building long-term equity, not just short-term growth. Through mutual workshops and co-creation sessions, we identify brand pillars and innovation platforms, transform big ideas into integrated product concepts (including naming and graphics), and translate them into shelf-ready design.

It’s common for an organization to operate in “response” mode, answering to retailer demands with tweaks on old ideas. It’s much more challenging to truly refresh a brand’s innovation pipeline from within, while addressing emerging consumer needs. CBX guides companies tasked with filling out their short- and long-term product pipelines through consultation, workshops, and guided inspiration sessions that are consumer-centric, cost-efficient, and beneficial to your brand.

LEAP (A STARTUP MENTALITY)

BRAND CREATION | RAPID INNOVATION | BRAND RENOVATION & BRAND DESIGN

Part entrepreneur, part savant
Using a combination of agile principles and design thinking, CBX has created a means to solve business challenges at warp speed. Our approach uses tested techniques and applies them to new product development, brand creation (from the ground up!), brand renovation, and brand design. Once you take a leap, you may never want to go back to “business as usual”.

Today, we are working at the speed of light to keep up with the competition and make an impact on our business to stay relevant with consumers. Create a brand from the ground up in 3 months? No problem! Find white space in a category to position a product uniquely? Can do! Name it, design and create brand foundational tools? Yes, sir!

Need a 3-year pipeline in 3 months? Want to ideate, concept, validate, and create new products for launch within the year? With leap, we can help rapidly innovate, gain consumer input and empathy, and create game-changing ideas that will rock your customer’s world.

Every brand needs a tune-up now and then. With leap, we can cut 6–12 months out of a typical timeline using best practices of agile and design thinking. We think fast, create, and execute to get your brand/product to market, so you can start reaping the benefits of greater consumer relevance and salience now, rather than later.

Our clients range from big & small to B2C & B2B to global & local