BS LLC—a Cincinnati Branding Agency

The crack of a fresh spine, the feel of paper, the satisfying organization of perfectly displayed text—designing a book integrates research, materiality, typesetting, layout, and graphic design.

We help clients meet industry standards, define and templatize book layouts, engineer, and bring to life front cover designs, and create all necessary creative assets to bring your book to life. 

Additionally, we have hands-on relationships with multiple print houses specializing in various print techniques. We project manage the project process and the print production process to help you focus on what’s important a beautiful book. 

Strong corporate identity design—the process of creating a visual identity for a product, service, or institution through graphic design—combines purposeful and research-driven brand positioning strategy with timeless aesthetic vision. The most iconic and long-lasting brands exist because a group of people dedicated themselves to the practice of discovering a product, service, or institution’s fundamental purpose and representing that purpose through shapes, colors, and words.  

Brand names and product names must serve many masters—the URL, the SEO, the feelings and associations, the sound, the shape of the letters, and the list goes on. The process of developing and selecting brand names and product names can be draining and demoralizing—you think you’ve landed on something perfect, something that captures exactly what you want people to think and feel, plus it looks beautiful in chunky sans-serif text. But then you turn to Google and find out someone has beat you to the punch.

Our brand-building process begins with positioning. Brand positioning is the process of understanding how your brand fits into the ecosystem of competitors, stakeholders, and customers. It is the act of creating a brand that occupies a unique and different space in the market, while still communicating the inherent benefits of the product or service. Positioning is essential to the process of creating a brand imbued with purpose and built to last and grow.

A great brand strategy is the process of understanding where a brand has been, its current market position and its long-term goals. From it, we can plot a course to achieve future goals based on a deep understanding of how its products or services solve problems for customers and what moves those customers to make decisions.

Branding is the act of defining and refining the essence or identity of a business, product, service, or institution—it is creating that which comes to represent the totality of experiences and associations with a product or service.  Some believe that branding is a promise you make to your customer. We believe this to be a shallow interpretation, as branding encompasses the promise as well as how, when, and why you make the promise. More broadly, a brand is the voice, heart, mind, and style of a business. 

From a top-level, our approach to business strategy begins with research. We define how you currently generate revenue, what problems you solve for your customers, and why they choose you over your competitors (competitive advantage). These fundamental components of business help us align strategic endeavors with branding, marketing, sales, and HR. Together, they produce quantifiable results, including differentiation and growth.

The problem with copy is that almost everyone in the business world can write, and so they think copy is easy, intern-work, get someone to do it, and don’t fret about it. We wish you the best of luck. 

Graphic design has never been more accessible than at the present moment. Our culture has become increasingly visual. More and more, we communicate with and through images. For BS, graphic design is more than a tool for communicating ideas, it is the visual representation of brand identity. To us, designing an identity for a brand is a human process.  

Market research is the process of analyzing the viability of a product or service through quantitative and qualitative analysis. The goal of this research is to determine or discover a target market, brand position, and marketing niche position. The positioning informs brand strategy & business strategy and lays the foundation to build a marketing strategy. At large, conducting market research increases your chances of success. It outlines opportunities allowing leaders to make better use of resources & processes while mitigating risks. Market research operates on two primary modes of analysis—quantitative and qualitative. These distinct disciplines are deeper and richer when studied together, however, they can operate in silos. In a way, quantitative and qualitative offer a philosophical dialectic: together they pursue the truth about opportunities. Quantitative research is analytical, correlative, and focused on data. Qualitative is human and causal. 

BS LLC is a Cincinnati marketing firm with expertise in strategic marketing and digital marketing. We work on campaigns but specialize as an outsourced marketing department for small to mid-sized companies. Our growth mindset helps turn insights into action and action into data-driven performance. 

Outsourced marketing departments offer a strong value proposition. Internal teams with senior talent, content developers, engineers, analysts are expensive and complex to manage. We’re here to help reduce marketing department costs by 70+%

With 20+ years of experience in marketing strategy and strategic planning,  we are able to support your company’s growth and campaign objectives. Our work is defined by transparent planning, objective alignment, metric measurement, and unique flexibility to focus on both short and long-term strategies. Our team’s capacity also reaches beyond traditional marketing to business strategy, brand strategy,  branding, design, public relations, and more.

BS LLC helps firms develop marketing strategies to build brand equity and to promote the sales of your products or services.  

How do you build a marketing strategy? You begin with the research product /service, the customer, and the marketplace. These research processes are essential to the development of brand strategy & business strategy, the tools that help define your position and identity.

From stunning product shots to interior design and architectural photography to lifestyle and event shoots, we’ve refined the craft of image-making into a process that begins with goals and final placement and works backward to styling and shooting. We organize any necessary rentals, talent, and scheduling and work with our clients on shot selection before any final editing or retouching as necessary.

From exciting launches to the not-so-fun COVID-19 communications, BS has managed Public Relations for startups and mid-sized companies. Our approach to PR is to tailor each story pitch to a specific publication or audience, work directly with editors and reporters to craft unique angles, and organize calendars and follow-up.

Our goal is to increase your brand’s awareness, primarily through earned media with the general public and/ or specific subsets of the market. Publica relations is a sub-strategy of brand and business strategy objectives identified to achieve your goals. 

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How do people find what they need to find online? Well, it begins with a search index such as Google, Bing, and others. Users input questions, keywords, or they talk to their phones and the index scurries off to find information that is highly relevant to their request. SEO is the practice of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic through organic search. SEO is essential to a website’s success as a marketing tool. The most successful SEO-attuned websites require a thoughtful taxonomy that allows its content to be highly digestible by search indices.  

Simple, elegant, unique. Our goal is to create business and institutional websites that provide potential customers the emotional satisfaction and functional understanding necessary to convert leads into customers.

The BS LLC team has opened 15 restaurants. With deep expertise in restaurant operations and design, we are an ideal fit to help bring culinary dreams to life.

Our solutions-based development process has helped build award-winning restaurants from concept to completion, including advising on technical culinary and operational development.