Your brand identity is more than just your brand name or brand logo. As Jeff Bezos the founder of Amazon puts it “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room”. Your brand is essentially the personality of your business and how it makes your audience feel when they interact with you.
Your brand is your reputation and you need to be consistent with your communication as a brand. A brand identity involves having consistency in your environment (in your store front and office), website, online advertising, signage, packaging, print collateral, content publishing, sales and customer service.
Branding doesn’t happen overnight; it takes many years to be enforced. Yet, however long and tedious building a brand identity is – it’s just as rewarding! It will eventually help you increase sales, word-of-mouth referrals and advocacy for your products and services.
Branding is all about being able to develop marketing strategies and campaigns in a way that highlights your brand giving it a unique and positive image that helps it stand out against its competitors and promotes your success.
It helps you convey your brand strategy to the public with visuals, messaging and experience. The elements for your brand identity should be used across all communication and marketing channels consistently. This is what will help your audience recognize you even in the swarm of brands out there.
IMPORTANCE OF BUILDING A BRAND IDENTITY
A brand identity is the whole persona of your brand. It helps your brand to evolve in the mind and hearts of your customers. It’s essential for the lasting success of any business because it makes your brand relatable to its audience and therefor creates brand loyalty.
Here are 6 aspects of a brands Identity that needs to be developed to ensure a brands success.
1. Logo
The Logo is quite literally the face of the brand. It has to do more than just look cool or interesting. It has to be recognized as the name of your brand. People should immediately be able to spot your logo and associate your brand with it.
2. Consistency
A brand doesn’t just need to be remembered by an audience, it also has to be perceived as credible and trustworthy. How do you make that happen? Simply be consistent. A brand that is consistent in its design, message and approach will eventually be able to build credibility amongst its competitors and trust amongst its customers. For example Coco-Cola.
3. Impressions
A brand identity is a set template for your brand. So, whether you are communicating something through an ad [online or in print], product packaging or designing your website, they should all use the set template in their communication. A brand with a face and consistent messaging through all its channels will develop trust among potential buyers.
4. Mission Statement
When you give your brand a face you give it a personality with something to stand for. This in turn gives your company a purpose to base all its actions towards. This is called a mission statement and you can’t have one unless your brand has a face.
5. Generating New Customers
A brand with a face, trust and a mission gives new customers a reason to believe in their purpose and to support the brand.
6. Retaining Old Customers
Once the new customers accept the brand, it’s the brand identity that gives them a sense of belonging and keeps them loyal to the brand. These customers then advocate on your behalf building brand loyalty.
HOW TO BUILD YOUR BRAND IDENTITY
Now that we know what a brand identity is and how important it is let’s walk you through the 5 important steps you need to build your own brand identity.
RESEARCH
It’s important to understand your audience, value proposition and competition, mission, personality and do a SWOT analysis before you build a brand identity. You need to understand these 5 points with absolute clarity and without any confusion. If you haven’t really figured it out yet all you need is a brainstorming session where you ask yourself important questions like:
- Why did you started this business?
- What are the core values that you hold dear to your business?
- What is it that sets us apart from our competition and what do we do better than them?
- How do we describe our brand in 3 words?
- What are the 3 words we want our customers to use when describing our brand?
Now let’s deep-dive into all the 5 pointers.
1. Audience Research
People are versatile, so you can’t expect to reach everyone the same way. For example, you can’t reach a 5-year-old child like you would reach a management level employee. Which is why audience research is essential to understand who your target audience is and what is the best way to reach them in a way that helps you get their attention.
There are a couple of ways you can conduct research. You can prepare questionnaires and surveys, asking relevant questions that you would like to know in order to understand their likes, preferences and priorities.
2. Competitor Research and Value Proposition
The next thing you need to know is who you are up against. You need to understand your competitors marketing strategy and figure out what has worked for them and what hasn’t so you can take an informed decision about your course of action while avoiding the pitfalls they experienced.
Another thing you need to figure out what is it that you are offering that your competitors aren’t. What is the benefit you are giving your audience that they aren’t? And what is the reason that they would choose your over your competitors?
This is known as a USP or unique selling proposition. If you haven’t come up with a USP yet, now is the time to think about it.
3. Mission Statement
A mission is a statement is a clear one-liner about what your business aims to achieve. This will help direct both your business and marketing actions propelling it towards a goal. This is what gives your brand a personality and a vision to live by.
4. Personality
Even though you’re not really branding an individual, giving your brand a persona will only help people relate with you on a deeper level. You can use your brand font, color, and imagery to do this and enhance it even more by the tone you use to market yourself.
Understand what tone you want to use for your brand, whether it\’s informal and sassy or formal and classy. The more you know about your brand the better it helps you create a credible brand identity.
5. S.W.O.T Analysis
Conducting a S.W.O.T analysis is a must for your brand. It helps you understand where you are doing well and what are the areas for improvement. S.W.O.T stands for strengths, weakness, opportunity, and threats. Listing these down both for your brand and your competitors’ brand will give you an edge to market your brand more efficiently.
DESIGN LOGO AND TEMPLATE
Once you completely understand what your brand is and how you want to brand it, you can now bring it to life by designing it.
Let’s look at how we can achieve this
1. Logo
The Logo is one of the most vital parts in creating your brand identity, Its how people will eventually come to recognize you. It’s the one design element that will be on almost everything, from your websites to social media, brochures, business cards, online ads, etc.
Which is why you need to make sure that your logo not only looks attractive but also stands as a symbol for everything your brand stands for.
Here are a few things to keep in mind while making your logo.
- It should clearly communicate the values of your brand and who you are.
- It should be simple, uncluttered, and clean – making your logo visually appealing goes a long way.
- Make a logo that will style for an infinite amount of time.
- Is in accordance with your industry standards
- It creates a positive impression on your audience’s mind.
2. Template
Your business cards, letter heads, and emails will probably be used daily so you want to give it a set template so that it looks more unified, professional and builds credibility and trust among those you work with.
3. Interesting form
When you visually represent your brand in all the packaging, products, and services you offer along with the marketing strategy you are giving your brand an interesting form that helps your audience recognize and remember you. When your audience gets familiar with you in this way it helps you create trust among them.
4. Consistency
I cannot stress this enough – Consistency is key in building a brand identity. Make sure you use the templates that your brand decides upon and use them across all media and business documents. Consistency goes a long way in building credibility.
5. Flexibility
Yes, Consistency is key, but in an ever-changing world that we live in today, you need to constantly switch it up to keep your audience interested. So, you might have to make a few changes to your marketing strategy along the way and even a few changes to your design, and that’s okay. However, what you need to remember is that you have to make these changes across all your communication channels and business documents. You can’t just change the color palette on your website and not change it anywhere else.
6. Color and Type
Creating a color palette helps you enhance your identity while being creative. Setting a limited number of colors that you will you for your brand helps keep your brand consistent while giving you the freedom to play with the colours on your palette to create unique designs that represent your brand.
7. Document
You can ensure that your brand sticks to all of its branding rules by create a branding guide with all the do’s and do not’s. This will make sure you do not miss anything and stay true to your Brand Identity.
BRAND LANGUAGE
Your Brand Language is how you integrate your brand into your community. The best way for you to do this is to create quality and engaging content. You content will literally speak for you online. It’s how your audience will perceive you and connect with you.
Let’s see how we can build our Brand Language.
1. Language
The language that you use to communicate is a direct reflection of your brand. So, make sure to use language that suits the tone your brand wants to enforce. For example, if you’re a high-end business you will want to use a more professional language but if you are a trendier and more laid-back brand it makes more sense for you to use a conversational tone. Whatever language your brand incorporates makes sure that it is consistent with all its communication channels.
2. Connection and Emotion
The best way to connect with your audience is to make them relate to your brand on a more emotional and personal level. This is why it is so important to give your brand a personality. People to relate to people, not to organizations – so you need to show your audience that you truly care for them and aren’t just a brand looking to increase sales (even if that is your end goal).
Tell them a story as a brand that will move them and lead them to build a strong emotional connection with you. This will help your audience build a strong and lasting connection with you.
3. Social Media
Social Media opens up a whole new world where you can interact with your audience one-to-one. If you use it well it can be a canvass of creativity for your brand to build its unique identity and engage with its customers. The plethora of social media platforms and its unique features have practically made the distance between a brand and its audience disappear. This is a great way to promote your brand but it’s also a great way to receive feedback and understand what your audience is looking for.
4. Advertise
Advertising is the oldest way for brands to connect with their audience. Being creative in your ads and striking a chord with your audience while being true to your brand\’s identity is key to making an impression on your audience.
WHAT TO AVOID DOING
If you all of what is mentioned above but also end up doing any of these, your brand identity will not succeed after all. So keep an eye out for these.
1. Avoid Copying Your Competitors
Copying your competitors might be tempting especially when you know what has worked for them. But restrain yourself from doing so. Replicating what they’ve done will not only take your individuality away but it will also destroy your credibility. Instead, learn what has worked for them and add your own twist to it to make it unique and true to your brand\’s Identity.
2. Don’t be inconsistent online and offline
Although there can be a variation between your branding on print and online – Make sure to keep the font, colour, theme, and design the same for the most part.
3. Don’t give out mixed signals
Keep your copy simple and clear. Know what you want to communicate and don’t jumble it up with many elements. Just because something makes sense to you doesn’t mean your audience will understand it. Additionally, it would be great if you can get an unsuspecting person to review your material before you publish it. It will help you understand if they received your message the way you intended.
MONITOR YOUR BRAND
Constantly monitor your brand to make sure that all the elements you decided for your brand identity are being used efficiently.
Also, keep a watch on how your brand is being perceived by your target audience. You can do this by keeping a close eye on social media discussions about your brand, the comments you receive on the content you post, and conducting surveys.
Make sure to make changes based on the information you receive to either change certain aspects of your communication or add some aspects to help you create a greater impact.
Conclusion:
Your Brand Identity is essential to create a lasting impression on your audience. Do thorough research to understand your brand better and understand your competitors and what has worked for them.
Create a branding guide to make sure all your branding elements are being used effectively. Consistency is key. Be consistent with your design, language, and tone across all your communications.
Monitor your Brand Identity regularly to understand what has worked for you and what needs to be changed to create a greater impact.
