What is branding?

Your brand is much more than a cool logo, it’s how other people perceive your business.

Your brand is the cohesive combination of design, language, storytelling and experience. Together they combine to evoke a feeling – “the vibe” – with your target audience, to influence them to engage with your brand and ultimately buy from you. Whether you’ve thought about it or not, you have a brand.

A strong brand is a congruent tone of voice, design, strategy, people, environments, touch points, ‘call to actions’ and customer care.

Your brand is your promise to solve a problem so always remember to:

  • Be consistent
  • Be cohesive
  • Have clarity

Why should you care about branding?

With millions of businesses trying to get noticed online and offline, having a strong brand has become crucial to differentiate your business from your competitors.

With this increased competition, products and services can often have limited life cycles, however brands can last for a very long time. Your brand can pivot to meet the market, if managed and designed with longevity in mind.

There is no point having a great product or service if your visual communication fails to connect your visitor with your messaging. Branding is the key tool for connecting all your communication touch points and giving clarity to your offers.

Why is branding important for your business?

Many new businesses go to market with an idea, not with a brand.

The idea can be challenging to explain to others. You may think everyone should understand it as you do, but often they don’t, so branding is critical for communicating and connecting your idea with your audience.

When branding is done well, it can…

  • Help you stand out from your competition
  • Increase the perceived value of your offer
  • Connect with your prospects emotionally
  • Boost credibility and trust levels
  • Have your business be: first in mind
  • Motivate customers to buy
  • Cement customer loyalty and retention

What is brand Identity?

Just like your personality makes you unique, your brand identity is the unique tangible personality of your business that sets you apart from your competition.

The appearance of your business matter – brand identity is the visual impression you leave with your customers every time they interact with your brand online or offline.

Visual brand identity is the unified visual design message or visual vocabulary of your brand that needs to communicating effortlessly across all your marketing touch points including: your logo, color palette, typography, imagery, packaging, website, social media, and all other visual elements in your business.

These visual cues are designed to clearly communicate your brands values and they can subconsciously affect how your customers views your business from your relevance, to your perceived value and your trustworthiness.

How do you create your brands visual identity?

Research and strategy comes first, then the design phase comes next, so you need to be clear about your brand’s voice and mission before you create your brands visual identity.

The strategy phase doesn’t need to be a drawn out process. Some of the bigger agencies want you to believe it is so they can justify their high price tag to produce a ‘brand strategy’ document. In my opinion many brand strategy documents are overpriced, overworked multi page documents that are full of buzzwords, fluffy wanker branding jargon and basically stuff that you do NOT need in a small business!

What your designer really need to know…

All your designer really needs to know before they can create the visuals of your brand identity, is the following foundational questions, plus a few others, however these are the main questions:

  • Describe what your business does and what is the purpose of your brand?
  • What problem does your brand solve?
  • Who are your targeting with your brand? (Age, Gender, Profession, Geographic location, Socioeconomic status, Frustrations etc.)
  • Describe your brand values and what your brand should represent. (Provide 3-5 words for how you want to be remembered.)
  • Describe the feeling you want to evoke from your target market with your brand.
  • Describe your objectives for your brand.
  • Where do you see your brand in 5 years from now?

Answer those questions and your designer should be ready to bring your brand identity to life and translate who you are as a brand into a series of design assets you can use across your products / services and marketing material.

Engage a design team that has a proven track record and can get to the heart of your brand quickly. The right team will create unique visual design solutions that align with your brands values, reflects your brands mission and appeal to your target market.

All of the key branding design elements can eventually take the form of brand style guide. This is a tangible document that will help unify your message on and offline.