What is a Brand:
A brand identity is one of the most powerful tools that a company can have, as it helps customers identify and distinguish your company from others. In fact, most customers choose to buy from companies that align with their personal beliefs, making it imperative that businesses create an identity that clearly communicates the values and voice customers want to see.
A brand boils down to four main things: a business’s values, its products or services, its brand voice (this includes its personality, tone, and style), and its relationship with its customers. These four elements are combined in order to create a cohesive image that represents everything a company stands for, becoming its public face and responsible for its customer relationship. Some common components that comprise this image are the business name, logo, and design elements like logo and color palette. On the surface level, creating these elements may seem like an easy task, however, its importance and meticulous nature should not be overshadowed.
Research:
The first, and likely the most important step, is to research a few different things in order to get a feel for what your brand should be like. For instance, identifying your audience can help differentiate your marketing approach from other companies in the same field, such as Barbie and LEGO. While Barbie targets a demographic of primarily young girls with fashion, accessories, and feminine colors, LEGO targets a much wider audience of both girls and boys and encourages creativity through building, problem-solving, and a diverse color palette. Knowing the audience that you’d like to reach is the best way to ensure that your marketing matches your product and that it fulfills your customers’ needs. When crafting the ideal image of your target customer, there are some important things to consider: their age, location, gender, income, values, buying habits, and main challenges/desires. As you develop your business, these traits can be developed further and adjusted based on results and feedback.
Additionally, in a competitive market, it is important that your brand identity helps to distinguish you from your rivals; this can be done by researching the market to find weaknesses like market inefficiencies and untapped clients. One prominent example of this strategy is with TJ Maxx: by creating a name for themselves in the retailer market by selling affordable brand-name clothing, they garnered an astounding $14.589B in profits in 2023, proving that they were able to successfully draw new customers for themselves into the market.
Brainstorm:
Once the research has been done, you can finally start to create your brand utilizing the information gathered. As mentioned before, the company’s values and mission statement are an integral part of one’s brand identity. In order for customers to recognize this statement, it must be prominent in every aspect of your marketing and image, as it clearly defines why the brand exists in the first place. If your mission statement does not solve a problem or differentiate the company from competitors, it must be reformed.
A brand is meant to depict a business’s relationship with its customers through its personality and voice. Your marketing and branding should all be done with this tone in mind, ensuring that the relationship that you maintain with customers remains consistent. The five most common brand personalities are competence, excitement, sincerity, sophistication, and ruggedness; most businesses exist on a spectrum of these traits. Understanding which personality will be best for your audience is a decision that can be modified as you gain a higher understanding of their needs. Design elements such as font, imagery, and color can help to maintain the same tone, even in the visual aspects of your brand.
By picking a slogan and a narrative to sell your company’s mission, you encourage a deeper relationship with the customer as your business provides solutions to people’s problems. This should be complemented with the brand’s name, one of the most important decisions you will make. Brand names must be distinguished from competitors; short, easy to remember, and representative of your business. Start by brainstorming a couple of names that fit these guidelines and check in with your friends and family to then adjust as needed; an effective tactic is to try and decipher why your favorite businesses retain the names that they chose, and why they work.
Once this process is completed, your next step is to put it into practice! Then, as you continue to collect feedback and grow your business, you may find parts of your brand identity that work and others that do not. As we have stressed, building a brand is not a short process, or one that ever stops. It is normal to have components of your brand identity change over time, and that’s okay! Learning to change and expand on your successes based on feedback is a normal part of being a business owner, and no one gets it right the first time. The important thing to keep in mind is to never stop adapting your brand.
Sources
