Everything in your business is about how you market yourself. A brand isn’t just a collection of colors or images, but it’s an identity. It’s the expression of your business that’s a result of the thoughts, feelings, and ethics you’ve worked hard on distilling into a formidable business product. But creating a brand isn’t about translating the components into some pretty pictures. There are steps you need to go through in order to come out on the other side. What is it that you need to do to develop a brand identity that’s strong and stable?
Understand Your Message
It’s about creating a visual language that isn’t just a logo but it’s a way of communicating your business through every single promotional material, from your website to your audio and visual materials, or your product labels, it should all be consistent. There are marketing agencies that can help you with this but you also need to remember that when it comes to your product that the branding remains consistent. Working with labeling companies like Pro-Motion can help you to create a consistent setup with your products. Before you can get to the physicalities you’ve got to get to the message.
Create Personas
When we start to think about our brand identity as the face of our business we have to start thinking about it as a “character.” We start to create personas that don’t just represent what our business needs to communicate but how it represents different segments of your target market. When you start to dig deep into the psychological personas of signs and signifiers (semiotics) and think about the underlying message to stimulate a person’s need to buy certain products, aligning the persona with the market research gives you a more comprehensive vision.
Build The Identity
Building the identity is about understanding your customers but it’s also about understanding your competitors. When you start to accumulate all this information you can begin to build the identity. Doing this can be a long-winded process especially when you’re trying to get your employees to brainstorm but when you start to break it down into the individual components like the typography, colors, the logo, as well as the strapline you then soon begin to make this fully formed entity.
The Eye-Catching Elements
Eye-catching is one thing but it’s about also creating the aesthetic of the business that entices people in. It’s not necessarily about pretty pictures and colors because every company is now savvy about marketing themselves. What you’ve got to do is go one step further in order to build the bridge between yourself and the customer. Eye-catching doesn’t necessarily need to be the logo and typefaces but it’s about the values and ethics you communicate too. All of these work together to create a brand identity.
A strong brand is the distillation of business that’s worked hard to understand it’s identity. Creating a strong brand is crucial but you can’t get there until you have an understanding of what you are all about.
