Today’s marketplace is becoming increasingly crowded as more and more businesses are flushing the market daily. In such a situation, how can your business stand out? The answer is to create a consistent brand identity that would leave a powerful impression on your customers.
A solid brand identity shows your company’s values. It connects with your audience and develops trust and reliability. In this comprehensive blog post, we discuss how you can create a brand identity that your company needs. Let’s explore further.
Define Your Brand’s Core Values and Personality
Pinpointing what beliefs and personality traits you want your company to have serves as the foundation of developing a strong brand identity. To identify your values and personality take the following steps.
What Are Your Unique Offerings?
What sets your brand apart from your competition in the market? What are the unique aspects of your products or services? What special value do you bring to the table? Answering these questions will help you identify how you are different from others, which is the basis of developing your brand personality.
What Are the Values You Want Your Brand to Have?
Make a list of all the values you want your company to uphold like honesty, innovation, sustainability, etc. Identify how these values will affect your decision-making and strategies. Now select the values that you really want your brand to represent. These are your brand values. Let’s say that you always want your company to be transparent with your customers. In that case, honesty is your brand value.
Assign Some Personality to Your Brand
Think of your brand as a person. Now consider how you want this person to be. Do you want it to be authoritative and authentic? Or playful and funny? Remember these personality traits also align with your audience or brand values. For example, if you have chosen honesty as your brand value, then your brand will have an authentic personality.
Associate Some Emotions With Your Brand
How should your customers feel when they encounter your brand? Should they feel excited, secure, or trusted? Imagine how your brand will connect with your customers at the emotional level. If your brand is honest and authentic, customers must get a sense of trust when they hear of your company.
Ask Stakeholders for Input
Ask for feedback from your employees, customers, and suppliers. Ask them how they perceive the brand. Listening to their viewpoints can give you an idea of your existing brand identity and a sense of how should you change it.
Craft a Visual Identity
Visual identity breathes life into your brand. And it’s not just about the logo. Everything from color palettes to typography and graphics has an impact on brand identity. Let’s talk more about these elements.
Logo- The Benchmark of Visual Identity
A logo is the face of your brand and it should reflect your core values and personality. It should be simple and memorable yet powerful enough to tell your brand story. A logo sets the tone for the rest of the visual identity. Especially if you are designing a logo for a startup, you should also consider the industry that startup will provide service.
Color Palette
Colors have an impact on our psychology. And that’s the reason why choosing the right colors is necessary to convey your brand’s emotions. You should choose the colors that align with your values and personality.
Typography
Typography is also another big factor that influences how people perceive your brand. The style and arrangement of text should complement your brand colors and should be versatile enough to be used across different media platforms.
For example, if your brand gives playful vibes, you can use funky fonts, but if your values are authenticity and trustworthiness, that’s definitely a bad idea.
Imagery
The images, illustrations, and icons you use should also resonate with your brand’s persona, values, and colors. These images play a key role in attracting and bonding with your audience.
Invest in Design
Hire professional designers to create high-quality designs for your brand. The visual elements of your brand become the touchpoints across all marketing channels so it’s important to have a well-conceived design that amplifies your brand voice and distinguishes you from competitors.
Consistency
Whatever, designs, colors, typography, or theme you choose, always keep it consistent across all platforms. Whether it be your social media profiles, website designs, or digital and print ads, use the visual identity. If your visual identity isn’t consistent, your brand won’t be remembered.
Keep a Consistent Tone of Voice
Tone is the embodiment of your brand personality in words. It is another critical factor that shapes the perceptions and emotions of your brand.
Define Your Tone
How should your customers feel when they read an email of yours or a blog post on your company’s website? If they should laugh, then your brand tone is funny, relaxing, and playful.
Brainstorm and define the characteristics that you want your company’s voice to have. And as you might have guessed, your tone must align with your values.
Suit Your Audience
In addition to aligning your tone with your brand values and personality, it is critical to align it with your audience as well. Research what your audience wants, what’s their awareness level and what language they speak, and adjust your tone accordingly. It is important for connecting emotionally with your readers.
Develop a Style Guide
Create a comprehensive style guide that covers every syntax, lexicon, and grammar rule you want your brand writing to adhere to. Finer details like the use of humor, storytelling, and references should also be listed. Every writer in your company should follow this style guide while writing anything.
Be Consistent in Your Tone
Just like your visual identity should be consistent across various platforms, your brand voice and tone should also be consistent. Switching from a casual tone in blog posts to using technical jargon on social media might get your audience thinking if yours is the same brand they encountered earlier.
Keep in mind that you would need to adjust your brand’s voice slightly according to the nature of messaging but the main theme should be the same.
Maintain Consistent Brand Identity Across all Touchpoints
Maintaining uniformity across all of your brand’s touchpoints is crucial. And we can’t emphasize it enough. Your identity should permeate all your communication and marketing channels. Let’s see how you can do so.
Unifying Marketing Channels
All of your marketing channels should tell the same brand story. Whether it be your corporate website, social media profiles, emails, or even tangible aspects like product packages, all should represent the same brand values, voice, and imagery.
Consistency in Visual Elements
Visual elements like logos, typography, and color schemes should be uniform wherever your brand expresses itself. It demonstrates your professional elegance. Also, it helps quick recognition of your brand by your audience. All digital and physical media should have the same visual identity.
Consistency in Message Delivery
All the content you create should have the same tone and style. Your words should communicate your brand’s message. Consistency in tone and message establishes your credibility and trust with your audience.
Consistency in Customer Experience
Every interaction you make with your customers should echo your brand’s identity. From the user-friendliness of your website to the quality of support you provide to your customers, your brand identity shines through all of it. Even the aesthetics of your workspace should also speak of your brand’s personality.
Review and Refresh When Needed
This might seem a bit confusing but you should regularly review and revitalize your brand identity. Throughout the article, we have discussed that brand identity should be consistent but that doesn’t mean it can never be molded. Let’s explore this concept further.
Regular Brand Audits
Periodically audit all elements of your brand identity to stay aligned with market trends and customer expectations. Brand values and goals change from time to time and the identity elements that once represented your brand might have become irrelevant now. So it’s important to audit your identity to make sure it aligns with your brand.
Review Visual Elements
Visual elements like logos, colors, typography, etc. also age over time and what once seemed modern and fresh, might start to feel outdated. Review these elements every once in a while if you feel your visual identity seems outdated, some subtle tweaks can rejuvenate your visual appeal.
Adjusting Tone of Voice
You might also find your tone outdated after a few years. If you feel so, update your brand voice. Another critical aspect is to adjust your brand voice to the type of message you’re delivering and also the platform. For example, if you have decided your brand tone to be funny and casual, you still need to avoid cracking jokes while talking about a serious social issue on social media.
Monitor Feedback and Performance
Ask your employees, stakeholders, and the audience about how they perceive your brand. Ask them how they feel when they encounter your brand. If they’re perceiving your brand in a way you don’t want them to do so, it’s a signal that you need to change some elements of brand identity. If a large percentage of your customers feel that your logo is too outdated, it’s time to change that.
Change Gradually and Don’t Change Often
When it comes to changing your brand identity, you need to be very careful. And we can’t overemphasize it. Your brand identity is what you are to the people. You must not revamp the entire brand identity every year just to make it look better. You’ll sabotage your identity this way. Change should only be made when it is necessary.
Moreover, it should be gradual. If you want to change visuals, change element by element so that your audience gets used to new details while not forgetting the roots of your brand.
Conclusion
To create a consistent brand identity, you need to stick to these five key steps. Define your brand’s purpose, create unique visual elements, set a tone of voice you want to be remembered for, maintain uniformity across all platforms and media and platforms, and lastly, change when necessary.
Brand identity helps customers recognize, trust, and connect with your audience. It’s more than just a logo or tagline. It’s the representative of your brand values, personality, and promises.
By creating a unique brand identity, you achieve more than just differentiating yourself from competitors. Your brand voice, visuals and conduct all align with your company’s core beliefs and personality.