How to develop a great brand identity

A strong brand identity is essential to the success of your business. It can help you stand out from your competitors and attract new customers. Sounds simple right? One study showed that 85% of organisations have brand guidelines but only 30% actually enforce them, so if you are not paying attention to your brand identity, it’s time to start.

Developing a great brand identity involves creating a strong personality, recognisable logo, designing distinctive assets, and crafting compelling messaging. It’s about understanding your target audience and how best to communicate with them through visual elements like colour choices and font styles.

What exactly is a brand identity?

Brand identity is a way of representing your company’s essence, its personality, values and objectives. It can also be used to differentiate your business from its competitors. A great brand identity allows you to create a strong bond with your customers and build an emotional connection. With the right strategy in place, your business can develop an effective brand identity that not only resonates with your customers but leads to more sales.

Developing a great brand identity requires careful planning, research and creative thinking. It must start with understanding your target audience; who they are, what they are looking for, what’s important to them and the kind of message they will respond to emotionally; 64% of women and 68% of men have felt an emotional connection with a brand.

One more time for those at the back, it’s not just a logo!

Branding is more than just a logo or slogan. It’s the overall feeling that people get when they encounter your company, product, or service. It’s how you communicate who you are, your values and what you stand for.

It’s also about creating aspiration. Many luxury brands like Gucci and Louis Vuitton have successfully created an image that many people associate with their brand. They want the kind of identity and lifestyle portrayed by these companies. Owning one of their products makes the buyer feel they’ve got a piece of it – and this extends to the very considerable market for reproductions and fake brand products.

Your brand identity should be simple enough to be memorable but complex enough to distinguish you from the competition.

How to create a great brand identity

Ask questions

To create a great brand identity, start by researching your industry and target market to understand their needs, aspirations and expectations. Try sending a survey to current and past clients, run focus groups to gain feedback or try to find message boards or scroll review sites to gain some voice of customer research (VOC).

Create a mission statement

Your mission statement should explain why your company exists and define its core values. This is important as your business grows because as you acquire more staff everyone needs to be clear what they are working towards. Having clear core values can also be useful in staff recruitment, but that’s for another blog ????  

Build out your messaging

VOC research can be extremely useful when building out strong messaging that resonates with your audience. Try using your customers’ own words in your messaging. What better way to resonate with your audience?

Use core values

Your core values should be the foundation for everything else and should be threaded through:

• Design elements like logos and colours
• Content such as advertising and PR copy
• Customer experience elements such as what aspirations your brand fulfils.

With this foundation in place, you can ensure that every touchpoint with customers is delivering consistent messages about who you are as a company.

Be relentlessly consistent

Your branding efforts must be consistent across all platforms and channels, from online to print advertising. Presenting a brand consistently across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%. 

Consistency is key because when you are familiar with your own brand, your customers have likely only just started noticing it. It takes between 5 to 7 impressions to even start creating brand awareness, which is why consistency is so important. Most companies consider re-branding once every 7 to 10 years with smaller refreshes in between to elevate their visual identity.

Be memorable

Brand salience is how much your brand is thought of or noticed. Without brand salience, your target audience will not choose your brand at the moment of truth i.e. when they make their purchase decision.

How do you achieve brand salience? Through differentiation. Differentiation is about giving your brand a unique voice and message that sets it apart from your competitors. After all, if your brand looks and sounds just the same as theirs, why would anyone choose you? Be different, because it will pay off in the long term.

Define your positioning strategy

Positioning involves strategically placing your company in a certain space in the market to make it more attractive to potential customers, are you a budget brand? Are you a luxury brand?

Final words

A strong brand identity is the key to success for any business. It ensures that your company stands out from the competition, increases customer loyalty and encourages more people to become customers.

The foundation of your brand identity consists of three core elements: salience, differentiation and positioning. A great brand identity can be the difference between success and failure, so it’s important to make sure all the elements of your brand are working together to create a strong, lasting impression. It takes a lot of research and planning.

If you’d like some help developing your brand strategy, why not call on brand strategy professionals such as C4B Media. We’re experts in branding and marketing services in Hertfordshire. Drop us a line at hello@c4bmedia.com or call on 01763 877110