5 Steps to Creating a Powerful Brand Identity
Your brand identity is the apex of your marketing endeavors. This will differentiate you from your competitors and personifies your company and your employees into a unified image. All your hard work in marketing your product and the company concludes to your brand identity. Individually, the product, website, social media content and other promos are marketing activities but together these provide the toolkit that defines your company not just to your customers but to you, your employees and other parties.
A powerful brand identity is crucial in building your business. The visual identity and your logo are just the start – these should be fully integrated into the company’s products, services and vision. However it’s easier said than done, creating something strong and long lasting takes time and effort.
Here are 5 steps to creating a powerful brand identity.
Step One Complete a Brand Audit
As the founder and owner do you know where you stand in your marketplace? How well do you know your company and your business? Complete understanding of your business, including the knowledge and insight of your employees will help you shape a short and sweet image of your company which leads you to your brand identity. As a business owner you must uncover how your products or services is actually being viewed by your consumers, this in turn will drive growth to your business.
Step Two Establish Your Position and Your Messaging
Who are you? What do you stand for or against? These are some of the first questions you must ask yourself while you’re establishing your position and your messaging. Understand that your brand identity will reflect and directly affect your business strategy. Brand identity is more than about what looks cute and eye-catching (well, all things considered, these are also important!). But your brand will visually reflect your position, message and the goals of the business, whether you are aiming for visionary and creative, stable and dependable, or brilliant and agile.
Step Three Develop your Brands Creative Elements
This step is by far the step from our experience is working with clients, is where everyone wants to start first. The first two steps must be established first, before we jump into the look and feel of your brand. Your business logo is one of the most important creative pieces of your brand simply because it’s the visual representation of your brand that your audience will see before your products and services. A powerful logo is simple, memorable, relevant, adaptable, and timeless. See our article on 5 Characteristics Of A Great Logo Design.
While developing your creative elements such as your marketing collateral, website, sales deck, remember to make the design adaptable across all channels of media and for all seasons. Adaptability of design makes it more flexible to all media touch points and through different times and seasons. There’s no better example for adaptability than the Google logo, which goes through different adaptations for different times and reasons. And adaptability of design makes the brand a “fun brand”, a design that’s not boxed in and placed in one corner.
Step Four Launch Your Brand
You have your positioning, messaging, and brand identity complete; it’s time to launch your brand to your consumers. This is by far the fun part, and it can be scary. You may have a feeling of your brand not being accepted, but I’m here to tell you, as long as you’ve followed the three steps before, and created a power message, position, and identity that’s tailored towards your consumers, you will be successful. Launch your new identity alongside other business initiatives. People are by nature averse to changes; products and services they use are all the representations of their childhood blankie or tattered stuffed toy they can’t sleep without, and changes are hard, so these should be justified and must be founded with assurances. So launching a new brand identity with other initiatives that focus on giving more value to the products and services will somehow soften the blow.
Step Five Stay Consistent & Monitor
Lastly, be consistent let your brand identity tell your story. This should kindle a feeling in your customers, speak for your product and company about the direction it’s going and taking. It should create a “POW!” moment. Your image should connect to the customers and immediately create an understanding about the brand upon seeing it. To remain competitive, you must consistently monitor, analyze, and refine your brand to ensure your brand retains its relevance and importance with key audiences. Your brand is built over time, and it’s good to implement strategies to help grow your brand’s awareness and strengthen the brand.
Create a powerful brand identity that will create that POW and BOOM that will resonate even in your customer’s sleep. This will be the foundation of your company in connecting and creating a relationship with your customers.
