How To Create a Brand Identity In 5 Steps
So you have an excellent idea for a business and a plan of action. You know what products or services you’ll offer and who they’re intended for.
Now it’s time to set the tone of your brand voice, ensuring it stands apart from the competition and creates a clear and defined brand identity design.
In this beginner’s guide, we’ll take a deep dive into what it takes to create a brand identity, covering everything you need to create a brand personality for your business, including:
- What Is Brand Identity?
- Why Is Brand Identity Important?
- How To Create A Brand Identity In Five Steps.
- Colour Psychology.
- Choosing Your Brand Colours.
- Famous Brand Colours.
- Creating Your Brand.
- Brand Consistency.
- Companies With A Strong Brand Identity.
- Logo Evolution.
- Why You Should Invest Time In Your Brand Identity.
- Key Takeaways.
By the time you’re done reading, you’ll know what it takes to launch a successful brand.
Let’s get started.
What Is Brand Identity?
A great brand identity goes beyond just a public face—it also conveys your voice, beliefs, and the relationship you want to create with customers.
When creating a strong brand and company logo, it’s essential to have a distinct visual identity. To ensure maximum recognition of your company, here are some steps in developing a solid and compelling brand identity.
Identify your mission
What motivated you to establish your organisation, and what is its mission? Customers crave knowing your firm’s purpose (not just “to earn a profit”), as this will reflect who you are. Distinguish yourself by creating a unique value proposition that expresses why consumers should choose your business over other options.
Establish Your Value Proposition
Your unique value proposition makes you stand out from the competition. It’s a declaration of how your offer will satisfy and surpass customer expectations and what sets it apart from other services on the market. Every marketing action should align with this pledge to ensure its success.
Create your brand’s visual identity
Establishing a strong visual identity for your brand is essential. Consider the well-known logos and colour palettes used by big brands, such as Facebook’s iconic blue logo or McDonald’s instantly recognisable golden arches accompanied by their trademark yellow and red colours.
With the right combination of elements, including colour choice, you will easily ignite recognition among your target audience and maybe even brand ambassadors!
Crafting a unique brand design is essential, but selecting the perfect colours for your company name can be just as powerful. Colours have different implications and nuances; when carefully chosen, they can evoke an emotional response from potential customers.
Increase brand recognition
Establishing a solid foundation for your company and, as a result, brand positioning can take time.
You can leverage multiple marketing strategies to reach this goal, such as creating an attractive and informative website to embody your mission, optimising content for higher SEO rankings, and developing meaningful relationships through social media outlets by sharing relevant posts.
To maintain an authoritative and unified presence in the market, it is critical that your mission statement, unique value proposition, and branding stay consistent across all platforms, reinforcing your company’s reputation and ensuring its success.
Why Is Brand Identity Important?
A strong brand identity is crucial in differentiating your business from your competitors.
A well-crafted brand identity is essential to any successful branding strategy. A consistent and recognisable logo, style, or messaging that customers can quickly recognise will help ensure your business stands out from the crowd.
By building up a distinct brand identity, you’re strengthening customer loyalty and helping them remember who you are even when they don’t have time for deep research into each potential vendor’s offerings.
The easier it is for your customers to recognise you, the more likely they will relate with you.
How To Create A Brand Identity In Five Steps
When considering brand guidelines, it’s essential to clearly understand your target audience and their expectations and determine the tone of voice that best fits your brand.
Once you’ve established the tone of voice, focus on the visual aspects to create an aesthetic—from fonts and colours to imagery and logos—that communicates who your company is.
Next, decide how you will showcase your brand through various elements such as packaging design and advertising campaigns.
Finally, take stock of all elements of your branding efforts, from website design to print collateral pieces, to ensure they flawlessly align and represent your company’s brand identity.
By following these five steps, you can ensure that your company has a distinct presence that resonates with those who encounter it.
Step 1: Define your target audience
Step one in creating a successful brand identity is to define your target audience. Knowing who you’re speaking to is essential for developing an appropriate tone of voice and ensuring your language resonates with them.
Think about their age, lifestyle, occupation and interests – understanding this will go a long way in helping you craft messaging that captures their attention and appeals to their needs. It’s also important to consider additional research, like market trends or competitor analysis, which can provide further insight into what drives your target audience.
Step 2: Develop your key messages
Step Two in creating your brand identity is about getting your messages across.
Ensure you know your target audience and identify the key points you want them to hear so they can form a favourable opinion of your brand. This means honing in on the most critical aspects of your business’s message.
It will go a long way in developing a solid reputation with the desired audience, giving them enough information to make informed decisions. Plus, you’ll give yourself an edge over other companies doing the same thing who still need to develop their message. After all, having a brand identity isn’t just about looking good: it’s also about being heard.
Step 3: Brand identity design
Step 3 is creating a brand identity design that includes building a logo, colour scheme, typography and style.
Having the correct visual identity can help to make sure your brand stands out, as well as communicate ideas quickly and effectively.
Look at what other brands with similar industries or target markets are doing and see how you can incorporate elements into your own visual identity to make it unique while still communicating your brand’s message.
Step 4: Implement your brand across all channels
Step four involves ensuring your brand identity comes through across all your channels and marketing campaigns.
Consistency is critical, so consider how you want to express your brand’s unique personality over different platforms. People understand this – they have come to expect brands to convey their message with humour, empathy and creativity.
Step 5: Evaluate and adjust as needed
Step 5 is all about results.
Evaluating how effective your brand identity has been and, if necessary, make adjustments to ensure it is as successful as possible. Whether that be refreshing the look and feel, so it stays up to date or changing the narrative or content you push out, a constant review process is crucial.
Colour Psychology
Logos are a vital component of any brand identity.
When selecting brand colours, be aware that each hue can bring about a range of emotions and thoughts.
The shades you select to represent your business will enhance its identity and convey its mission statement while reinforcing what makes it unique.
Therefore, when considering the strength of your brand voice, consider your brand image’s impact on your target market.
By grasping the principles of colour psychology, we can understand how shades affect human emotions and habits.
For instance, red is identified with passion, daringness and strength. However, it may be linked to danger or annoyance in specific contexts and cultures.
On the other hand, red has also been known to induce hunger, a reason why fast food companies often adopt such a brand personality for their logos.
Grasping these subtleties around hues and their influence on people’s perception of your logo (and brand) will aid you in making sound design decisions.
Choosing Your Brand Colours
Here is a quick overview of each colour’s attributes:
- Red: Passion, love, power and confidence
- Orange: Trust, energy, playful and optimism
- Yellow: Happiness, hopeful, cheerful and fun
- Green: Peace, nature, harmony and renewal
- Blue: Tranquility, calm, intelligence and trust
- Purple: Royalty, wisdom, compassion and creativity
- Pink: Optimistic, innovative, creative and childish/feminine
- Black: Power, modern, sophistication and strong
- Gray: Neutral, calm, wise and professional
- Brown: Natural, stable, friendly and comfortable
Famous Brand Colours
Let’s look at some of the world’s best-known brands and the colours they use.
Creating Your Brand
Your brand identity should be reflected in everything from your website and logo to your social media presence and marketing materials. Crafting the perfect brand identity can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be!
Creating a clear visual identity and voice for your brand is crucial if you want to stand out and be recognised by consumers.
Being a creative marketer driven by visualisation, I always start by thinking about what the brand should signify as an overall message. At this point, I can begin visualising the overall concept of creating a memorable brand identity. This helps me understand the website design and overall brand strategy.
Brand Consistency
It’s essential to carry this same cohesive design and message through your entire marketing strategy, from design elements on social media to printed materials like business cards.
Each of these components should work together in harmony to create a sense of unity between all elements. If done correctly, having an effective and professional brand appearance can pay dividends in helping you build credibility in the marketplace.
When you craft a clear and persuasive message that speaks to your target audience, it’s much easier for them to recognise how your brand embodies their preferences and values.
Let’s dive into some noteworthy examples of brands successfully leveraging this strategy.
Companies With A Strong Brand Identity
In a world where many companies are clambering for market share, having a simple logo that can be easily identifiable across different cultures proves that you don’t need to go over the top on the design front to create a successful brand.
Some notable brand identities include:
The North Face
We start with a global brand identity by The North Face. The North Face – a U.S.-based outdoor product company specialising in apparel and equipment for climbing, skiing, hiking, camping, snowboarding and for those who love to be outdoors.
Their core value is to ‘Never stop exploring’ – an ethos that drives their mission to inspire people all across the globe.
The iconic North Face logo is synonymous with the brand’s identity. Designed in 1966 and composed of three interlocking arched lines representing the Half Dome Mountain peak in California due to its unique shape and curved outlines, it was boldly placed on the left side with a monochrome badge under it.
The redesign of 2010 provided a much-needed update to the North Face logo. The vibrant red and white palette added energy, while the lettering and emblem were placed on a scarlet-red square. This combination symbolises power, progress, and motion – all qualities that perfectly embody the spirit of this brand.
Apple
Apple has manifested an emotional branding strategy that prioritises lifestyle, creative thinking and liberation while upholding a commitment to ardour, dreams and ambitions.
Moreover, they are devoted to offering the technology as an enabler for everyone who uses it. This puts Apple ahead of its competitors – their focus on giving people strength through tech so each person can gain from it.
By maintaining an air of mystery around their brand’s inner workings, they have generated a frenzy unlike any other regarding product releases, sparking conversations among tech-savvy people and those who don’t usually use technology.
Apple has always prided itself on being unique; that’s why they have its iconic slogan, “Think Different“. In contrast to other technology companies, it isn’t the practical features of their products that attract customers – what sells is the concept behind them.
Apple has mastered the art of creating an exclusive atmosphere when releasing new products and carefully crafting their aesthetics, allowing them to be seen as a luxury brand amongst their followers. This is what many customers are paying for – practicality and a symbol of prestige driven by emotion.
LG
LG stands for “Life’s Good,” a slogan and a brand personality which accurately reflects the company’s mission of creating delightfully intelligent products. As an organisation, LG strives to be at the forefront of technology, providing users with cutting-edge innovations.
This company has five guiding principles: Global, Tomorrow, Energy, Humanity and Technology. The letter G enclosed within a circle serves as our symbol for emphasising human relationships above all else. This mark expresses their commitment to achieving maximum customer satisfaction through lasting partnerships with them.
The “L” and “G” emblem encircling the world stands for the company’s dedication to all future generations, humanity, technology and relationships.
Their symbol mark comprises two distinct components: the LG logo in a signature grey and a stylised image of the human face, which exemplifies their vibrant red hue. Red denotes friendliness and demonstrates their assurance to deliver excellent results.
Amazon
Amazon is another one of the most successful and recognised brands globally.
In 2000, the current logo debuted with a modified yellow curve to symbolise a smile that stretches from A to Z. Throughout all its modifications over the years; Jeff Bezos has kept each of the original components of this iconic logo intact.
The iconic “A” to “Z” represents the vast selection of products on the site. As a company, they want customers to know that whatever they need, they have it – with a smile!
The Amazon symbol of a smile was used across the business to reduce costs. The “smile boxes” have transformed into a powerful marketing asset – just like the vans that travel with them.
Logo Evolution
Re-imagining your visual brand is an effective way to stay true to your brand’s roots while showcasing progress.
Letting customers and staff know that you are growing gives them the assurance of continuity and a sense of excitement for what comes next!
Logo evolution keeps the core values alive but introduces something fresh and new which builds upon the success of your organisation.
Examples of global brands that have evolved their logo since inception.
Why You Should Invest Time In Your Brand Identity
Crafting a solid brand identity can be challenging, but it’s worth investing your time and energy. Doing so can allow you to control how the public perceives your company and establish an emotional connection with potential customers, increasing their loyalty and trust.
When considering brand guidelines, it’s essential to clearly understand your target audience and their expectations and determine the tone of voice that best fits your brand.
Once you’ve established the tone of voice, focus on the visual aspects to create an aesthetic – from fonts and colours to imagery and logos – that communicates who your company is.
Consider how you will showcase your brand through various elements such as packaging design and advertising campaigns.
Finally, take stock of all elements of your branding efforts, from website design to print collateral pieces, to ensure they flawlessly align and represent your company’s brand identity. By following these five steps, you can ensure that your company has a distinct presence that resonates with those who encounter it.
Key Takeaways
A brand identity can include visual design components as well as brand voice. The right way to do this is to portray the brand’s vision and ethos. You need to know market trends and know what your target market needs.
Create a brand identity that increases brand exposure for your business; this is the best way to stay above the competition. Brand identity can evolve or be modified over time and should be considered when rebranding.
Follow these five steps to creating a strong brand identity for your business: define your target audience, develop key messages, create a visual identity, implement your brand across all channels, and evaluate and adjust as needed.
FAQ
What are examples of brand identity?
Inspirational brand identities. Glossary. Hydroflasks. Jungalow. American sodas. The boys smell. CocaCola. -. Patagonian. McDonalds. Glossary. Hydroflask. Jungalows. American societies. Boy smelled. Coca. Patagon. McDonalds.
What creates a strong brand identity?
A strong brand identity is built on a consistent application of design standards to every aspect of brand strategy, from office design to product packaging, online design and Facebook. The results are obtainable with the help of the brand book.
What are the five steps of brand design?
- Execute effective market research.
- Create a unique value proposition.
- Use a brand name that delivers your company message.
- Establish an emotional connection.
- Be consistent in your communication.
