With millions of companies trying to gain popularity and mass adoption, having a strong brand has become crucial for companies to stand out from their competitors.
If you are working to build a brand identity for a client, or you are doing this for your own company, it is important to understand first what a brand is and what it takes to establish one. This is not as easy as it seems.
Your brand, which is a crucial part of your brand identity, is characterized as a name or form of product produced by a particular company.
What is Brand Identity?
What your company means is a brand identity, what your beliefs are, how you express your product and what you want people to feel as they engage with it. The brand identity is simply your company image and a commitment to your customers.
Even after you made the sale the company makes a mark on your clients. Brand identity is the process where that mark is formed.
Basically, a brand identity is a way of communicating with the public, separating yourself from your rivals and building a brand image that allows people to get involved.
If you want your brand to grow and prosper in the future, you need to create a brand identity that conveys your meaning effectively and is versatile enough for you to develop. But that does not happen immediately. It requires critical thinking, a team with solid interaction and design capabilities, and an intimate brand understanding. Yet, with excellent results, it can be achieved well — as long as you have the right support. Luckily, you just don't have to do it alone.
Importance of Brand Identity
Here are five elements of a well-established brand identity, and why you should consider developing them:
1. It Represents your Business
The logo of your brand is the "face" of your business, for all purposes. But that face should do more than just look great or exciting — the contribution a logo makes to brand identity is also associative. It tells the public that [ this image ] means [ your company name ].
2. Builds Trust Among Customers
Not only does having a brand identity make your product memorable, but it also builds authority for your brand in the industry. A brand that develops a face, and continually retains that identity over time builds reputation among its rivals and confidence among its consumers.
3. Increased Impressions and Exposure
A brand identity is a blueprint for everything you'd include in a company advertising — whether that ad is in print, web, or a YouTube commercial. A brand with a face and market reputation is well-positioned to promote itself and give potential customers an image.
4. Brand Identity Establishes your Company Mission
Once you build a brand identity you give it something to stand for. That, in effect, adds meaning to your business. You can't build a mission statement without first earning a reputation for your brand.
5. Customer Generation and Satisfaction
A brand identity— one with a name, trust, and mission— draws people who are in alignment with what the company has to deliver. But once those individuals become customers, that identity of the same brand gives them a sense of belonging.
If you want the company to become a well-known and respected brand name, there will be some effort to do so. The steps below will help you build brand identity. These are simple steps, yet powerful ones.
How to Build Brand Identity
We have created this step-by-step guide to building a brand identity to normalize the process for you, specifically focusing on the design elements of a brand identity. The process may seem intimidating, but we will try to make it simple and easy to understand for you.
If your brand is in its initial stages or prepping to rebrand and unsure where to get started, follow these tips to move seamlessly through the process and build a stronger brand identity that will set you up for success.
Determine your Brand Strategy
Your brand identity is a means of helping you put your brand strategy into effect. The approach is a comprehensive plan detailing exactly what you are trying to do and how you will do it. Together with your content strategy, your brand identity lets you connect in ways that will enable you to achieve those objectives.
As such, it's critical to have a fully fleshed-out plan before you jump into your brand identity. We will cover some elements of the brand strategy, but in this post, we will focus mostly on the process of developing your brand identity.
It is essential to complete your approach and recognize the fundamental values, brand identity, and brand marketing system of your company (e.g. your branding, meaning prop, slogan, and brand narratives) to put yourself in a position for excellence because your visual design must work in conjunction with those components.
Once you've recorded your marketing strategy, you can work on brand identity.
Design a Logo and other Visual Elements of your Brand
It's time to bring your brand to fruition once you know your business, inside and out. Here's how you are going to do it:
Logo: Even though the logo is not the entirety of the brand identity, it is a vital element in the cycle of branding— it is the most identifiable aspect of your brand. From your homepage to your business cards to your ads, it is on everything. Your logo enhances the cohesiveness of your brand.
Color and Font: Creating a color scheme is a way to assert your identity. It provides you with variety so that you can create unique designs for your business while remaining true to the identity of the brand.
Font selection is also crucial when it comes to representing your brand. While the font design of "mix and match" has become quite the norm, this does not imply combining a bunch of fonts is necessarily helpful for your business. There should be consistent use of typography in all your published media.
Templates: You are likely to send emails, type up messages, or pass out business cards daily to prospective customers. Creating templates (even for specifics as insignificant as email signatures) will give a more unified, credible and professional look and feel to your business.
Avoid Common Mistakes
You may practice all the actions of building a strong brand identity, but if you're guilty of any of the below activities, your brand can struggle or fall short.
Don't Send Mixed Signals to your Clients
Choose what you want to say, and use the words and images you want to share. Just because that makes sense to you doesn't imply that it's going to make sense to your users.
Don't Copy your Rivals
The competitor may have outstanding branding, and since you market the same goods or services, you may want to do what you think works— don't. Take into account what they do, and add their spin on it to help your company stand out even more in your market.
Do not Lack Cohesion Between Online and Offline
Sure, your print content can look a little different from your online presence, but it should all be aligned with your colors, style, theme, and post.
Engage in Research
Once you launch a branding project, you want to tackle each step from a strategic and highly critical point of view— inspect, poke, and probe, before you hit the brand's heart. You can only translate that into a visual language when you have that extensive knowledge.
It means to do a reasonable bit of research before plunging into the design. Indeed, that is the most tedious phase by far. Yet constructing the framework upon which the visual language sits is critical. Your goal here is to collect as much information as you can on who you are attempting to communicate with who your rivals are, and where your brand is currently. Make sure to research these areas:
Know your Audience: It's no wonder different individuals like different things. You can't (typically) target a product to a middle schooler the same way you'd target a product to a student at a college. Learning from a business in your sector what your audience wants is vital for creating a brand that people will love.
Competitive Analysis: What makes your organization unique in the industry? What is it that you can tell the customers that other competitors cannot? Understanding the distinction between you and your competition is essential to successful brand development. Keeping tabs on your competitors will also teach you which branding techniques work well, and which ones do not.
Personality: Although you aren't necessarily branding an individual, that doesn't mean that when you develop a brand image you can't be personalized. To reflect who the brand is, use your style, colors, and imagery. Then strengthen that visual depiction with your voice tone Be sure to establish your brand as a means of portraying your company, too.
Research may be tedious but the better your brand identity will be, the more you learn about your company.
Track your Brand Identity Constantly
As with other facets of your strategy, without monitoring key performance metrics, it is hard to know what you're doing well (and what you're not). Using Google Analytics, polls, commentaries, social media posts, etc., to track the company and get a feel of how people talk to you and communicate. This will allow you to make changes to your brand as necessary, whether to correct an error or to improve the brand identity.
It necessitates consistent use of font, texture, pictures, and language to create a memorable brand, but it's worth it. You have become more than just a name and a symbol when customers immediately acknowledge who you are and what you stand for all based on a logo.
In this article, we laid out proven methods to enhance your brand identity and make you stand out from other brands.
Royex Technologies provides end-to-end Scalable Branding Solutions with modern and effective designs. We have proven to be the best branding agency in Dubai because of our vast and deep experience. We can help you escalate and magnify your brand’s reach and suggest you the strategies to accelerate the brand’s success. For all your branding needs, kindly contact us at info@royex.net or call us at +971-56-6027916.