Whether you’re starting a business or looking to improve brand awareness, cultivating a memorable and unique identity can be challenging. A compelling brand is more than just a logo, colours, and design; it involves crafting a narrative and identity for your business that properly reflects what you sell and creates a lasting impression with your audience.
With this in mind, consider these 6 steps for building a memorable brand.
1 . Identify your Target Market and Competitors
Before making any decisions about your brand, you need to understand who your potential customers are and what competitors currently exist within the marketplace. Time and time again, marketers have discovered narrowing in on specific groups of people is far more effective than trying to cater to everyone. Of course, not everyone will find your offering beneficial. Ask yourself this – what problem does my offering solve for someone? What are the ages, genders, nationalities, income levels, and education levels of someone facing this problem? Once you identify the unique components that make up your target audience, your branding and marketing efforts will be much better informed and positioned against competitors.
2. Establish Your Brand Positioning and Mission Statement
Have you determined what the vision for your brand is? In essence, consider this your “Why”. When establishing a brand mission statement, envision a projection of where your brand aspires to go, what it aspires to be, and what impact you want to make within your industry. This will inform how you execute your brand building strategies and identify a roadmap for accomplishing your vision.
While crafting your statement, focus on these 4 elements:
Value – What value does your business bring to both customers and employees?
Inspiration – Tap into the emotion behind the brand persona.
Plausibility – Is your statement reasonable?
Specificity – Tie it directly back to your business/service offering.
Examine how Tesla uses these elements to translate their core purpose into a powerful mission statement. “To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”
3. Develop the Visual Components of Your Brand
Next, you’ll need to begin brainstorming how you want to visually represent your brand through colours, typography, and other visual elements including your logo.
Selecting your colour palette
When used strategically, colour can generate some of the most powerful emotional responses in a consumer. This is why choosing a strong colour palette is critical within the brand building process.
Think about what emotions you want your audience to experience when interacting with your brand. Is your brand energetic, bold, and youthful? Or does it lean more towards peaceful, relaxed and balanced? Depending upon your answer, some colours may be better suited than others.
Choosing your fonts
Typography and its ability to visually communicate your brand is often overlooked. Similar to the effects of colour, typography has a psychological component that evokes certain emotions or messages to your consumers. Each typeface classification has a different set of connotations and, therefore, will create a different representation of who you are and what you stand for as a brand.
We suggest using no more than 2 fonts within your brand. This will avoid confusion, build a cohesive visual identity, and ensure your visual application remains consistent. Use tools such as Google Fonts or Font Pair to browse a wide range of typefaces and font pairings. Also be sure to take into consideration legibility and accessibility, as these elements will be vastly important when developing content, graphics, and your website.
4. Create a Logo
Your logo is the visual foundation of your brand identity and the face of your business. Furthermore, it’s your opportunity to make a solid first impression and will be used to differentiate against your competitors.
Begin your logo design process with brainstorming, sketching, and rounds of iterations. Once you’ve established your preliminary design concept, seek feedback from internal stakeholders and be sure that your core concept is powerful enough to deliver the message on it’s own without the enhancement of colour.
With your collected feedback, refine the design accordingly, apply the brand colour palette, and be sure the logo effectively communicates your brand. Ask yourself these questions; Does this logo make an impact? Does the colour application accurately reflect the brand personality? Does this visually represent who you are and what you do?
If you or your team do not have relevant design experience or feel comfortable partaking in the logo creation process, also consider outsourcing your brand identity to a graphic designer or branding agency. Working collaboratively with an expert to bring your vision to life can save you time, money, and guarantee a professional outcome.
5. Apply your Branding Across Your Print & Digital Mediums
Based on the decisions made surrounding your brand positioning, colour palette, typography, logo creation, and complimentary visual elements, you are now in a position to confidently apply your brand identity throughout your printed and digital mediums. This typically includes your website, social media, stationary, marketing materials, and additional collateral dependent upon your industry or service offering.
When applying your brand, keep in mind everything should live in unison with one another and come together cohesively. In doing so, you can ensure you are fostering thought leadership, brand awareness, and reaffirming a cohesive brand story.
6. Evolve & Refine as You Grow
Just as your business will evolve and adapt from continuous learning, the branding process does not stop once you’ve established your visual identity or applied it across your business. In fact, a key to success will be the consistent evolution of your brand to ensure you remain relevant in the eyes of your existing and potential customers.
After launching, conduct an initial 6-month brand assessment to gauge what is resonating with your audience and what may need refinement. Consider an approach where you interact with your brand as an outsider. Would you like the visual identity? Would you be impressed by their print and digital mediums? Does the brand accurately reflect what the business does and who they are?
Looking closely at your brand and asking yourself these questions on a regular basis will be crucial in staying connected to your audience and demonstrating you understand who they are and what they want.
If your business is in need of guidance when it comes to building and launching a brand, get in touch with one of our experts at LRO Solutions today.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
