When it comes to your business, you know everything there is to know. You could speak for hours on unique selling points and why your product or service is the best one on the market. Unfortunately, many businesses like yours (and maybe even yours) are losing potential customers well before they ever get the opportunity to make their pitch.
Why? Because they don’t know how to marry their revolutionary ideas with a strong brand identity.
Brand identity refers to the sum of the many elements a company uses to communicate who they are to consumers. This includes both the visual elements of a brand—the logo, colours, font choices, design, etcetera—and the messaging—the company name, logo, the brand voice and how they communicate with their customers. These elements work together to create a cohesive image of what a brand is, its story, what it stands for, and who its customers are.
When implemented thoughtfully and deliberately, a strong brand identity helps a company distinguish itself in the minds of potential customers. The idea is to make a brand appealing, but also to make it instantly recognizable, ideally even synonymous with its industry.
What makes for an effective brand identity will be different for every company, but there are elements that the strongest brand identities have in common:
They’re Memorable
This one’s pretty self-explanatory, but hard to pull off, and there are a lot of pitfalls along the way. A good brand identity is visually appealing, but it also tells a story—it communicates to customers not only what the brand is, but also why they should care.
They’re Consistent
To successfully build brand awareness, your brand identity needs to be considered and woven into everything your company presents to the public. Everything you produce should be following the same guiding principles—your website, your social media, your graphics, all of them should look and sound like they’re coming from you.
They’re Appropriate to the Target Market
Even if the visuals are engaging and the brand tone is consistent, branding that is wildly incompatible with your target market will have disastrous results. A successful branding strategy will consider who the customer is when crafting a brand identity. You probably wouldn’t use a bright psychedelic color scheme and a dry comedic tone for a target market of legal professionals, or a bunch of long-winded academic language if you’re looking to appeal to kids, for example.
What quickly becomes obvious is that deciding on and implementing a branding strategy, while simple in theory, is a huge task consisting of a lot of moving parts. Because of this, branding agencies have become an invaluable service for companies looking to establish themselves and their brand.
The Benefit of a Branding Agency
The benefit of a branding agency is the ability to tap into a wide range of skills and experience for every step of the process—from helping you hone in on the unique selling points of your product, to designing striking visual assets, all the way through to establishing brand guidelines that make it easy for your in-house team to pick up where the agency leaves off. (The value of that final point can’t be overstated, without clear branding guidelines you run the risk of drifting off-message, diluting your brand identity and undoing a lot of hard work).
But regardless of whether you choose to work with an agency or go it alone, we urge you to take a long, hard look at how your business is presenting itself.
Do you know what your brand identity is saying?
