Who and what are you? Creating a brand identity in 7 steps
Maybe you are starting your business and need to establish your brand.
Maybe a small or medium client has come to you for advice on their brand.
In any case, here are seven steps to follow for successfully creating/updating a brand identity.
- Know your customer
Who are your stakeholders? What is important to them? What are their fears and desires? What do they need from you?
Your brand must resonate with your target audience, so you must know who that audience is.
Consider talking to a few people in the target customer group, to find out how they think.
Once you know your customer…
- Assess your current brand
Take a good, hard look at what already exists. Make sure your audit is based on your customer knowledge, not just your subjective feeling.
Some brand components will not be working well; do they need to be updated or replaced entirely?
Some elements may suit your customer and be worth saving, however.
Once you understand your current brand…
- Check out the competition
Your brand identity should represent you to the world while also differentiating you from the competition. Take the time to review what other companies in your market space are doing.
How do they use their website, social media, and other elements? What is their approach to design? Do they have a slogan? Do they have a logo, and how do they use it?
Is there a space among the competition where your business can establish itself as distinct from the rest?
Once you’ve identified the best opportunity…
- Define your unique value proposition
How is your business different from the competition? Why would someone choose you and not another business?
How will your offerings better engage with customers, solve their problems, serve their needs?
Distill your unique value proposition into a couple of sentences so that you could explain the specialness of your business to anyone at any time.
Once you’ve defined your unique value proposition…
- Create a unified set of brand elements
Put together what you know about your audience with the value of your offerings and start developing brand components that reflect and support that message.
Your brand identity is not just a name and a logo, it is everything associated with your business. That includes color palette, the typeface you use, the editorial style of your written materials, the look and feel of photographs and illustrations.
Everything needs to be considered.
Once you’ve created your brand elements…
- Use your brand identity consistently
The suite of elements should be implemented with intentionality across everything your business does, from emails to website to advertisements to social media accounts to blog posts to podcasts.
Brand identity is part visual look, part company personality, and part gut feel. A strong brand is developed over time, through the consistent application of the identity.
In addition, something to keep in mind…
- Actions matter
A brand identity is not just what things look like, or sound like. A brand is not just cosmetic. A brand is also about your values, and what you do as a company and a business owner.
How you behave, how you treat customers and employees, the things you say on social media, the values you display through your words and actions, all of these feed into your brand identity.
A final thought:
“The strength of brand loyalty begins with how your product makes people feel.”
Jay Samit