Whether a business is just about to take off the blocks or it is an ongoing establishment running for years and ready to launch a new product, creating a brand identity is equally crucial for both. Right from the time of starting a business, it is essential to personify the company by creating a brand that helps the audience recognize it instantly. Not having a brand would make the business just another face in the crowd without any special appeal to draw the audience. To stand out from the crowd, every business has to create a brand that becomes the face of business and to etch it in the minds of consumers it is essential to develop a brand identity. This is where brand identity comes into play. Therefore, building a strong brand foundation is critically important for growing any business.
By creating a brand identity, businesses can communicate with the world. It helps to distinguish the business quickly from the competition by differentiating it from others and create a brand experience that brings consumers closer to the business and encourage them to engage with it. To ensure the success of the brand and to make it thrive in future it is mandatory to build a brand identity that is capable of conveying the essence of business and keep evolving as the company progresses. To create a brand identity, you have to depend on the expertise of some design agency Kent that has a thorough understanding of the brand and understands what is essential for its success. Right guidance is critical for building brand identity and how you can proceed in the matter will become apparent on going through the steps discussed here.
Brand strategy comes first
When you want your brand to speak, it is essential to understand the way you want to communicate and connect with consumers for which you must first create a brand strategy. To execute the brand strategy, you have to use the brand identity as a tool. The strategy comprises of a detailed plan of the goals you want to achieve and how you want to accomplish it. The brand identity teams up with the content strategy and determines the ways to communicate with consumers to attaining your goals.
The brand strategy lays the foundation on which you can create the brand identity. We will talk more about the process of designing the brand identity with a brief mention of some brand strategy elements. Building the brand strategy and understanding the core values of the brand as well as the brand voice, and the architecture of brand messaging is important because the visual design elements have to work in tandem with it.
Understand brand identity
Brand identity comprises a variety of elements that help to create a comprehensive visual language that you can use across all platforms of marketing from your website to packaging. The logo, the color palette, the infographic style, photography, illustration, web design and many more elements work in unison to create the brand identity. In simple words, brand identity is about how your brand looks as well as how it feels and speaks to people. To make the brand identity work for everyone that includes the creative team as well as the consumers you have to pay attention to the parameters that help to achieve your goal.
The brand identity should be capable of making an impact so that people remember it and it must have distinctive features that separate it from others. It has to be intuitive, scalable and every element has to complement the brand identity. Above all, it should be easy to apply.
Do some research
The most important aspect of any branding project is to reach to the core of the brand much before you start rolling out the branding activities. To reach to the core of the brand, you have to gain intimate knowledge about it that helps to understand the brand from various perspectives. The experience helps to create a comprehensive visual language that connects with people.
Doing some reasonable amount of research is the starting point before you enter into the designing phase. It helps to create the foundation upon which you can place your visual language. The research should enable you to gather as much information about whom to target for communicating, the current position of the brand and the competition you face.
Create Personas
Since the brand identity becomes the face of your business, it should accurately communicate your business identity. The identity must constitute information about what the brand presents, but it must also include such information that consumers would like to engage with. It means that the identity has to resonate with consumers or else it will fail to elicit the desired response. Therefore, you have to understand well what consumers would like by knowing their wants, needs, and values and blend the information into the identity that you create.
To understand consumers well, create personas that belong to different target segments. The personas would reveal the psychographic and demographic information that provides insight about who the people are and what drives them. The information you gather will influence your design decisions.
Know your competition
Making your brand visible, unique and relevant with an element of differentiation are the objectives of creating brand identity. To stand out from the crowd, you have to know the competition by undertaking a competitive analysis that provides a snapshot of the competition.
Build your identity
Now you are ready with loads of information that you have to use intelligently to convert the text-based information into visual concepts. The biggest challenge at this stage is to figure out how you can transform the underlying emotions contained in the information into the visual form for communicating with consumers by keeping the sentiments intact.
This is the stage when you start using the various elements of creating brand identity and like a master chef create a recipe that attracts consumers who find enough reasons to engage with the brand.
