Upon reading the words Brand Identity, the first thing that comes to our mind is the visual aspect of it – the logo. But Brand Identity is much more than just the logo.
It is the compiled perspective and emotion of customers, employees, and founders attached to the brand that makes it look the way it does. A powerful brand identity is capable of evoking positive emotions in a compelling manner. Although it is a tough feat to create a powerful brand identity that involves undying efforts, however, it is not impossible. So, here are 5 ways to create a powerful brand identity for your business:
A complete brand strategy:
Every business has a brand strategy that provides a direction in which the company should move while making any brand decisions. What makes this strategy complete is the understanding of the motive of the brand, its core values, brand voice, positioning, target audience, tagline, missions, and goals. A brand strategy is just a plan that any company needs to make to help them first understand what they stand for and then come up with ways to achieve a bigger goal and then come up with its execution. Once the brand strategy is documented, one can focus on identity.
Understanding brand identity:
Before designing a brand identity, one must first understand the need to create a strong identity that resonates not just with the customers, but with everyone working for it (employees, CEO, content creators, etc). Any business must set out to be different from their competitors, create something memorable, flexible and something that is easy to apply.
With such clarity, one must move forward to design a brand identity by including the following elements in it: logo, colours, typography, design system, photography, illustration, iconography, data visualization, interactive elements, video and motion and web design. With these basic elements required to design a brand identity, one can then see how much to expand from there.
Identifying your competitions and customers:
It is crucial to identify and understand your competition and customers while doing research. Understanding customers will help you to come up with a design element that matches their persona or helps them connect with the brand emotionally. It is psychologically proven that a brand image helps a customer make a purchase, hence it is important to evoke positive emotions through your brand. Identifying and analyzing competition is important to create something distinct yet relevant. This practice also helps in identifying what are the common designs they go for, how they present themselves visually and what trends do they follow, which leads to a better understanding of what one needs to do with their brand. Once customers and competition are analyzed, one can come up with extraordinary ways of creating a powerful brand identity that is not only different from their competitors but also stirs their customers.
Begin with converting the abstract:
Idea creation must begin after proper research on consumer behaviour and competitors. It is good to make note of all the things, emotions, or words that describe your brand. But we are not creating a logo for ourselves, we are creating it for the world to see and that includes people who will work with you and people who will interact with you (customers). Hence, it is very important to come up with a logo and design that gives one the feeling of what your brand really stands for. To do this, all of these ideas need to be converted from being abstract to something more substantial and doable. For example, if your product makes life easier, it could be termed as a comfort giver. It is still abstract at this point. But now one can list emotions drawn from this term – happy face, the ah-feeling, mother figure, etc and then choose the one that strongly represents the product. There are many ways of doing this but the goal is to come up with something that creates the strongest emotional response by creating effective visuals.
Keep refining, keep improving:
With time, a brand must always keep refining its identity instead of completely changing it. One good way of noticing changes made or changes required is by tracking web analytics, social media analytics and having a good analytics team. It is important to keep up with the fast-paced world around us – with technological advancements, software updates, psychological trends, paradigm shifts, and global issues. Since brand identity is not just about the visual aspect of the brand, it reflects upon the values, missions and beliefs of an organization hence constant refinement is the key to powerful branding and creating a powerful brand identity.
Now that we know that brand identity is not just defined by a brand’s logo and how it looks, we understand how arduous and Herculean of a task it is. But all good things come when the right efforts are made at the right time.
At Dramantram, we don’t just create logos for brands, we shape your brand’s personality.
**Dramantram (Pronounced as Dra-Mann-Tram) is a video production, communication design, digital marketing, and a concept photography company that takes a human-centered, design-based approach to innovate, create and communicate. Our flexible approach works in tandem with creativity and innovation.