When you think of a brand, the first thing that comes naturally to mind is the brand’s logo.
A good brand is easy to remember. But a great brand is impossible to forget. But creating an outstanding brand is no piece of cake.
If you’re thinking of just mixing up colours and creating a logo, sorry to be the one to break the bubble but branding & design don’t work like that. Logo colors need to be selected strategically that can curate a great brand personality.
From strategically mapping out where the brand stands, to designing and creating branding solutions that’ll resonate better with the audience. That’s an effective way to start to create a strong brand identity.
While this may seem like an overwhelming task, with the right guidance it won’t be. Thankfully, we’re able to pass down our years of wisdom.
Here, we’ve laid down everything you need to know about how to design an outstanding brand identity. Keep reading. We’ll lay it out for you.
Table of Contents
1. What is a brand identity?
2. What does a brand identity incorporate?
3. How to Build a Brand Identity
i. Figure out your unique brand strategy
ii. Delve deep into your current brand identity
iii. Understand your customers
iv. Determine Your Competitors
v. Develop your messaging strategy.
vi. Brainstorm Your Visuals
vii. Designing the elements
viii. Monitor, track and recreate
1. What is a brand identity?
Is it your logo’s design? The colours that represent your brand? The design style? It’s all that and much more!
Simply put, a brand is what people speak of it when you’re not in the room.
A brand identity is a unique way to let your story be told that creates a resounding impact on the audience, helps you stand out and take the lead and creates an exciting brand experience that convinces people to engage with you.
Think of brands like LEGO, Levi’s & BMW. They’ve established their market share very well with their branding strategies. Of Course they had a brand guideline they adhered too. And that has elevated their game.
Creating a brand identity is an art. And that’s where some brands tend to struggle. The key is to communicate in a way that conveys your story and curates a resounding emotional feeling with the audience. This way you are sure to succeed and achieve your business goals.
As a graphic design agency, we’ve worked in various industries: Real estate, FMCG, Pharmaceuticals and many more; we’ve provided effective branding solutions that has helped them increase their brand recognition and increase their conversions.
2. What does a brand identity incorporate?
We already discussed that logo and colours do not alone make a brand identity. When it comes to visual identity, you need visuals that can be seamlessly used on your website, products, advertisement and much more.
Depending upon your brand and the type of content you plan to create, a simple brand identity includes:
– Logo
– Visual Designs
– Photographs
– Typography
– Illustration
– Videos
– Data Visualization
3. How to Build a Brand Identity
Now comes the good part. As a creative branding agency helping brands around the world grow and achieve lasting success, we get how difficult it can be. But we’ve been through it a countless number of times with our creative partners, we know what it takes to exactly make it work wonders for your brand. This is how to always get your brand strategy spot on.
i. Figure out your unique brand strategy
Whether your brand is in the early stages or planning to revamp your existing strategies, here’s how you start in three easy steps:
– The heart of the brand– purpose, vision and mission.
– The brand’s core values to convey- tagline, brand voice, and brand message.
– Identity of the brand- logo, colours and typography and design.
Before you dive into creating a brand strategy, it’s best to figure out and know exactly what you want to visually communicate to the audience.
ii. Delve deep into your current brand identity
When you start with your branding project- whether you’re revamping or starting from scratch, you need an in-depth analysis of your brand:
– How your brand is currently resonating with people
– How can you ignite your brand’s perception for the future?
The goal is to get an honest understanding of how your brand is recognised currently and to reflect and make better decisions to empower your business growth.
iii. Understand your customers
Yes, the main goal of branding is to market your brand and engage with your customers. But what most people forget is that people are the ones interacting with it. If your identity doesn’t make them feel one with it, then the efforts won’t show.
That means it isn’t all about the colours. But the design plays a vital role as well. The better you understand your audience’s demographics, the better you can perceive their priorities & desires.
And better the branding language decision you can make. As such it is going to reduce the marketing risk associated with the development of a brand to great extents.
iv. Determine Your Competitors
You wouldn’t want to be communicating to your audience the same way your competitors do.
Building a brand’s identity is all about standing apart in your way: be unique, creative & relevant and keep the customers’ experience & customer service at the forefront.
See how your competitors engage with their audience and if it’s addressing the problems their customers are facing. If not, that’s what you can quickly use to your branding advantage.
Follow this wholeheartedly and watch the magic happen.
v. Develop your messaging strategy.
Next up, a great messaging strategy! Positioning your brand’s message to your target audiences. Your audience is going to be coming from different demographics.
While the heart of your brand positioning must be uniform, each audience will want to consume unique content that’ll get them to resonate with your brand. Your messaging strategy should address these concerns. Adhering to this is essential to make your brand relevant to your target audiences.
vi. Brainstorm Your Visuals
Now comes the creative part. Brainstorming for your branding strategy. Now you have an abundant amount of information to help you ideate for great branding solutions.
This is your time to give life to your visuals. This is where you put the acquired knowledge into fruitful use. Crafting an elegant design for branding of your products, website design , business cards, for your logo or anything else that people can find value in and can associate with your brand well is what you need to do.
But don’t just create a final design yet, there’s always room for improvement and that’s what brainstorming is for. Discuss with your creative team and think of what suits your branding goals best and work in that direction.
vii. Designing the elements
At last, designing here we go! This is the final and most crucial aspect of the brand development process. Each element will evoke or influence a certain emotion or a reaction for the people.
And by this time, you must have figured out what will work for your brand. Identifying clearly the marketing collaterals is a must as it will help you determine the risk associated with the type of strategy you plan to execute.
viii. Monitor, track and recreate
You can’t always be sure that things will exactly pan out the way you imagined. It’s the way of life. Even if it does, people forget that brand development can never stop. People who get occupied with clients, usually don’t have much time to give for brand development even if they want to.
That’s why keeping track of how things are going is always a good thing. Did the branding design strategy work out efficiently?
Along with keeping track of objective metrics like how much traffic was generated? Which regions saw most engagements? How many new leads were generated?
Only by tracking the entire branding design strategy process thoroughly can you draw the right conclusions and adjust accordingly.
And that’s the gist of it. You’re good to go.
GET STARTED ON YOUR BRAND’S SUCCESS
If you’re a start-up working on your branding strategy for the first time or an existing business wanting to revamp your brand strategies, it’s best to go with a well-known branding agency in Ahmedabad.
As a branding & graphic design agency ourselves, we’ve worked with various brands.
When a client comes to us, we just don’t hand out ready-made strategies because that’s now how we work at Communication Crafts. Our brand identity designers delve deep into their business, figure out where the brand stands in the market presently, how their audiences’ behaviour is and then we start to brainstorm a branding design strategy that sits perfectly with the brand.
That’s how we guarantee success for all our clients’ brands.
Get a branding strategy that’ll take your brand to the next level!
