We say it all the time; a brand is so much more than simply a logo. It’s the essence of your identity and the power of a brand should never be underestimated.
Building a brand around your product or service is one of the most important aspects of creating a valuable business. Whether you’ve just launched, or hoping to develop your brand into something more compelling and relevant within your market, it’s important to consider all the elements, beyond just the logo and colours.
A brand will create visibility and loyalty. It will help you to reduce marketing costs in the long-term, reduce competitive threats, help you to differentiate in the marketplace and enable you to create positive attitudes towards your product or service. Most importantly, it will help you and your business realise your full market potential and value.
A brand’s identity refers to the sum of all the tangible aspects; including the logo (and its size/placement), a strapline (or tagline as it is otherwise known), the colour palette, the typography/fonts, the graphics, the style of photography and the web elements.
A brand’s personality can be defined as the brand values (not to be confused with the corporate values or strapline), which are ingrained and frequently intangible aspects of the brand’s identity. It’s a promise of how you’ll act to serve the marketplace. The brand values should be memorable, meaningful, actionable, unique and timeless - campaigns may change, the proposition may evolve, but the values should always remain the same.
Once the identity and personality are established, you can start to formulate the brand story - a way of communicating how you will create a difference for your customers. The Story of Telling explain this brilliantly “Your story isn’t just what you tell people. It’s what they believe about you based on the signals your brand sends. The story is a complete picture made up of facts, feelings, and interpretations, which means that part of your story isn’t even told by you.” The brand narrative should inspire an emotional reaction and should always go beyond simply showing and telling customers about your brand.
To bring this all together, it’s essential to have a clearly defined ‘tone of voice’ for your brand. This is the language you, and anyone representing you, will use to represent your brand’s character. It’s not what you say, but how you say it.
Before you embark on creating a brand, it’s important to firmly establish your business mission and vision, which should be focused on achieving your corporate goals. A mission statement, elevator pitch and clear objectives with KPIs are all useful before you start.
A brand needs to be aligned to the wider marketing or ‘Go-To-Market’ strategy in which you understand and can articulate the market size/potential, the value proposition, the competitive landscape, and the target market/audience and their needs/motivations/challenges.
Once this is in place, you can start to create a brand with the highest chance of success. Keep asking yourself - as a business what do we value the most? How do we want to make our clients feel? Why do our clients trust us?
We can help with all aspects of creating, growing and nurturing a brand to establish a significant, consistent and differentiated presence in the market that attracts and retains loyal customers. We can support you in your journey of building an identity, of developing a brand personality and provide guidance on how you’ll bring the brand to life in your communications - whether that’s via traditional media such as advertising, PR, sales promotions, direct marketing, or online via email marketing, SEO, content marketing and social media.
According to some, a strategic, successful and well-regarded brand can add up to 50% more value to your business. So if you’re hoping to launch with impact, grow your market share or move into new markets, a good brand is essential. Let us show you how.
