Your brand identity tells a story. It’s an opportunity to express yourself as a company and manage the way you’re positioned within your industry. A compelling brand identity allows you to build deeper relationships with the customers you’re trying to reach.
While your brand identity is ultimately expressed visually through various creative elements—such as your logo, colors, fonts, advertising copy, overall style, and voice—it’s important that your visual elements represent the underlying truths and values of your business. Otherwise, consumers will sense a lack of authenticity.
No matter the size of your business, having a strong brand identity and customer recognition will increase the number of repeat clients you’re able to bring through the door. Here’s how to get started with creating a compelling brand identity for your business.
Understand your value propositions
Before setting out to create or revamp your brand identity, you need to understand exactly what your business represents and where you’re positioning yourself in the competitive landscape of your industry.
Does your company produce the highest-quality products in your space? The most affordable? Do you provide better customer service than any of your competitors? If you’re not sure what makes you unique within your industry, ask a few of your customers why they’ve chosen to do business with you. Are there any trends or commonalities in their answers? If so, use those to start building your value propositions and visually highlight your brand identity.
Visual elements of your brand identity
Once you’ve identified the value propositions that make your business stand out, it’s time to start translating them into the visual elements that’ll make up your brand identity—beginning with your logo and the colors you choose.
According to Megan Morahan, creative director at Vistaprint, “There are endless pieces of branding materials and tools out there, but your logo is the anchor that pulls it all together. It establishes trust, credibility, and consideration without saying a word. It’s a quick visual reference of you to your audience. Using color, fonts, and graphics, your logo should reflect your brand personality, your image, and your values.”
For this reason, your brand identity needs to accurately reflect who your company is and the types of customers you’re trying to serve. The fact that potential customers often make purchasing decisions based on the look, feel, and style of your logo (and the other visual branding elements that stem from your logo) makes this serious business.
Choosing your colors
For example, while yellow is psychologically the happiest color and tends to emphasize warmth and optimism, it may not be the best color choice for the logo and other visual assets of a company that’s branding itself as a provider of superior-quality products or services. If you’re going for premium with your brand identity, consider darker colors like silver or black that are more commonly associated with quality and luxury.
Choosing your fonts
You’ll also need to take care when choosing the fonts you associate with your brand identity. While the hand-lettered font style is getting increasingly popular among more creative brands, that aesthetic likely wouldn’t resonate as well in a more professional services industry.
By keeping in mind what makes your business different and aligning that vision with your visual assets, you’ll create a brand identity that better resonates with your target customers and helps you achieve your business goals.
