Creating a Brand Identity

What is Brand Identity?

Creating a brand is so much more than a nice logo, it’s more than a colour palette, a memorable slogan, or how everything looks on your packaging. Brand identity is the essence of your offer, whether that’s a product, or a service, it should entirely encapsulate your core values and the promises you make to customers.

So how is it possible to convey a clear message in a world so over saturated with brand loyalty? In today’s article, we’d like to take a look at the process for visualising your brand and 6B’s tips for marketing yourself.

Thought Process

The first step is identifying what makes your offer valuable, the target audience and how you engage with them. With thousands of new businesses cropping up everyday across the UK, mapping unique selling points and core target audiences will prove instrumental in composing your identity.

Think about your brand mission statement, this should be a concise description of your service,  and who your target audience is and what resonates with them. These are the core principles of creating a unique branding strategy.

Design Process

The creation of a strong brand doesn’t start with design, it starts with research and creating a strategy, this is no more apparent than when understanding your audience. Have a look at your competition, take a step further and look at other successful businesses outside of your sector, take note of what works for them and arguably most importantly, what isn’t.

Online surveys and interviews with key stakeholders will offer you an insight into the market and how important marketing assets can change brand perceptions – from this you can develop user personas. Conducting both group and individual interviews will allow you to gather as much data as possible.

Be wary when conducting focus groups, in our experience, one pitfall of conducting group only interviews is that these can often be led by the loudest voice in the room rather than an open discussion with all participants who can contribute. By conducting group and individual interviews, you will generate a better spread of data to inform your research and strategy.

Following this, you can begin brainstorming which is crucial for bringing together raw ideas and will eventually lead to a great brand name, theme, logo, and all the other aspects of the brand identity.

Design & Marketing

When it comes to getting your brand out there, simple, bold and intuitive design will always come out on top as they often prove the most recognisable. This will yield the best results as it will limit the amount of money and time you ultimately have to spend on marketing strategies.

Once you’ve nailed this, consider how your identity will translate across different channels i.e., social, print, video, large format etc., and is it still recognisable when reduced to its bare components?

In some instances, even the colour scheme can trigger brand recognition, like Coca Cola’s shocking red, or simple iconography with no text, like Apple’s, well, apple. Simplicity and clarity is the name of the game and a good designer will be able to discern the distinguished from the complex, apathetic and forgettable.

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