It's difficult to create a unique brand from scratch. How should it appear? What emotions should it evoke in viewers? Will my intended audience find it appealing?
When you begin to consider how to link the dots between what you're selling and who you're attempting to reach, questions like these unavoidably arise. To get started, you might look at our article on how to launch a business.
What you need to know about creating a powerful brand identity for your company, whether you're starting from scratch or want to make changes to your current branding design.
What is a brand?
A brand is more than just your name and logo, which help you stand out in a crowded market.
If you stop to consider it, humans also have personal brands. Each of us has a name, a face, a communication style, and a manner of speaking, and based on these characteristics, we leave various impressions on different individuals.
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Similar to people, companies have names, goods, logos, colours, fonts, voices, and reputations that contribute to who they are and how people perceive them.
Without being consistent and upholding that consistency as you extend your brand to every aspect of your organization, you cannot effectively approach brand creation. The ideal method to develop a brand is to first decide how that consistency will look and what emotions you want it to arouse.
How to Create a Brand
While you may go over some steps again as you pivot or build your brand, it's crucial that you think about each one as you develop your brand identity.
Let's begin by building the foundation for how to develop your company's brand.
1. Analyse your target market and rivals
Understand the present market, including your potential clients and rivals, before you begin making judgments about how to build a business brand.
There are several approaches to this:
- Search for your product or service category on Google, then examine the immediate and indirect rivals that appear.
- Investigate relevant Reddit subreddits and listen in on discussions and product advice from your target market.
- Ask those that make up your target market what brands they favour while shopping in your industry.
- Look at the social media profiles or sites that your target audience is interested in and follows.
- Take a virtual or physical shopping trip to obtain a sense of how your target market might browse and purchase goods.
Before continuing, it's crucial to understand this since it will help you decide what to focus on for your brand and how to set it apart from rivals.
2. Determine your personality and focus
In particular at first, you can't build your brand to be everything to everyone. As you construct your brand, it's crucial to identify your emphasis and let that guide all of the other components.
The following questions and branding exercises will help you consider the purpose and voice of your brand.
A positioning statement is a sentence or two that asserts your position in the industry. This is merely to assist you in building your brand's slogan and in helping you to answer the proper questions about your brand; it is not necessarily something you put on your website or business card.
You are only in competition with yourself and your special value proposition. Find it, capitalize on it, and incorporate it into the marketing for your brand.
As an alternative, you can write this down as a mission statement that makes a clear promise to your clients or to the world if the business you intend to create has a cause at its core (for example, if you're launching a social enterprise).
3. Select a name for your company
What does a brand name mean? You can argue that your name matters a lot or a lot less depending on the type of business you intend to launch.
A brand is much more than just a name, as we've already stated. What gives your brand identity's name true market meaning are its character, deeds, and reputation.
However, one of the first significant decisions you must make as a small business owner is likely the name of your enterprise. If you want to go that route, it will have an impac ton your brand name, logo, domain, marketing strategy, and trademark registration (it's more difficult to register a trademark for generic brand names that directly reflect what you sell).
The ideal store name is one that's challenging to copy and even more challenging to associate with other competitors. Instead of picking a brand name based on your product category if you intend to increase the product lines you offer in the future, think about keeping your company name generic to make pivoting easier.
Be sure to look around to see what's available before choosing a domain name for your brand because your brand name will also effect the domain/URL of your website:
- See our advice on picking a suitable company name.
- Make a list of prospective domain name suggestions.
- Use a WHOIS lookup to verify the availability of your domains.
- Visit our website to register a domain name.
If for no other reason than to ensure that it doesn't have an unexpected meaning or is too similar to something else that you could have missed, it is also a good idea to run your name past a focus group of close friends.
4. Compose a tagline
A memorable tagline is a nice-to-have item that you can use as a tagline in your social media bios, website header, personalized business cards, and anywhere else that only allows a few words to have a significant impression.
5. Select your brand's visual style (font and colours)
Once you've settled on a name, you should consider your brand design, including your colour scheme and typography, to determine how you will visually represent your company. When you start using a website builder to create your own website, this will be useful.
Selecting colours
In addition to defining your brand's visual identity, colors can also assist you convey the sentiment you want to convey and maintain consistency throughout all of your activities. To prevent misleading your potential clients, use colours that set you a part from your immediate competition.
Even though color psychology isn't a precise science, it does influence your decisions, particularly when choosing the color for your brand's logo.
A excellent overview of the feelings and associations that various colours typically trigger can be seen in the infographic below.
Take into account how well-read white and black text will be against your chosen colour scheme, as well as how colourful text may appear against white and black backgrounds. To come up with a palette of complementary hues, try using a program like Colours. Take note of the hex codes to keep on hand and search through several shades to locate your favourite ones.
Your font selection
It's also a good idea at this stage to consider the typefaces you might want to use on your website.
When it comes to fonts, keeping things straightforward is the greatest way to develop a brand. To prevent confusing visitors, choose no more than two fonts: one for headings and one for body copy (this does not include the font your company logo may be in).
Using Font pair, you may browse a large collection of complementary typefaces.
6. Create your company's logo
One of the first things that undoubtedly comes to mind when you consider creating a new brand is a brand logo design. And with good reason after all, it represents your business and may be present everywhere your brand is.
Ideally, you should design a logo for your brand that is distinct, recognisable, and saleable to work at all sizes (something that is frequently missed).
Think of all the locations where your company's logo must appear:
- Website
- Profile image on social media
- Merchandise packaging
- YouTube channel banner for video adverts
It will be nearly impossible to read if, for example, your Instagram avatar is a text logo. Create a square version of your brand logo with an icon or symbol element(referred to as a logomark) that is still recognizable at smaller sizes to make your life easier.
Invest in a logo that can be used both online and in print media.
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An abstract brand logo has some significance, but it's basically just a shape and some colours that are difficult to connect to anything in the outside world.
The advantage of an abstract logo is that you may invent this meaning yourself and make it come to life in your clients' minds.
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Your brand is visualized as an icon in an icon logo. An icon logo, as opposed to an abstract one, makes a statement about the product (for example, Twitter's bird symbolizes the platform's frequent brief "tweets").
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You should avoid employing an icon logo alone if you are a new brand attempting to increase brand recognition. If you're unsure of the type of brand logo you want, though, combining an icon logo and a wordmark is typically a good bet.
7. Integrate your brand throughout your company
By using your branding throughout your company, you may create a unified brand narrative. A brand story encapsulates "who" and "what" your company is. Every customer engagement with your brand, both in-person and online, is set up by this.
For more information about the company they are purchasing from and, for more socially concerned clients, how the company is run, they will visit its About Us page. Share your company's brand story if you have one, since it helps convince them that you are a trustworthy vendor.
Not every firm is purpose-driven, but if your brand was developed with a mission or set of principles at its core, tell customers about it and share your brand narrative. Take a look at the companies TOMS and Coca-Cola; the first is a brand with a clear objective, the latter less so.
Conclusion
Making a logo or tagline, or even raising your brand's visibility after launch, are only the beginning stages of brand building. Wherever your customers contact with you, your brand needs to be present and consistent from the website theme you pick to the promotional materials you create to how you package and transport your goods.
As you expose more customers to your brand, learn more about your target audience, and develop effective communication strategies, you'll continue to evolve its style and identity.
All you can do is always put your best foot forward and work to connect with your core audience. However, perhaps at this time you have the abilities, information, and assets to begin developing your brand right away.
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