What exactly is brand identity?

Brand identity refers to all of the stylistic components of a brand, such as its design, colour, logo, personality, and typography, that identify it in the minds of consumers. The brand identity of a company appeals to the senses and seeks to build rapid brand awareness by visual, aural, oral, or tactile connotations. Brand identity is critical for building and maintaining a brand’s significance in the minds of consumers.

How to Develop a Brand Identity?

Developing a brand identity that is aligned with the company’s and product’s beliefs and attributes is a vital step toward success. Ideally, all elements of a company’s branding should work together just to convey a single message.

Here are nine methods to help you create an effective brand identity:

1. Know Your Foundation

Before diving into the processes outlined below, bear in mind that the visual part of your brand image should be the final thing you tackle when building a brand. A brand is similar to a house in that it should be constructed on a solid foundation.

First, you must identify oneself: What is your personality like? What is important to you? What are you going to do? How do you explain what you do? These are the essential characteristics of your brand that will be communicated through your visual identity. You can’t develop a visual identity that accurately represents your company brand until you have this foundation to work from.

2. Identify customers

To identify a consumer group, do surveys, focus groups, and interviews. Understanding customer wants and expectations can aid in the development of brand identity in order to best foster customer loyalty. This could involve performing audience segmentation and identifying various subgroups within your general audience. These subgroups could be categorized based on a variety of variables, such as a customer’s age, geographic area, or buying preferences.

3. Study Your Competitors

The key to creating a company identity is differentiation: making your brand visible, relevant, and distinct. As a result, it’s essential to comprehend not only who your competitors are, as well as how your brand stands in terms of visual presentation.

A competitor audit enables you to compare your brand to each rival as well as your competitors as a whole, which could yield some interesting information.

To evaluate your top five competitors, use the Competitor Brand Analysis Template in the toolkit. Keep a close eye to how your competitors present themselves in terms of similar visual aspects, trends, industry-specific visual themes, brand personalities, and so on as you progress through the process.

4. Create a Branding Brief

After you’ve done the preceding stages, you’ll have all the data you need to begin designing. You should, however, take your time. Start with a creative brief that includes all of the details you’ll need to keep your team on the same page—and to assist you in creating an identity that corresponds with your brand’s aims.

Use the Branding Brief Template to get started. Take care not to disclose too much or too little information. Your brief must always inform rather than overwhelm.

5. Design your Logo

A brand identity is a complex design system. Each piece has an impact on the others, but it all starts with your logo. A strong logo reflects the spirit of your company, allowing you to make your mark in the world (literally).

You may go old-school and use pencils to free-sketch in black and white here. You would like to make sure that the main imagery is strong enough to convey the idea without the addition of colour. Begin by playing with flexible shapes and complementary imagery to inspire your logo mark.

6. Consider more Visual Components

Consider how the various visual aspects in your logo, packaging, advertising, or website might represent your brand. This could include taking into account the following visual aspects:

• Color: Using distinct brand colours immediately increases product visibility.
• Shape: The visual look of shape can also be used to distinguish some brands.
• Graphics: Distinct patterns can also aid in the formation of a memory structure oriented on a single brand.
• Text: The size and style of your font can convey the personality of your brand.

7. Select Your Typography

Every visual component in your brand should contribute to a consistent visual language and so compliment one another. This is especially true for typography, which should be influenced by your logo’s shape.

Every level of design has its own set of obstacles, but typography in visual language can be tricky, particularly when brands adopt trends that are popular for a second but quickly appear dated or seem unoriginal (serif vs. non-serif). Limit the amount of typefaces to 2-3 to keep things simple. This contains primary and secondary brand typefaces for specialised uses such as body copy typography, UI typeface, and so on.

8. Choose your tone

Determine the style or tone of your brand. The vocabulary used in conjunction with the brand, or “diction,” contributes to shape the brand’s tone and attitude. The language chosen to connect with customers might influence the type of client the brand draws.

The tone of your brand is usually related to its personality. A fun brand, for example, might use a more conversational tone, whereas a medical equipment company might seek to create empathy.

9. Examine Your Current Identity

Communication is at the heart of excellent branding. You must have an intimate understanding of your brand to ensure that your visual output corresponds with your brand values, represents your personality, and tells your overall brand story.

As a result, you should begin with a brand assessment to understand:

Your brand’s present condition of identity

How that brand identity might be established or adjusted in the future to line with your goals

By closely analysing your brand, you can gain the knowledge you need to create an identity that correctly represents it.

As we all know, consistency is essential when it comes to creating a successful brand. You can’t just throw your new brand identity out there and assume people to know how to use it right away. Assign a point person to address any and all inquiries about the brand application, and put in place a quality control mechanism to protect your brand’s authenticity at every touchpoint.