What is involved in branding?
Building an entire brand involves the logo, fonts, colours, icons, photography, tone and style of voice, and other design elements. You will also need to define the key characteristics. If your brand were a character in a novel, you would determine not only what they look like, their fashion style, and how they talk but also what they are like as a person, how they interact and what factors motivate them.
Points to consider include:
Your core values and ethos.
These elements will help cement the underpinning values of your company and allow you to represent these throughout all marketing endeavours.
Mission statement.
Your mission statement will summarise everything your organisation stands for in a few sentences and let anyone reading it know your core values and ethos and how you practise them.
Brand identity.
Your brand identity is your organisation’s visual and written representation and defines the company name, logo, tone of voice, colour palette, typography, etc.
Once everything is clearly defined, the elements must be used consistently throughout your organisation to reinforce your brand for staff and your audience. Each way you communicate with current and potential customers needs to be considered, from your website to social media, printed media, customer service, and anywhere else your audience might see or hear your company.
Incorporating your brand is achieved through the following:
Branding with a Sprinkling of Psychology
Branding aims to present your audience with something memorable, something they can relate to and feel loyal to and invoke positive thoughts about the organisation. Your branding needs to have appeal, distinguish you from your competitors and reflect your brand’s personality.
We use a little psychology to achieve these points – move over, Sigmund Freud! For example, for a fun and vibrant company, we might choose bright and bold colours and modern fonts for the core of its design and a light-hearted tone of voice. For a more traditional company, we might choose a calligraphy-style font with a less adventurous colour palette and formal tones.
The branding we created for Eddie Hall, a UK strong man and previous deadlift world record holder, is a perfect example of how good branding can invoke the right emotional responses.
The packaging design is instantly memorable and unique. The illustration of Eddie’ The Beast’ Hall uses strong lines and his signature pose to depict strength, confidence, and enthusiasm. The use of the colour yellow invokes strong emotions of confidence and energy. Everything is designed to appeal to its target audience – anyone wanting to gain strength and confidence.
How do you build a good brand?
Building a good brand is a long-term strategy that begins with defining it, deploying it everywhere your audience will come across your organisation, and then developing your marketing strategies based on your brand guidelines.
A strong brand is crucial to your success, or it could lead to catastrophic failures, such as 20 Epic Fails in Global Branding. Hilarious as some of these might be, it can be challenging to recover from a branding disaster.
At The Hideout, we recommend our Brand Biology workshops which are tailored to discover what makes your business unique and its positioning in the market, the persona of your brand and how to bring it to life. We use the information gathered and our creative expertise to create your visual and communication elements, such as your logo and tagline.
It is essential to document the details somewhere (we provide you with a Brand Book), and then you will need to use it everywhere.
