Starting from the ground up and creating a distinctive brand identity for your company is no small feat. A good brand strategy will incorporate strong representations of image, culture and personality that best align with how you want your business to be seen. When these elements are captured successfully, awareness of your company, trust and loyalty is gained.
There are a lot of questions that arise when deciding what you want your brand to look like. How do you want/not want to be seen? What is unique about your company that separates you from others competing in the industry? What do you want to represent? What are your core values/messages that you want to put across? Who is your target market?
Answering these questions can be overwhelming when attempting to connect the dots between what you're selling and who you're trying to reach.
Whether you're starting from scratch or looking to make changes to existing ideas, here's what you need to know to create a memorable company brand.
What is a Brand?
Your brand is how you define your company. It is the way in which you convey your company's values, messages, ethics, and personality in a distinctive way. Branding is often associated with the colour palettes, logo designs and typography you may stumble across when visiting a webpage, however it is more what these features represent about a company than how they appear on the surface. For example, a website involving small font, white space usage and limited colours may signify sophistication and minimalism about a company. Why is this important? It means prospective customers visiting the site will gain the impression that this company is reliable, and therefore interest will peak in buying products or services.
How to Build a Brand
- Find your gap in the market
- Decide your personality and values
- Create your company name
- Design your brand
- Integrate your branding
Find your gap in the market
Understanding the current market of what you want to go into is the first step to building your brand. This involves researching who your prospective customers will be, who the industry competitors are and what is unique about your business.
When researching prospective customers, take note of which types of people are easily within reach to make a sale to. Pay attention to their interests and the language they use to communicate them. Think about what techniques and features you could employ within your brand that will easily "speak" to these types of customers. For example, if your ideal target market is teenagers, it may be worthwhile including modern-day language on your website that will be a point of relatability for them.
A quick way to identify who your industry competitors are is to look at the top search results that appear when googling your product/service. Look into who are the well-known and reputable companies and who are the lesser known competitors doing a similar thing to you. Consider, how can I replicate this but better? What would I do differently?
Crucially, your business needs to be unique in order to be successful. Your brand needs to be doing what no one else is doing. If you are too similar to competitors, chances are that customers will opt for a company that is experienced and reputable if it can reliably offer the same services as you. What makes you unique is what will make you stand out, and can be the difference between a potential customer and a missed opportunity of sales.
Decide your personality and focus
Around half of consumers prioritise a company's brand values and impact before actioning a purchase. In recent years, greater importance has been placed on social impact such as animal rights and climate action. So, it is important to decide what ethics you want to hold to your name which make you a favourable company to seek services and products from.
How you forge your brand's personality will also allow you to connect more with customers in your target market. Ideally, customers engaging in your website will reflect the same personality traits that radiate from your business. Decide how you want to come across, and how you want to be seen. Keep in mind that whichever personality you decide on will be integrated everywhere within your webpage, from typography to images.
To hone in on what you want the focus of your company to be, consider what the problem is that you solve, and build your brand around that starting point. Also reflect on why your company exists and what functions you carry out. Your brand's foundations will be based off of these thoughts.
Create your company name
Your company name will be the first thing people discover about you when searching in your market sector. Before consumers even know anything about your product or service, your name will be a standout and can be a deciding factor as to whether people choose you. Your name will directly impact your brand design, logo, marketing and domain. Remember, you need to choose something that is memorable and easy to spell/say so that customers can easily find your company/website again. It also needs to be distinguishable from other companies so customers can recognise you for you and not confuse you with large corporations.
However, a brand is so much more than a name, so do not overthink this step as a be-all and end-all to determining your company's success.
Tips for Name Generation
- Reuse an unrelated, pre-existing word such as 'Table'
- Create an entirely new word that has no meaning
- Use an acronym of a short phrase that describes your company, for example, 'Jophie's Nails' could be 'JN'
Design your brand
Once you have settled on a company name, turning this into a logo format is the next step. Whilst curating a logo idea that is both unique and identifiable, it also needs to be usable across a range of different sizes. Similar to the company name, it is important to not overthink this step. An overly complex logo can be hard to replicate and may throw people as to what your company actually does. Simplicity is the key to being memorable. This can be seen within many conglomerate companies whose logos have become an iconic symbol of recognition due to their straightforward design.
Colour scheme plays a big role in determining the look of your brand and the messages you want to convey. It can be helpful to research the meanings and representations behind colours to inform your selections. When choosing a font, be consistent with the simplicity approach too. Use of too many fonts can appear messy.
Integrate your branding
One of the final things you will complete when building your brand is employing your branding across the business. This is done in order for everything your company stands for to appear unified across every webpage, social media page and marketing device. This leads to your company having an effective brand story, and an effective brand story causes customers to have a distinct understanding of who you are.
A 'Meet the Team' and 'About Us' page is often a great way to further tell your brand story to site visitors. People like to feel that they are doing business with actual personable humans who have a story and care about the work they are doing. They want to be sure that the company is ethical and has a positive social impact, as mentioned earlier. Afterall, good branding is all about forging a connection between company and consumer.
Conclusion
Hopefully these tips have been a useful introduction into building your brand. It is essential to remember that your brand does not have to be perfect first time round. It is natural to go through a refining process as more customers give feedback to your company and the market demands evolve over time. Have acceptance that people will never be fully aligned with how you want your brand identity to be seen. As long as these things are in mind, success shouldn't ever be far from reach.