Branding is a big world, any actions you take to shape your brand is considered branding. Let's explore in detail what brand, branding, and brand identity are, why it's important, and how you can build a strong brand.
A brand is a customer's gut feeling about the product, service, or organization - Marty Neumeier from The Brand Gap.
Just your Logo
Just your packaging
Just your Product
It simply is a customer's perception of your product, service, or organization. A brand is how they feel and think about you. It's an emotional game. It's an idea or a promise made to its target audience.
A brand is the result of Branding which means that it's an ongoing process of using a variety of strategies and techniques.
It helps to build trust and a strong connection between you and your target audience. That's why we often buy products from the brands we connect with. Consumers want comfort, happiness, and satisfaction in their lives, and they get it in part through the products they buy.
If the brands they use consistently deliver a positive experience, consumers form an opinion that the brand is trustworthy, which gives them peace of mind when buying.
So, now let's discuss what Branding is and why it matters.
Branding has been around since 350 A.D. and is derived from the word 'Brandr', meaning to burn in the Ancient Norse language. By the 1500s, it had come to mean the mark that ranchers burned on cattle to signify ownership - a precursor of the modern logo.
Yet branding today is much more than just a look or a logo. It has come to signify the emotional "gut feeling" reaction a company can elicit from its customers.
It is a big world. Any actions you take to shape your brand is considered branding. It can include various elements like:
Let's assume you designed a logo for your business, it will help the consumers to identify you as a brand. Sometimes, we don't remember the name of the brand but we do remember their logos. Because 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. Visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than other boring texts. So, your logo becomes a part of branding because it helps the consumer connect with your brand.
You developed a brand voice - that's part of branding. You get together with your marketing team to brainstorm an ad campaign - that's part of branding.
Brand identity is the face of your brand. A Brand is an emotional concept while brand identity is the visual component of a brand that represents those ideas. Branding is emotional whereas identity is visual. It helps the consumers to identify you as a brand. The process of creating a brand identity is called brand identity design.
Being distinctive and consistent is what makes your brand identity stronger. It will help you to be and look different and it will become easier for the customer to pick you out from the crowd.
Logo design helps the consumers to identify you as a brand. Your logo should be simple, memorable, distinctive, and appropriate for your brand. It's good if your logo has a story.
Select the right fonts for your brand and develop a typography guide. You can choose 2 or 3 font families and be consistent with typography. You can use those selected fonts for prints and on websites.
Colors are very important, colors have meanings and they should be appropriate for your brand. Select a color palette that represents your brand values to increase your recognizability.
Create specific patterns and textures for your brand. You will be using them on bags, posters, business cards, and other graphics.
Create an outstanding website for your business. It should be effective and SEO optimized so that you can get more reach. If your business has a physical or digital product, consider building an e-commerce website. Whether it's a landing page, static website, or an e-commerce website, you can build a custom website using the no-code tool Webflow.
Design packaging if you have a physical product and stay consistent. Your packaging should stand out so that it can grab customers' attention.
Select an effective illustration style for your brand. The shapes and colors should be similar, as it ensures consistency.
Select an appropriate photography style that represents the emotions your brand wants to convey. Photography represents your brand visually, you can stand out using different tones, sets, props, colors, and more.
Choose a powerful icon style for your brand. Icons are often used on websites, prints, and social media. You can select a solid style, line icon style, or mixed style.
Create a strong brand layout. It's the process of arranging visual elements - like text, images, and shapes - on a given page. Layout design is important for any project that conveys a message through eye-catching visuals, like magazine layouts, website design, and advertisements.
Define a tone of voice for your brand. It will help you stand out from the competitors. It's the mood or emotion you convey in messages to your audience through specific word choices and writing styles. Essentially, it's how you express your brand voice.
Create brand guidelines to ensure consistency. It should represent guidelines on all the brand elements. It should also demonstrate what the company is, what it does, and what it stands for.
Be consistent with what you create for your brand, it should be professionally designed and should work for your brand.
Thank you for reading till here!
