Branding: Why It’s Important to Understand the Entire Process

Your brand is your first impression. It should be a nice firm handshake with eye contact type of introduction. One where the person meeting you for the first time will quietly think “yep, this feels right.”  But why are there so many companies that get it so wrong? One big reason is that they don’t understand the entire process of building a brand. Many companies want to start with designing a logo. Which is a VERY important element of your brand. However, there are a few key foundational pieces that need to be established first. These will set the groundwork and tone for all other elements and design choices for your business. 

The first is to establish what your mission statement is. This is a short declaration that defines the purpose of your organization and what you plan on achieving in the long term. For example Nike’s mission statement is “Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world *If you have a body, you are an athlete.” 

Now you need to define your brand pillars or vision statement. These are the values and truths that your brand embraces in all aspects – from operation to packaging. It’s what you want your customers to know about you and come to expect from you. As an example, Amazon’s vision statement is “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” To break this down a bit further Amazon’s vision is to (a) have global reach, (b) be customer-centric, and (c) have the widest selection of products. 

Once you have your mission and vision established now it’s time to spell out the benefits and features of your products or services. Keep in mind here the things that will differentiate you from your competition. If you are starting a lemonade stand, you might not want to list “lemonade” as a feature. The lemonade stand down the street offers that too. However, you would want to list “lemonade made from freshly squeezed organic lemons and locally sourced sugar cane”.  This sets you apart from your competition.

This next step proves over and over to be one of the hardest questions to answer – who is your target audience? The typical response is – everyone. Which in an ideal world, yes hopefully everyone uses your product or service. However, the reality is, if you try to appeal to everyone (I’m sure you’ve heard this before) you will appeal to no one. By establishing key demographics like age, gender and income you create a road map for defining what your logo and marketing should look like.

Now that you have your foundation built it’s time to start designing a logo. During this process it is easy to get distracted by what you like. However, you have to remember the foundational elements you’ve created above. It’s important that your logo expresses these elements in a way that will appeal to your key demographic and truly expresses what your business is. You might personally like a mascot style logo, but if your business is luxury yacht rentals, this would not be the ideal style for you.

Once you have a logo in place it’s time to pick colors that will complement the overall brand. Color will have a huge impact on expressing what your brand is and how people will emotionally relate to it. It’s imperative that you pick colors that represent the mission and vision of your brand. If your vision statement says that you will be trustworthy and environmentally conscience, blue and green might be the colors for you. Green represents growth, harmony, and balance (environmental). While blue represents trust, responsibility, and honesty. You can find out more about colors and psychology below.

Credit: The Logo Company

We’re almost finished creating the key elements of your brand – stay with me! Now it’s time to create your voice. Your voice is how you speak to your customers in all visual and written communication, both online and off. If your product or service is more expensive a formal voice might be appropriate. If you offer a product or service that is more fun, you can have a playful voice to compliment it. 

From this point moving forward there are numerous additional assets that can be beneficial to building your brand – website, business cards, flyers, packing, etc. The one thing to remember is that not all of them are necessary. Assess your unique needs and develop a plan to create additional assets accordingly. Now, go show off your brand to the world!

Need help developing your brand? Or maybe you are ready to take a look at refreshing your current brand? Drop us a line and let us know how we can help.