Branding

The goal of branding

Branding focuses on creating a brand identity and brand image that will distinguish your business and make it recognizable to your target audience.

The goal of branding is to show customers what you offer and what your brand values are. The aim of branding is to present a unique selling proposition that enables you to highlight a product or its features to try and grab the target audience's attention. Organizations use branding to turn their customer base into loyal customers, grow their position in the market, and display their values.

Branding elements

Branding consists of various elements that help you shape the appearance of a brand.

Brand voice and tone

Brand voice and tone determine how your business communicates and shapes your brand's personality. Determining voice and tone will allow you to create a distinct identity that defines how users and customers will perceive your products. It's also crucial for the tone and voice to be consistent across communication channels.

Spend some time thinking about how you want your brand to communicate. Do you want it to emanate classiness, or do you want to adopt a more casual tone? Researching your customer base and getting to know them can help you learn what voice will be effective in communicating with them.

Brand storytelling

Storytelling in branding is crucial. It lets you show the business from a different, more human side. When creating your brand, you should take some time to tell the story of your business. You can write about the brand's design and how it came to be or how you started as a small business and grew. You can also describe your future plans and what you would like to achieve. Thanks to this, you will give customers something to relate to and increase their trust and brand affinity.

You can tell your story on a dedicated page on a website or one of your social media channels. Put it somewhere curious customers can find and familiarize themselves with or where users can catch a glimpse of it and explore more if they want to.

Brand identity

Brand identity refers to your brand's visual appearance. Creating mood boards and word associations can help you determine how you want your customers to feel when they see and interact with your brand. By considering different options and styles, you will define your brand's colors, fonts, and typography. Moreover, if you already don't have a name for your business in mind, then it's an excellent opportunity to consider different options. The name should be unique, easy to remember, and can, but doesn't have to, communicate what your product is for.

When you establish the elements of your brand identity, ensure they are consistent across your products.

Brand strategy

A branding strategy is a skeleton that supports your brand. It aggregates all branding elements and turns into a consistent plan to increase brand awareness and ensure that you follow the defined brand guidelines.

Brand strategy will allow you to facilitate the branding process and find new market niches worth exploring. It also makes sure that your brand has an opportunity to develop and grow to adapt to changing market trends and customer needs.

An effective brand strategy should:

• Improve loyalty
• Build brand equity
• Attract target audience
• Enhance brand management
• Improve brand recognition

Benefits of branding

Successful branding can have many benefits for your business.

Affects purchasing decisions

Branding can sway customers' and users' purchasing decisions. If your target audience makes emotional connections to your brand, they're more likely to keep buying your product and recommend it to their friends and families. Some customers are willing to buy products of certain brands because the brand mission aligns with their values. Some customers feel better when buying products from brands that make a tangible impact on the world.

Gives your business a personality

Branding gives your organization personality and makes it easier for customers to relate and connect. Understanding how your brand makes the customer feel and how it looks in their eyes is essential. Once you know this, you can leverage it and create a strong brand.

Makes customers remember your products and business

A successful brand is memorable and recognizable, and that's precisely what an effective branding process is all about. Its goal is to make your business stand out from among the competition. Branding helps customers remember you and recognize your products from many others.

Improves advertising and marketing efforts

Branding provides structure to your advertising and marketing efforts. When you know what your business is about and what your products stand for, you can communicate it through advertisements and reach your target market. Apart from attracting new customers, effective advertising can keep your existing customers up to date about novelties.

Types of branding

Your approach to branding may differ depending on your goals; therefore, you will focus on different aspects of branding. Additionally, depending on your goals and type of business, you may want to combine different types of branding.

Corporate branding

Corporate branding focuses on every part of your business, such as products, services, and even employees. It concentrates on your unique selling proposition and value proposition and involves creating brand guidelines that help you communicate your values to customers.

Corporate branding isn't just about marketing and sales; it also enables you to improve your employing strategies and find business partners. Your brand values and mission can attract skilled individuals who want to join it. Moreover, corporate branding can aid with establishing your position in the market, making you more attractive to potential investors.

Personal branding

Personal branding focuses on one individual and how they advertise themselves. It is for self-employed people, such as freelancers, influencers, coaches, or personal trainers. It allows them to make themselves distinct and stand out from the competition. To grow your personal brand, you can use your existing work experience or some real-life events that influenced you and your career.

Product branding

Product branding concentrates on branding a single product or product line. Unlike corporate branding, it doesn't involve the entire business. Product branding encompasses the products of a particular series and needs to be done separately if a new line of products appears. This is because products of different lines may vary in terms of price, features, or benefits.

During product branding, you need to consider the needs and expectations of end users. Your business goals need to align with theirs if you wish to be successful. A competitive analysis can also help you collect data regarding products that are similar to yours and reveal how the competition markets them. If you want your products to be successful, they need to offer value to customers and solve their problems in a distinctive way.

Retail branding

Retail branding focuses on marketing retail businesses like Amazon, Walmart, or Starbucks. It gathers all the products and concentrates on marketing the seller rather than individual product lines. That's because products sold by retail businesses usually come from different manufacturers, and it would not be easy to market them individually.

In short, retail branding enables you to sell products from different businesses and brands. Naturally, you can choose to sell your own products, but depending on the number of items, retail branding will still benefit you. You can also combine it with product branding if you only focus on a few product lines.

Geographic branding

This type of branding focuses on the location in which your business operates. Geographic branding works best for companies that focus on tourism, such as local restaurants or souvenir stores. The main goal of such businesses is to attract customers by highlighting the most appealing and interesting features of a particular city, state, or country.

You can create a logo or color palette by leveraging popular tourist locations or monuments and incorporating their characteristics into your branding.

Service branding

Service branding is similar to product branding but focuses on one part of the business — a service. The issue with service branding is that, unlike product branding, you don't have a physical item to work with, such as product packaging. Therefore, you need to convince customers to trust something they can't physically touch, which poses a challenge.

Service branding aims to analyze your customers' pain points and offer them a unique solution.

Building a brand

Now that you know about the branding elements and what you need to consider in the branding process and you've selected the type of branding you want to focus on, it's time to bring this all together.

Discover your target audience

Brand development should start with extensive market research that will allow you to understand your potential customers and competition.

Understanding customer and user behavior and how they think will enable you to establish a unique selling proposition and help you design graphic elements that will resonate with the target audience. To learn about the trends and behavior of your audience, you can use such tools as Google Trends or Google Analytics.

During the research, you should pay close attention to the following:

• Customer habits
• Popular social media platforms
• The language of your end users
• The way customers engage with different brands

These will allow you to collect valuable insights that you can incorporate into your brand.

Define the tone and voice

As mentioned, defining the tone and voice determines how your brand is seen from the outside. This step involves considering what type of personality will resonate with the target group.

To do that, you can think of your brand as a person. What kind of characteristics do they have? How would they behave? Are they serious? Or kind and helpful? Or maybe they don't take themselves too seriously. Create detailed descriptions that you can then turn into a brand personality.

The tone and voice will determine how your brand communicates with customers and how it makes them feel while interacting with your business. It will also influence your social media posts and customer service behavior.

Come up with a business name

Choosing your business name is a crucial step in the creation of your brand. Your brand name should be distinct, and it would be perfect if it weren't used by another company. This is especially crucial when you later create social media accounts and purchase a domain name for your website.

As mentioned, your business name needs to be easy to remember. It can be a real word or a made-up one. Simultaneously, it should be hard to imitate it, allowing you to keep it unique. The last recommendation is more of an added value rather than a must-have.

There are a few approaches to creating a brand name:

• Inventing a new word
• Using your own name
• Adopting an existing word
• Create an acronym
• Using a combination of different words

Additionally, you can consider creating a slogan that concisely conveys the offered value and increases brand recognizability.

Write down your brand story

Writing your own origin story can help customers understand your brand and connect emotionally to it.

A brand story should focus on describing how your business came about and how your products were created. What was that initial spark that took you on this business journey? It's a story that narrates your beginnings and describes your values and future goals.

A brand story will make customers want to return to your products. You can give them something they can identify with and form a connection with. Telling your story will allow you the opportunity to convince customers and influence their purchasing decisions. It's a chance to present the features that make your brand and products special.

Once your customers feel attached to your brand, they will be happy to return and recommend it.

Develop a brand style guide

A brand style guide is a comprehensive collection of graphic elements that make up your brand identity. This collection will determine the visual aspects of your website, social media, and product packaging.

An established brand style will allow your customers to recognize the brand. Moreover, thanks to the visual consistency between your products, they will feel a sense of familiarity and safety.

A brand style guide should contain the following elements:

• Color palette
• Font styles
• Logo
• Imagery
• Voice
• Additional visual effects (e.g., animation)

Design the logo and other graphic elements

The process of creating a logo should start a bit later in the brand design process because to make it, you need to know the look and feel of your brand. Changing a logo as you go is challenging and can increase the design cost. Therefore, you should be sure what you want your brand to represent.

You should ensure that the logo is easy to recognize and scalable so that it can be easily applied to products or digital channels.

You can place your brand's logo in various places:

• Websites
• Social media channels
• Email marketing
• Advertisements

You should also consider what type of logo you would like to create.

Abstract logo

Abstract logos consist of shapes and colors that don't resemble anything in particular. They're usually combined with wordmarks and lettermarks. The goal of an abstract logo is to convey the concept and main idea of your business. You can see examples of abstract logos in products such as Google Drive, Spotify, or Pepsi.

Mascot logo

This type of logo is created as a mascot—a character or person who represents the brand and becomes its face. It enables you to show the brand from a more human side and provide customers with a face they can identify with and connect to. Examples of such logos include Pringles, a brand producing potato chips, sports teams, and even events such as conventions.

Emblem logo

Emblem logos combine imagery with text and can be rectangular or circular. When creating emblem logos, be careful because it's often challenging to scale them properly. An example of such a logo is Puma.

Icon logo

An icon logo usually represents a particular brand's characteristics. It's a concise metaphor for your brand. Examples of icon logos include Firefox's logo, which depicts an orange fox surrounding the Earth, and YouTube's logo, which displays the play button.

Wordmarks and lettermarks

Wordmarks and lettermarks are logos that consist of initials and words that represent the brand.

A wordmark (also called a logotype) utilizes the name of the brand or company as its primary visual element. Popular examples of such logos are FedEx and Disney.

In turn, lettermarks consist of initials or individual letters, visually representing your brand. They're often used when a company's name is too long, and shortening it makes it more memorable. Examples of lettermarks include H&M, HBO, BBC, etc.

Implement branding across your business

Once you turn all the mentioned elements into a cohesive brand, it's time to implement it across your social media accounts, products, website, and all the other channels you plan to use to communicate with your audience.

This will enable you to curate a familiar and positive customer experience. Thanks to your branding efforts, they can recognize your products and business whenever they encounter them.

Who should you choose? Branding agency or user experience agency?

Nowadays, the branding and user experience markets are intertwined. Branding agencies compete with UX agencies. Software development companies even offer branding services.

Digital agencies also don't shy away from such projects. That raises the question of which agency to choose for designing a visual identity and sometimes even a brand.

It all depends on the project type and the task the company sets. If it's packaging (package design), a packaging or branding agency would be the best choice.

Every branding agency starts its business with packaging. Usually, it is their core competency, in addition to logo design.

When designing a brand, the process involves discovering the company's identity and mission and emphasizing this in the identity system. Not every company is familiar with this process.

Branding is not simply a logo but rather a carefully thought-out system for managing a company's reputation, promotion, and business through its values, goals, and actions.

In this case, the identity system is an outcome, not a source. It's one of the tools. Neither the software development company nor the digital agency will help with this task.

Just because these companies hire graphic designers doesn't mean they employ a brand designer, strategist, or researcher.

The choice should fall on the branding agency or our agency, which has studied this process, knows it, and conducted it several times.

If the task involves creating or redesigning a digital product, a user experience or product design agency should be chosen.

Branding and visual identity are only one part of creating a digital business—an important part, but one of many. In a digital product, user experience and branding are connected.

In addition, for a digital product to be successful, knowledge from many other areas is essential in this process, such as:

• Business models
• Industry and the legal framework in which a business operates
• Availability in the market of digital solutions and their APIs
• Cloud solutions and their capabilities
• Traffic in digital channels for a given business niche
• Consumer and user behavior
• Lean management methods
• UX research
• Knowledge of principles and experience in software development
• Knowledge of principles and experience in interface development.

The Story possesses all this knowledge and constantly develops it. We know how to create digital products. In a business project, even visual identity is better outsourced to a company that understands the whole process and what it entails.