What is your favourite product and why? What are the factors that make that specific product so good, in your eyes? Is it the usability, the quality, design or any of these? These factors and many more all go towards the brand’s image. It’s these factors that we’ll look to identify when figuring out what a brand really is.
The first and most obvious question is, What is brand identity?
What is Brand Identity and The Brand World?
When we look at the visuals a brand has, the colours, the text, the design and the logo, these all contribute to a brand’s identity that make up their brand world. And from this quick round up you might think it’s quite easy to define your brand’s identity. But we need to look beyond the obvious and see beyond logo design and graphics. Brand identity is all about the personality that make up your brand world. Imagine how your target market portrays your brand identity. How do customers describe your brand? How do they describe your brand’s personality, its philosophy? By considering this we can develop this and tailor the identity around this vision.
Might be of interest – Maximise Your Brand Position
Identify Your Brand
What is the process to identify your brand? There are many ways to do it, but we like to use the following approach.
Who is in Your Market?
Consider your brand. For whom is the product or service marketed? Work out who you want to buy into your brand. This is by far the most important and first step that should be undertaken. This allows adaptation to meet the needs of the market, rather than assuming and taking shots in the dark. Analyse yourself and define your personality, your brand personality. Make this identity appealing enough for customers to engage with your brand identity.
What is the Purpose?
What is the purpose of your brand? To focus on a sale, to gain trust, for example. There are many reasons for your branding. Focus on what the stand out reasons are. If these match up to the target market nicely, then you’ve got yourself a winner.
Ask What People Think of Your Brand Identity?
Link all these together to fully understand what external stakeholders think of your brand world. This is particularly useful at the beginning, to understand your market and your purpose. But also, at the end, if a new brand identity has been developed. Think of the whole identity of your brand world, the whole personality. It’s not just the visual identity via the logo, it’s also the vocal identity, with communication, the emotional identity with the feelings your brand evokes and it can even be about the sounds, smells and tastes, depending on the type of brand worlds you have!
The Benefits of Understanding Your Brand Identity
You can never know everything about your own brand identity, but what is the point? Let’s look at the benefits of understanding your brand identity.
Help Brand Development
Brands can often stay still and become boring. Be aware of this and identify this before it happens. Consider your brand as a personality that needs refreshing from time to time. This allows for brand development and future proofing your identity.
Connect with Your Audience
Understanding brand identity gives you a good opportunity to get down and connect with your audience, by getting to know what they like and don’t like. This keeps consumers happy as they have an input. It also keeps you happy and you’ll understand more. It also allows for new customers to join, as you can better meet their needs.
Business Growth
Business growth is a natural output of assessing and refining brand identity. You are tailoring your brand more closely and reaching out to a wider audience that will associate with your brand identity and brand personality to a much higher degree. Brand strategies can help drive business growth, check out this blog for more information.
Rounding up Your Brand Identity
Establishing a brand’s identity may seem like a tough task to do. But it’s important to fully understand your brand, the market and how to better position your brand’s identity within that market.
If you need to better understand your brand’s identity and can’t do it alone, then get in touch. Here at Fellow we are a brand identifying and a brand developing super team. All our contact details are below.
