We all want our businesses to stand out from the crowd. Although it takes some time and effort, it’s worth it to have a unique identity that is instantly recognisable. Your brand identity is what tells everyone who you are and what you do, as well as what they can expect when they interact with your business. It’s what helps you gain loyalty from your customers, get referrals, and build that all-important trust.

There are several things that help make up your brand identity – it’s not just about your logo, slogan, and design scheme, but also about the experience your customers get at every touch point with you.

Mission and vision for your business

The first thing to do is to think about a mission statement for your business, which is a short sentence about what your purpose is. We all know Nike’s tagline, ‘Just Do It’ but did you know that their mission statement is ‘To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.’ So, their mission statement encapsulates everything that the company is about and wants to achieve in one short sentence. This is no mean feat, but achievable for your business with a bit of thought. You could always get a few friends round and have a ‘get my mission statement’ party…but make sure you work on the statement before you start drinking…or you could have some very interesting stuff!

It can be easier if you think of your brand as a person – what does it like or do? How does it help people? What do you want customers to remember about your business? It’s important to be consistent across everything you do and give the same high-quality service and friendly attitude to every customer, so they all have the same or similar experience. This is especially important if you’re dealing with a complaint – be consistent; apologise; find out what went wrong and why and then try and put it right, keeping the customer informed. By doing this you can often turn a complaint around into something positive and turn the complainant into a loyal future customer. I think that the main thing to remember is to always consider your branding with every interaction with a customer.

So, now that we’ve looked at the experience you want your branding to give you customer, it’s time to look at the more practical stuff – business name, logo, colours and design – these are important and help shape your brand, but you need to know what the mission statement of your business is first before you begin, as this helps everything else fall into place.

What’s in a name?

The name you choose will depend on what you do. I chose to incorporate my name in my business name. The reason for this is because with a service business like mine, people will often remember my name, but wouldn’t necessarily remember a random name I came up with. If anyone puts my name into a Google Search, they will find pages about all that I do.

You might want to use a name that incorporates what you do. For example, if I made handmade chocolates I might call my business ‘Cindy’s handmade chocolates,’ keeping it simple, or maybe ‘Cindy’s tantalising treats.’ It needs to be catchy and capture the nature of what you do. Take time to think about it as once it’s out there, that is how people will see your business.

Logo – Once you have your name, you could incorporate that into a logo – again to make your business recognisable. As well as an overall logo, you could also have smaller logos for individual product lines.

Brand Colours – The colours you choose are more important than you might think – according to research by web design and marketing company, WebPageFX, people make a subconscious judgement about a product in less than 90 seconds of viewing, and most of these people base that assessment on colour alone. In fact, almost 85% of consumers cite colour as the primary reason they buy a particular product and 80% believe that colour increases brand recognition. Wow! That’s quite powerful.

Tagline – The most important thing with producing a tagline is to be succinct. Your tagline captures what your business does and its values in one, short sentence. For example, Nike use ‘Just do it’ – L’Oréal use ‘..because you’re worth it’ – both very powerful brands with quite simple, catchy taglines that tell you what they want you to remember about them.

To help you produce your tagline, concentrate on the features of your business, how your products make people feel. Make a list of all the good things about your business …do your products enhance someone’s life?…make them feel more beautiful?…provide solutions to your customer’s problems?

Then brainstorm words that describe those things – it might be worth getting a few friends together to help you brainstorm. Once you have a few words, you can think about a tagline.

Fonts – When looking at your brand for the first time, people will notice the colours and the font – the way the brand name is written. There are so many different fonts, so try and choose one or two that enhance your business name…for example if you sell vintage jewellery, look at a vintage font.

Remember that the font you choose needs to be legible, so don’t pick something that is difficult to read. 

Tone of voice – Most big companies go for straight forward language or the ‘plain English’ approach. This helps customers easily understand what you’re saying without having to wrestle with big words, long sentences, or jargon. Keep the language simple and friendly and you can’t go far wrong!

Brand Personality

Brand personality is the overarching name that refers to a set of human characteristics that can be attributed to a brand name. It’s kind of personality traits that your customers can relate to, in that they see something they can identify with that meets some parts of their own personality. 

Finally, a brand personality evokes a positive emotional response from consumers.

So, how does brand personality work?

If consumers identify with certain personality traits of a brand, what are they? The five main types of brand personality are:

• Excitement – carefree, spirited, playful, modern, trendy, and youthful.
• Sincerity – Kindness, thoughtfulness and an orientation towards family values, environmental sustainability, or care for workers or communities
• Ruggedness – Rough, tough, outdoorsy, unfussy, and athletic
• Competence – Successful, accomplished, and influential, which is highlighted by leadership.
• Sophistication – Elegant, prestigious, exclusive, luxurious, and sometimes even pretentious

Even though we are very much in an online age, where automation and AI (artificial intelligence) is growing, people still want to have that personal interaction or direct customer service. And research has shown that customers are more likely to buy from a brand with a similar personality to their own.

Your business’s brand personality should shine out of your posts and in everything you do. It can also influence the type of imagery you use and the way you word posts or share your marketing. It’s definitely food for thought.

Examples

Let’s take a couple I used earlier – L’Oréal tells us ‘You’re worth it.’ Their brand is about empowering women of all ages and backgrounds to believe in themselves.  They believe in the quality, efficacy, and safety of their products, and are world leaders in beauty, hair, skin, and perfume. They now target both men and women, but the tagline most remember is ‘because you’re worth it’.

Nike, on the other hand, with its ‘just do it’ tagline, targets sports people driven to achieve their goals. It’s an energetic and modern brand.

A business’s brand should appeal to its target audience and strive to have brand attributes that attract that particular audience.

This has been a very simple way to look at your brand identity and there is a lot more to it, but these are the basics that should help you on your way.

If you need any help, please feel free to contact me.