These Top 5 Tips Will Help You Create an Effective Brand Identity Design
If you don’t want to waste time, money and effort into creating a brand that fails — these 5 tips will make your brand identity design a success.
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Developing a strong visual identity is not always easy. One little mistake, and all your hard work goes down the drain. This is why effective brand identity design is difficult to come by. It needs planning, time, money, and professionals who know what they’re doing.
As you probably know, every business needs to have a brand, and the stronger it is the better. Just look at the likes of Apple, Samsung, McDonald’s, Nike, or Supreme. They’ve all built a giant following thanks to their excellent, nay, genius branding strategies.
For example, what do you think of when I say “Nike”? The first thing that came to your mind is probably their simple logo and their easy to remember slogan “Just Do It”.
Yes, they’re memorable and it’s no accident. Professional marketers, designers, and copywriters studied the market, and came up with the perfect combination that would end up transforming Nike into one of the most popular sports brands today.
Through constant branding efforts, Nike was able to maintain the same active, cool image it started with, with a few re-brandings along the way (which is usually unavoidable).
But, before we tell you more about the 5 top tips for effective brand identity design, let’s first learn what branding is!
Branding as a marketing practice
To define it broadly, branding, or a branding strategy, is efforts made by a company in order to create a name, image, and design that are easy to remember, identify, and link to the business or company.
Not only does this help distinguish your products or services from the competition’s, but it also happens to be the best way to make a good first impression on your targeted audience and customers.
After all, it is much cheaper (and easier) to make customers loyal than to keep looking for new ones, and the only way to achieve this is by having an effective brand identity strategy.
So, without further ado, here are the 5 tips you need to know to create an effective brand identity design.
1. Know who you are, and make sure your audience knows it too
There is nothing more annoying to an audience than a brand that doesn’t know what it wants to be. When you’re creating a branding strategy, make sure to stick with it.
Sure, your product is important, but how you present it and yourself is even more crucial to the survival of your business.
So, ask yourself:
What defines you, as a company?
What’s your promise?
What kind of brand do you want to be?
For example if you’re starting a wellness brand then learn all about your target market, persona and any other elements that help build a good wellness brand identity.
Create your mission statement and stick to it. This is going to be your company’s character and personality, so make sure it’s done professionally.
2. Learn more about your audience
Because businesses are nothing without their customers, learning everything you can about your audience is primordial.
This is going to help you create the right design, the right branding strategy, and make the right marketing efforts later on when you need this audience to turn into actual buying customers.
Do market research, and adopt a niche. It’s going to be difficult work, but it’s going to be worth it because niche products always do better in a market as saturated as today’s market.
3. Create your Style Manual
A style manual will have everything that has to do with your visual brand, from marketing material to logo design and website design inspiration.
A style manual will define the color palette you use, the graphics, fonts, and all in all, the aesthetics you’re trying to run with. This is basically a summary of the visual character of your brand, which is why it’s so invaluable.
4. Identify your brand culture
A good brand culture makes customers feel like they’re part of a family. It also makes your brand easier to understand and makes your audience feel like they’re part of a community.
This is why it should be created around your goals, principles, values, and core beliefs.
For example, people who buy from The Body Shop believe in a greener, more cruelty-free world, and this is one of the strongest points in the company’s brand culture.
5. Create your community
Finally, create your community. People are social animals, and thus, love to bond more closely with others who share their beliefs, or at least, have the same tastes as them.
Fostering a community for your audience can be done through your website, but also through social media, from Facebook groups to Subreddits. Encourage conversation, not only between your company and your customers, but also between the customers themselves.
Conclusion
If this seems too difficult to be done, don’t give up. Brand identity design can be difficult and time-consuming, but it’s one of the only way (if not the only way) to ensure customer loyalty, which is definitely going to show on your sales.
So, keep on going and don’t give up!
