Intro to Branding

This is your guide to branding.

Here you will learn what branding is, why it is beneficial, and how to be prepared to establish a brand identity for your business.

What is branding?

Branding is a vital part of business growth. A brand helps create a unique identity by defining and establishing visual and non-visual elements that help a business differentiate amongst competitors, helping them stand out and make a memorable impression.

Branding enables businesses to engage with their target audience by creating an emotional connection through a variety of brand elements, such as a logo. Each element of a brand helps a business establish easier recognition, customer loyalty, increased interest, and a desired perception.

  • 94% of consumers affirm that a logo holds high importance in fostering brand recognition.

  • 75% of consumers judge a company’s credibility based on its logo design.

  • 60% of customers avoid companies with unattractive logos.

  • 59% of consumers prefer purchasing products from brands they can easily identify.

EVERY BUSINESS STARTS SOMEWHERE!

Why brand my business?

Every business starts somewhere. Successful businesses learn overtime the importance of establishing a strategic brand identity that targets consumers, represents their products and values, is sustainably recognizable, and has memorability. With the ability for bigger businesses to consistently invest in marketing, it can be intimidating for a small business owner to believe there is any ability to compete with these well-known and beloved brands. But don’t forget, successful businesses had to start somewhere!

Every business, no matter what size, has the potential to find success! What does success look like to you? Below are some potential benefits of establishing your brand:

Growth Benefits

Financial Benefits

Personal Benefits


Branding helps prevent business failure

Businesses fail when they either lack uniqueness or fail to socialize their uniqueness. Businesses that offer services too similar to others, especially in highly saturated markets, will not meet consumer demand. The result of this can be devasting. Not only could this leave potential clients with the wrong impression, but it can force owners to lower costs and most likely ends with complete business closure. This may seem easily avoidable, but it can be difficult to overcome when limited by cost/resources.

Branding helps highlight a business’s uniqueness and personality, but it is up to the owner(s) to identify what makes them more desirable than other businesses. Bottom line, business owners seeking out help with their brand identity should always be able to answer one question:

Why do consumers want what I have to offer over my competitors, and is my uniqueness clear to potential clients?

Before jumping into a brand project, if this question can’t be answered, it may be time to re-evaluate the business purpose and/or marketing strategies.

Do you know Apple’s story?

Apple’s first year was not an immediate success, but they showed ground-breaking appeal through their innovative design by providing the world with a new approach to personal technology - the world’s first color-technology computer. Steve Jobs hired designer Rob Janoff in 1977 to re-brand Apple with a better and cleaner representation of the product they had to offer. This rebrand turned the tides and was pivotal to the growth of Apple, proving that consumers are attracted to unique brands that represent unique products.

Brand Identity

Visual Identity

VS

The separation of brand identity and visual identity is a vital concept that sets the foundation for intentional design.

Brand Identity

A brand identity is the holistic perception your consumers have of your business. Essentially, your brand is the culture of who you are, what you do, and how you appear; your brand is a representation of how your products, services, and perception make your consumers feel.

  • Brand Story

  • Brand Name

  • Services/Products

  • Tone of Voice

  • Visual Identity

  • Social Presence

Visual Identity

Founded on the brand identity, the visual identity is the physical representation of your brand and expresses your business’s personality through logos, colors, fonts, and other visual.

  • Logo

  • Colors

  • Typography

  • Icons/Graphics

  • Print Materials

  • Social Appearance

  • Web/App Design

The logo is at the core of the brand because it is the result of all things brand identity and visual identity.