A brand persona is characterized by its façade as well as what lies beyond its visually-bound state. It doesn’t depend on how big or small your brand is; it depends on your ability to align its values and core messages parallel to the process of building your brand.
A man is known by the company he keeps, but a business is known by the audience it keeps. Each brand needs to establish a strong customer base – the one which lets the customers connect on a personal level, the one with which they can let their guard down, the one they could trust and confide in. While the stratagem of each brand and business varies, most businesses come spiraling down the steep market competition.
You see, survival isn’t a chance here. If a brand has to make its audience say WOW, it has to raise the standard and level of its strategies, values, characteristics, and personality. Sure, designing a good logo can make the impact, but it has to be backed by a robust brand design.
Ever pondered how big brands do it? They focus on customer pain points and design their approach in the same manner. From adding relevancy to integrating latest technology, they let their customers get the feel. Another quality of a brand is that it responds to the requirement of their targets regardless of how varied their preferences are.
To design a brand the way your customers like takes hardcore effort, but let’s say it’s more of a mind than a muscle thing. In this article, we’ll go through certain aspects of a brand design that (when considered efficiently) will make your audience go gaga over you.
1. Define your Brand Identity
No brand in the world exists without an identity. Each and every characteristic of a brand requires several months or even years to reach the pinnacle. From being a civil-war invention to becoming a world renowned beverage brand has taken Coca-Cola more than a century. During the process of building its identity, it has maintained its contemporariness with the passing time. With an attribute like that, it has strengthened its relationship with its customers.
The brand identity is shaped by the customers’ perception of it. Ask people what they think of coca cola. People love the taste and the product marketing is better than any other soft drink brand. Coca-Cola spends way too much on excelling its marketing for the sole reason to shape the perception of its target audience. Plus, it has kept the quality of its product intact, which in turn intensifies the outcomes of the marketing strategy.
To define a brand is to prioritize what your customers need. Even if you’re a small business owner, adjusting your visual brand elements (packaging, logo design, and marketing campaigns etc.) to the invisible ones (quality, quantity, values, motives, goals, and objectives etc.) makes you readily noticeable in the market.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
Most brands commit the sin of using a target area that proves broader than they could’ve expected. Of course, they want to reach a larger audience, but they cannot possibly pursue every customer. For instance, if a company manufactures apparel for young generation and targets the older generation as well, it isn’t going to go any further unless it revamps its marketing strategies by expanding its product line.
Similarly, a brand realizing the prospects of targeting a narrow audience will only deliver products that cater to the exact requirements of its main targets. The key strategy here is to specify your focus and discover the behaviors, shopping habits, and the lifestyle of your customers. Build a virtual customer base with different customer characteristics lined up in each profile. Connect those characteristics with your brand persona and relate them using your productive skills.
Let’s discuss an example here. If you run a small-scale travel agency, and your targets are college students applying for studies abroad, you’re going to have to research their requirements. You can get every detail on how they can avail of free scholarships and even help them process their visa application. You have to collect data regarding everything that revolves around students, studies abroad, and travel options – all in line with what you have to offer.
3. Determine Your Brand’s Vision and Mission Statement
Once realized that you’ve determined your target audience by establishing your brand identity, it’s now time to be clear on visualizing the goals and the mission statement for your business. Your vision is the reason why your brand exists as it serves as the foundation for other brand elements.
What does my brand represent? How shall my mission contribute to my brand design? Questions like these might hover your mind and form a cloud of confusion over it, which is why you need to pinpoint what your brand is about and what it offers. Simply put, your mission statement actually defines what you do and how you can add value to your customers’ lives.
Consider Coca-Cola again for a while. Their mission statement is: To refresh the world in mind, body and spirit. To inspire moments of optimism and happiness through our brands and actions.
Now, run a glance through their marketing advertisements and their products. What do you see? Within their marketing strategies, they cleverly imbed their mission statement. Their company values are reflected in their actions and visions on every level of their service.
4. Research The Competition In Your Niche Industry
First thing’s first: Never do what others are doing. Instead, pave your own way by learning from the mistakes of your competitors. Everyone offering the same products as you and catering to the same audience as you would definitely want to reach the pinnacle. But you’ve got to take a different approach, right?
Learn from the mistakes of your competitors to avoid the loss on your end. A brand that is designed to differentiate you from the rest is what makes the customers twitch. You can start by creating a spreadsheet and compare all the potential competitors in your industry and focus on the following areas:
- Their brand messages
- Their products and services
- Customer perceptions regarding their brand
- Their successful and unsuccessful strategies
- And the resources employed by them for executing an effective brand image
After this comparison, you must be able to draw practical conclusions on how you can improve your overall brand design. The key here is to focus on your customers. You have to convince them to consider you because you’re different!
5. Specify the qualities and services that your brand offers
What makes your brand qualify as a brand? It’s the qualities and the services that you offer. After you’ve molded your core values within the visual aspects, pay attention to the ‘meat and potatoes’ of your brand.
No one can deny the fact that the brands topping the industry have extensive resources and unique benefits attached to them. You don’t have to shoot arrows in the dark to compete with them; you’ve got to work on improving yourself – including everything your brand has to offer.
However, what makes your qualities and services different is how you add value to them. Learn how adding value can add convenience and comfort to your customers. Your focus on improving the consumer experience should rely heavily on how you implement those values.
Coca-Cola (yes, again) specifies its qualities and values in terms of a unique taste and the convenience it delivers to its targets. From time to time, Coca-Cola has tended to deliver a taste beyond the hedonistic delights of many. On top of that, it’s available everywhere. The flexible and transparent communication has enabled them to devise their strategies with regards to the view of their customers.
6. Create A Logo
Now that all the internal elements are placed in their respective positions, the visuals are ready to play their part. And within the visual domain, the creation of a logo design presents the most creative yet intimidating level.
Most brands use various means to design the perfect logo, which includes the message, core values, and the qualities. They might use DIY logo design generators, hire a designer, or crowdsource for the desired logo design. On the relative note, it’s not a good idea to stuff your logo with every business detail. Each and every component of your logo must convey the key ideas you want your customers to notice.
You know that your logo design is going to appear on everything and will be the source of your brand’s visual identity. To come up with an exceptional logo design, you must be willing to spend your time and resources to build a better brand experience. If you hire a professional designer, he’ll deliver a design worth his salt. His expertise will exhibit in his unique design. He will make sure he equips you with a powerful design that is made within the guidelines of the brand designing process, yet exceeds your expectations of the best logo design.
Related: Can’t Spend Much On Logo Design? Here’s What You Need To Know!
Alternatively, if you can’t hire a designer or an agency because of your tight budget, you can rely on your own creative approach and use online resources, such as online logo makers, to make a custom design that fits your brand’s design.
7. Give Your Brand Its Own Voice
Since you’re the creator of your brand personality, giving your brand a voice is mendatory. We’re not asking you to grab a speaker and head for the main street to deliver your brand sermon. By providing a voice to your brand, you could imply the type of personality your brand has.
Take your cue from music. You may like music, but you must have a particular taste. Similar to the classical, rock, pop, blues, jazz, Rnb, hip-hop, metal, and electronica genre in the musical realm, your brand tone may be:
- Informative
- Professional
- Conversational
- Promotional
- Fun-oriented and so on
Before you set the tone, ask yourself:
- Does the tone of my brand resonates with the audience I’m targeting?
- What should I do to balance it?
- Does the pitch of my tone align with my brand’s values?
It’s important to consider the point your brand can reach within the brand personality spectrum. The outcome of your brand should be directed by the tone and voice you’d like your brand to have.
8. Remain Consistent In Your Brand Design Approach
Of all the things that help you design the perfect brand, maintaining a consistent attitude across every stage is the most crucial part. You must’ve heard that a leopard can’t change its spots. The exact aphorism also stands true for the brand and its personality.
Once you give it a personality, you’ve to keep improving it. To make your personality stand out, you have to showcase yourself on a different level from others. You can do so by approaching your audience in the clearest and most transparent manner. The level of transparency helps your customers develop a deeper bond and connection with you. It helps them establish a trust relationship with you.
Keep integrating new approaches and maintain that look of freshness and youth in your brand. Again, we’ll mention Coca-Cola as the exemplary brand here. As mentioned before, it has become second to none in delivering a quality product for more than a century. It has continued to balance its strategies with its business objectives, and of course, its brand voice. It has reached for any means to stratify its personality traits, due to which the band voice requires no introduction.
9. Keep It All Simple
Most brands dwindle in their success journey by overcomplicating the brand-building process. You must’ve heard about the Zen way of life. Many are approaching this unique lifestyle to escape the harsh realities of life, all because of the simplicity it adds to their lives.
In the same manner, your customers want convenience, but with simplicity. People consider brands that are simple in their approach. From the brand message to the logo design, everything is simple. Coca-Cola has had the same brand message for more than 100 years – because of the simplicity and clarity of the message it delivers. It has even restricted its logo color to just red and white in order to avoid confusion and complexity.
When you see that simple logo with the message of optimism, you can feel that flavor bursting in your mouth, don’t you?
Bottom Line
If you want your business to live instead of just survive the market heat, you have to stop obsessing, overthinking, and even overcomplicating the brand design process.
A well-designed brand can do wonders for your business. Not only can you attract the potential audience but can reach a comprehensive platform. Your customers will be able to confide in you and will likely to associate their personal feelings with you.
So, when are you going to ignite that spark in your YES strategy?