The Think Tank
While branding refers to the marketing process of giving a structure to the brand and making it distinct, Brand identity is the collection of elements that a company creates to represent its image to its target audience. Design is what builds the brand identity of the company and how it is perceived by the set audience. It is vital that the identity be consistent across all collaterals of design like logos, typography, colours, packaging, and messaging. Here is an overview of the key elements that create a strong brand identity.
No matter the technical structure, build an emotional connect with the audience. An empathetic approach helps in practices and patterns. Defining a strong positioning, purpose, and personality of the brand helps set the ideals and distinguish the brand from the rest.
By all means explore the storytelling through visuals but keep the brand message very subtle, minimalistic, and brief. During the brand identity selection process, eliminate redundant information and elements from your brand identity to make it more perceptive and relatable to the customers. Effective design needs to convey the brand persona.
Ensuring brand consistency isn’t limited to only distinctive style on the brand website. It needs to be established across all visual platforms and social media. It creates cohesion for the customers irrespective of where they see the brand story.
Although the brand logo constitutes an essential part of the messaging mix, it doesn’t have intrinsic meaning as a standalone. Strive to keep the logo identity simple that resonates with the core message of the brand. Eventually the audience associates your brand with their logo perceptions.
Design research makes our approach to understanding users, methodical and well-structured. It is a necessary part of creating a user-oriented design for a product. Ensure that you validate the research on the target audience, incorporate feedback and process it with the final result.
Learning and analysing competitors’ behaviour gives designers insights and a sense of action. Competitor analysis provides designers with a way to take a look at a similar product/service currently in the industry, and assess standard user experience patterns and practices. It helps to ideate and find the niche distinction for the brand, its usability, and effectiveness.
Understand the preferences of your target audience. What the brand stands for, what it visually conveys, and how audience perceives it, need to be aligned. User-centred design techniques can help you create a successful brand by engaging directly with consumers in the early stages of the design process and involving them throughout.
Identifying the sweet spot where the customers and a brand intersect with their virtual interaction defines the context. By being an observer, the designer can gain a first-hand understanding of the real context towards his/her work.
When it comes to visual branding, colours have a powerful significance. There is psychological attachment and interaction associated with each colour the brand uses. Choosing the right colour palette helps to perceive the brand essence, persona, identity, and story better. The photos used on social media creates consistency and harmony with the brand.
The typography, colour palette, and forms/shapes you choose for your brand speaks a lot about what it stands for. These subtle yet effective elements can be used to reinforce the desired reaction from your customers. For example, a logo that is all circles and soft edges will inspire a very different reaction from a logo that is sharp and square.
A strong identity design sets the process in motion for a great register and recall in the minds of the customers. Beyond the contextual messaging, it helps in stability and longevity of the brand. As you move forward with different campaigns and communication strategies, there may be redesigning, but a steer clear consistency of the brand values will draw the audience to the brand.