Branding

Your brand includes everything you say and do as a company. It expresses what you think, feel and say about your business offering. Your brand is a promise of what people can expect from your products, services or experiences.

A brand is more than a logo – although a logo plays a significant role in communicating who you are and forms part of your identity. Your brand is evident in every way your customers experience your business: from the way the phone is answered, and the uniforms your staff wear, to the state of the plants and the way you deal with complaints.

Your brand adds value to what you offer. It can make you stand out from the crowd and helps build an emotional connection with your customers – increasing customer loyalty.

Brands are built on a big idea which comes from the heart of your business. The idea must be true to who you are. If you don’t believe in it, no one else will.

The key ingredients of developing a brand are:

1. The Big Idea: What is new about your idea?

2. Vision: Where are you going?

3. Values: What do you believe in?

4. Personality: How do you express it?

To have a clear and compelling brand, it is essential you have a clear and convincing vision for your business. A vision is a goal, set in the future. It’s where you want your business to be.

A good place to start when defining your vision is to think in terms of years ahead, for example 3 or 5 years’ time. Then visualise where you want your business to be and what it will look like: how many staff, what profit, where you will be based. Will you be operating in new markets, will you be in a different location? Expand your thinking and develop a vivid picture of a particular date in time. This is the start of your vision.

Once you have worked out the details and (importantly) what success will look like, you can start to craft a vision statement. Remember, the purpose of this is to motivate and unite your staff and to inform your strategy and objective setting throughout the business.

Knowing where your business is going enables a designer to help you create a brand that communicates not just where you are as a business now, but where you want to be.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Communicating your brand

Values are at the very heart of your brand. If you want customers to empathise and connect with what your brand stands for, then this is where values count.

Values represent what you believe in and they are a guide and measure for everything you do. To be truly believable, your business and every member of staff should live them every day.

A values exercise with staff and customers can help uncover what values are core to your business. Ideally, a maximum of four values should be enough to define what is at the very heart of your business, and should give you a point of difference with your competitors. Again, they need to be authentic and meaningful. You need to clear about what they mean to your business, and find a compelling way to communicate them.

Most companies use the same values: integrity, passion and innovation. Even if these are tr ue to your company, try and find a new way to describe these values, and try to identify something in your business that is unique to you.

A designer or branding consultant can work with you and your team to get to the heart of your business, your values and your vision.

If Coca-Cola were to lose all of its production-related assets in a disaster, the company would survive. By contrast, if all consumers were to have a sudden lapse of memory and forget everything related to Coca-Cola, the company would go out of business.

Brand identity

If you are clear about who you are and where you are going, then you need a strong brand identity that communicates it clearly.

A brand identity uses graphic design to create a unique and compelling visual communication of who you are and what you stand for.

If you work with a design agency to develop a new brand identity they will thoroughly research your market and competitors to give you, not only, an identity that is authentic and meaningful to who you are, but also, something different that will make you stand out in the market.

Your brand identity can then be used across all communication channels, from your stationery and business cards to your web site, livery, interiors, sales tools, reports, advertising, recruitment and so on. So all your communication consistently reflects who you are and what you stand for.

Brand guidelines

Once you have articulated your brand and have a clear identity, having a set of brand guidelines will ensure you and your staff manage your brand communications effectively.

From the use of the correct colours, to the amount of white space that should surround your logo, to stating a tone of voice for all your communications (e.g warm, official, academic, or fun). A designer will work with you to develop a clear set of brand guidelines to make sure all your communications are consistent with your brand.