What is Brand Identity?
Brand identity is the combination of your company’s values, principles, and vision – think of brand identity as the spirit of your company or your brand. Brand identity is expressed and communicated through the visual elements of your brand, like your logo design, color palette, fonts, and icons, as well as your messaging and brand voice.
There are several key elements of brand identity:
- Company mission
- Company or brand values
- Founder and executive values (these often contribute to company values)
- Brand personality
- Brand positioning and how you differentiate yourself from your competitors
- Your brand voice and communication style
Your brand identity is intangible, so it takes time and effort to establish a strong one and develop a corporate identity that’s the right fit for your organization. But it’s worth the investment. A strong brand builds brand recognition and sets you apart from your competitors. Here’s a guide to help you develop a recognizable identity for your company.
Why is Brand Identity important?
A strong brand identity helps everyone in your business feel connected to the brand and your company’s mission. It can also become a real differentiator for your business, essential for building brand awareness and recognition within your target market.
A Strong Brand Identity Helps Increase Consistency
Brand consistency is important for making your company appear professional and trustworthy. It also helps to increase recognition of your brand, products, and company.
A clearly defined visual identity makes it easier to create consistent, on-brand assets and messaging across multiple communication and marketing channels because everyone in the organization can recognize the core visual elements of your brand.
Consistent design and messaging help establish trust in your company, but inconsistencies can quickly erode that trust. Our State of Brand Ownership Report found that “too much deviation from the core brand colors, typography, brand voice, general brand behavior, or logo sizing (even slight deviation) and the brand identity can quickly begin to diverge across channels and look unprofessional.”
A Strong Brand Identity Helps Increase Brand Equity
A strong brand identity helps to establish brand equity, which is “the value that customers assign to a business based on their perceptions of its quality.” This is why you’re more likely to pay more for a product from a brand name you recognize on Amazon, as compared to a dozen look-alike products from unfamiliar competitors.
Brand equity is closely linked to brand recognition. A good brand can help you stand out in a crowded market and stick in the consumer’s mind. Clutch surveyed more than 500 people who’d clicked on a paid search advert in the month before the survey and found that 26% of respondents clicked on a paid ad because it mentioned a brand they were familiar with – and on YouTube and Amazon, brand familiarity was the primary reason they clicked on a paid advert.
Learn more - Examples of Brand Equity
A Strong Brand Identity Helps Attract Top-Quality Employees
Having a strong, recognizable brand identity doesn’t just help to attract potential customers. It’s also important for attracting and engaging new employees because employees today look for companies with a clear purpose, mission, and values that align with their own.
In 2021, The Predictive Index surveyed almost 2,000 workers within the U.S. from more than 15 industries. They found that 48% of employees have thought about changing careers within the past 12 months. With concerns like burnout, lack of physical and psychological safety in the workplace, and stress levels on the rise, employees are increasingly looking for companies that are a good fit for them – not just in terms of their role but also on a personal level.
Gallup found that 36% of employees say the brand and reputation of a company are “very important” when they’re looking for a new job. Your brand identity can help potential employees form an emotional connection with the company and help them feel like they belong.
How to create Brand Identity
Establishing a strong brand identity requires you to understand who your customers are at a deep level. But if you don’t understand their interests and goals, you won’t be able to build an identity that resonates with them. And they certainly won’t connect with your brand or have an interest in supporting it.
You’ve probably already done market research to learn about your customer demographics. You can go a step further by talking to sales representatives and support agents to learn more about customer pain points. Once you have a solid understanding of who your customers are, you can pinpoint the elements of your brand that have the greatest impact on them, like your brand’s mission and values. And you can begin building your brand’s identity around those elements by establishing guidelines that help you maintain brand consistency.
Let’s imagine you own a small, organic grocery store that sources all of its produce from local farmers. Some of the primary reasons that your customers shop with you are because it makes it easy for them to eat healthily and support local agriculture. With this in mind, you might incorporate fresh vegetables into your logo to highlight the produce you carry. You could also represent customers’ values by adopting the tone of a friendly farmer on social media and sharing facts about things like how much water certain types of produce require.
Creating your brand’s identity might feel like a big task. But unless you’re preparing to launch a completely new business, you won’t have to start from scratch. As an existing brand, you already have many elements of your brand’s identity in place. And that means creating a brand identity is actually much easier than you think because all you have to do is discover and refine it.
Discover Your Brand Identity
Most companies already have some sort of identity, but they’ve never spent the time defining it properly. Here are some steps to follow to discover your brand identity for the first time.
1. Assess Your Current Position
Take some time to understand the current state of your brand identity. Look at the campaigns and marketing materials you’ve produced recently. Identify the common themes across each one in terms of style, tone, and visual design.
You should also look at your competitors in the market, so you can understand what differentiates your company from theirs – not the product features but based on your brand personality. Finally, you should look at your target audience to understand what brand style appeals to them.
2. Invite Internal Stakeholders to Share Their Opinions
If you asked 10 people in your business to describe your brand, you’d likely get 10 different answers. Every department will have different ideas about your brand based on how they experience it in their work. Bring representatives from each team into brand workshops or discussions about your brand identity. Inviting stakeholders from different departments will give you a broader foundation of ideas to work from and may give you insights about the brand that you hadn’t previously thought of.
3. Develop Your Brand Voice & Tone
What you say and how you say it is one way to express your brand identity. Do you want to sound formal or informal? Respectful or playful? Authoritative or like a peer? There are lots of exercises to help you develop your brand voice and answer these questions. Once you’ve identified the key traits of your brand voice, you need to document them. Tone of voice guidelines will help your team understand what your brand sounds like.
It may seem hard to evaluate your current brand. But defining your identity as it is now is the first step toward building a strong identity that sets you apart from your competitors. You need to understand your current position before you can develop it further, improve consistency, and build up brand recognition in the market.
Read More:
