It takes a considerable amount of time and effort to figure out your place in the world, whether it’s about your identity or your professional pursuits. The way customers perceive a particular company, organisation, or product can greatly influence their buying habits and loyalty.

Building a strong brand requires more than just a logo; it takes time and effort to establish a recognizable identity. Simply placing a logo on your website won’t instantly make your brand stand out. Like any digital transformation, developing a brand identity is a process that, when done strategically, can greatly benefit your company and distinguish it from competitors.

By implementing consistent marketing and messaging, you can establish a strong branding identity, which in turn can lead to increased sales and customer loyalty. Knowing the different steps and strategies to build a brand’s identity can assist you in figuring out which approach would be most advantageous for your team.

What is brand identity?

A brand encompasses more than just a logo, name, or slogan. It extends to various elements that shape your company’s image, such as the communication style in your messaging or the attire guidelines for your staff.

Your brand is essentially how the public sees you. It’s all about creating a brand identity that appeals to people’s senses and instantly makes them recognize your brand through visual, auditory, oral, or tactile associations. Having a strong brand identity is essential for staying relevant in the minds of consumers.

Put yourself in the shoes of a customer and imagine being interested in a product that you could find online, like an online school.

There are a lot of different online schools, and you’ve heard of a few. Ultimately, when you go and crunch the numbers, many of the business principles are the same. So how do you make a choice?

You may find that psychologically you are pulled to utilise a school that you have some familiarity with, even if you can’t quite place your finger on exactly where that familiarity is coming from.

The familiar colours of the logo, the familiar wording of the logo, the slogan, and even the font choices on the website will all contribute to your decision to go with one online school over another, and this will likely result in you going with a school that you have some awareness of.

Effective branding holds significant importance for various reasons; however, at its essence, the fundamental rationale behind its significance lies in the fact that branding is as crucial to your business’s financial success as dollars and cents.

Building a strong brand for your company is essential to attract business. By creating a clear and distinctive identity, you establish who you are and make it easier for others in the business community to find you.

Having a strong online brand is crucial in today’s society where digital access is the norm. It can make all the difference between a year of no progress and a year of economic prosperity. To keep your audience engaged and your business thriving, you need to establish a powerful and impactful digital brand.

What Are The Keys to a Strong Brand Identity?

Branding needs to be organic. It needs to be something that makes sense and naturally represents the core of who your company is. The brand needs to match the tone, energy, and mission of your company. It needs to represent who you are. Identity branding needs to help you emerge out of the void and clearly rise above the competition as a clear choice for services in your field.

This is what builds the foundation of creating a brand identity. Taking these factors into consideration, a brand identity needs to be:

Unique

Brand identity needs to stand out from the competition. See what works for your competition, but don’t copy it.

Memorable

Making a brand memorable goes two ways. On one hand, it needs to be simple enough to stick in everyone’s head. On the other hand, it needs to be clever enough that it won’t be easily forgotten.

Think about brands that have simple one-word names with easy-to-recall logos, like Apple and Google.

Flexible

Don’t attempt to make something so complex or rigid that it won’t be able to scale upwards or downwards as needed.The last thing you will want to do is have to change your visual branding as you are making it into the big leagues.

Cohesive

The brand identity needs to function as a comprehensive solution, fitting together as a fully functioning program, rather than being piecemeal.

Finally, the key to making your brand identity strategy work for your growing brand is ensuring it’s easy to apply.

How to build brand identity

Developing a brand identity that aligns with the company and product values is crucial for achieving success. All branding elements must come together harmoniously to convey a unified message. Here are nine strategies to assist you in creating a strong brand identity:

1. Conduct research

Start by examining the market and pinpointing its strengths, opportunities, and weaknesses. Get a clear understanding of your company’s identity and what sets you apart from others. Identify the key elements that make your brand truly unique.

2. Determine business goals

Craft a mission statement that reflects the unique strengths of your brand and the purpose driving your brand forward. Highlight the key elements that set your company apart and explain why your products or services are essential. If your organisation already has a mission, consider how your advertising objectives can align with both the company’s and your client’s requirements.

3. Identify customers

Knowing what customers want and expect can influence how a brand is perceived, ultimately fostering customer loyalty. This could mean dividing your audience into different segments and identifying various subgroups within your customer base. These subgroups could be classified based on factors like age, location, or shopping preferences.

4. Determine personality and message

Establish or reshape the brand’s character by determining whether your brand emphasises enjoyment or addressing consumer needs. The brand’s tone is a distinctive feature that stays constant during the branding journey. Every brand component, from the name to the colour palette and font selection, work together to form a unified identity. 

5. Make a logo

Make or redesign your logo. A logo is a visual trademark or symbol identifying the brand. Similar to a sports team mascot, the logo visually represents the brand and the ideals it embodies.

6. Consider other visual elements

Consider how the additional visual components in your logo, packaging, ads, or website can represent your brand.. This might include considering the following visual aspects:

• Color: Unique and specific brand colours instantly increase product visibility. For example, the colour choice of heather grey may communicate serenity, while a more robust, more vivid hue of green can portray confidence. 
• Shape: The visual appearance of shape identifies some brands as well. For example, a soft drink’s unique square-shaped bottle or a game controller’s linear forms can immediately identify the brand.
• Graphics: Distinct patterns can also help build a memory structure around a specific brand, making identification instantaneous.
• Text: The size and style of your font can communicate a brand’s personality. A wispy font, for instance, might convey a sense of relaxation, while Times New Roman may portray tradition and stability.

7. Create your slogan

Create or improve the brand’s catchphrase. This is basically a memorable statement that represents the brand’s identity. The catchphrase should be short and catchy, making it effortless for customers to remember. Numerous brands employ catch phrases that include alliteration or rhymes to make them more memorable.

8. Decide on your tone

Figure out your brand’s style or tone. Specific word choice, or “diction,” is the vocabulary used in connection to the brand and helps to shape the brand’s tone and attitude. The type of language used to communicate to consumers can dictate the type of customer the brand attracts. The tone of your brand typically connects to its personality. For example, a brand focused on fun might use a more casual tone, while a brand that provides medical devices may prefer to cultivate empathy.

9. Think about your audience’s other senses

Think about how you can engage your customers’ senses in a unique way through your branding, whenever it makes sense. Sensory branding, as it’s also known, has the potential to captivate all five senses of potential customers. Here’s a brief description of how you might incorporate the other three senses into your branding:

• Sound: A brand’s distinct collection of sounds can boost brand recognition. Sometimes, a catchy tune can instantly remind customers of the brand, reinforcing its identity.
• Taste: The flavour or combination of flavours from a brand can be really important. For instance, a restaurant could have a special sauce for a certain dish, while a specific soft drink brand might have 27 unique flavours of their own.
• Touch: For companies that sell products, consider how that product physically feels. You might think about, for example, if the product or packaging feels heavy, smooth or rough to the touch and how that contributes to the branding.
• Scent: Companies that sell products with smells, like food or beauty products, might consider refining specific scents that customers can associate with that brand. 

Tips for building a brand identity

Here are several tips that can help you further develop your brand’s identity:

Continuously monitor your brand

Continuously keep track of data related to your branding. Keeping track of different aspects of your brand performance can help you determine how well these diverse elements positively influence factors like public awareness and customer loyalty. 

Connect your customers to your story

Give your customers a reason to care about the company you work for by sharing stories related to the brand. For example, you might publicly share your brand’s founding story or a story about devising the brand’s new mission. Telling stories about your brand may increase a customer’s empathy toward the company, boosting brand loyalty. 

Research your competitors

Research your primary competitors to determine what distinguishes your brand from theirs. This might involve researching the competitors’ mission statements, values, advertising initiatives and the features of their products or services. 

Allow the business to evolve

Make sure that your branding strategies have enough flexibility that they can change over time. Although it’s important to create a specific and memorable brand identity, it can also be helpful to give the branding room to evolve. This tactic can help the brand adapt to various changes in the market or consumer opinion.

Be accessible to your audience

Make it easy for your audience to discover and connect with your brand. This might involve developing a social media presence, setting up an online store, or creating a website compatible with various operating systems. Being highly accessible to your target audience can make it easier to build public awareness.

Examples of Companies with Good Brand Identity

When it comes to companies that have a good brand identity, the list can quickly become quite long.

Many companies are easily recognizable by a simple square, a word, or a set of letters that represent their brand. These symbols have become so powerful that both competitors and customers can instantly identify the company they belong to.

Here is a look at some of the companies that are industry leaders in putting together a strong brand.

Amazon

Amazon transitioned from a small mobile bookseller to an international wholesale provider of basic goods about a decade ago, and in doing so, began the journey of upgrading its brand.

The wholesale provider recently started shifting to a simple smiling face on an arrow and began placing that icon everywhere — on their boxes, in their commercials, on their trucks and airplanes, and even changed the look of their mobile app so that it was also a little box, just like the ones that would show up on your doorstep.

Apple

Apple is a top-notch brand that excels in brand development. Over the last twenty years, Apple has grown to encompass a wide range of home computers. They have created both hardware and software, including phones, computers, and televisions. Apple’s brand development truly skyrocketed in the early 2000s with the introduction of the iPod through a captivating music player commercial.

Apple revolutionised advertising with their commercial. They didn’t focus on the product details, features, or usage. Instead, they showcased a catchy song and a stylish music video of people dancing with a visible cord in the background.