Brand Identity Elements: What Makes Up Your Brand?
Brand Identity Elements
Embark on a journey into the heart of branding, where every element weaves together to form a powerful narrative – delving deep into the essence of brand purpose, values, visual identity, voice, tone, and messaging to unlock the true soul of a brand.
Brand Purpose
Brand purpose goes beyond the idea of selling a product or service and making a profit. As you create your business or work to better define the brand of an existing business, it’s important to understand what your business does and what purpose it serves on a larger scale. What problems is your business solving? What benefits do your customers get from doing business with you? What is the impact your business has on its customers, local community, or even other businesses?
Answering these questions for yourself helps elevate your business from focusing strictly on sales and profits to a realm of true service and value. Sure, your customers may buy your product because it’s attractive, but if you know your product also solves a big problem for your customers, like giving them more free time to spend with their families or helping them establish a sense of safety, and you tell them about it, you will raise the value of your product in their eyes. Brand purpose focuses on what your business can do for others, how it helps, and the impact it has on their lives.
Brand Values
After establishing the purpose of your brand, it helps to know how it will achieve that purpose. Again, this focuses on deeper aspects of your business approach to solving consumer problems. What are the things your brand believes in? What are things your brand stands against? If you run a restaurant, perhaps your brand believes everyone deserves healthy, well-rounded meals. Taking that a step further, your brand may also believe that fresh ingredients are the key to healthy, well-rounded meals and it may also stand against world hunger.
As you establish your brand values, you will realize they quickly become a framework for your brand ethos and a guide to decision-making. Using the previous example, the answers we created will narrow down the food vendors your restaurant uses and may also mean your brand donates a percentage of profits to fight hunger or has a program to bring food to those in need. Brand values are truly at the core of all brands, and they help give your business a structure for its personality, ethics, and actions. Combining brand values with other brand identity elements helps craft a truly unique, successful brand.
Brand Voice and Tone
The voice and tone of your brand are omnipresent and can be found anywhere from your website, to your physical business location, your emails, social media, menus, banners, and even the customer experience. Voice and tone define how your business speaks, the types of words it uses or does not use, and the energy with which your messages are delivered. Think about this in terms of your own interactions with people. When someone talks to you, they use certain language to explain or communicate, and they may communicate in an upbeat, friendly tone, or perhaps they are very professional in their speech. These elements affect the experience your customers have. If you are reaching out to a children’s party business and they answer the phone by saying “Thank you for contacting us. We value you as a customer. Please let us know how we can help you,” you may wonder if you even called the right place. But a greeting like “Hello! Thanks for calling. How can we help you throw a great party?” may get you excited to discuss the party and creates a friendly atmosphere and interaction.
The way your business communicates is very important in delivering your message in the best possible way to lead your customers to choose your business. Brand voice and tone should be intentionally used on all customer-facing interactions from your website, to your answering machine, your email signature, social media posts, ads, slogans, emails and more. It’s also great to bring voice and tone to internal communications, procedures, and other aspects of how your business is run to ensure you and your employees engage with your brand and learn to properly represent it.
Logo and Visual Identity
This is the part of a brand people tend to think of most. This makes sense since consumers interact with this part of businesses so regularly. They may see it while they’re at the store, on TV, browsing the internet, etc. Your logo and visual identity are the capstone of your brand, as they need to work in tandem with every other one of your brand identity elements. A successful brand shapes its visual identity to communicate its values and purpose while recognizing that its visual identity is the first impression consumers have of the business’s voice and tone.
Creating a visual identity requires a deep understanding of your brand, customer needs, and visual language. It must truly tie together all other aspects and be crafted to express key information like the type of experience your customers can expect. A poorly designed brand identity can leave your customers confused or uncertain about whether or not you are the right fit for them. If you need help with your branding, it’s important to seek assistance from someone who can help shape your brand to truly communicate your business personality and bring together all your brand identity elements into an attractive, effective visual brand.
Brand Messaging:
Knowing how your business will deliver its ideas and communicate with consumers is important, but even more important is the actual message you plan to deliver. And yes, it should be a planned message. Brand messaging defines what your business says ahead of time, so you can understand how to best craft a highly communicative set of assets or visuals. When focusing on messaging, decide what is important for your business to share and why. What are the important things your audience needs to know? What messages can you deliver, framed through your purpose and values, shaped by your voice and tone, that will convert visitors to paying customers?
Don’t just say anything to say anything. Everything your brand says, shows, implies or inspires should be intentionally crafted to maintain your brand consistency and create credibility and reliability. Going back to our party business example, their message may be that professionally structured children’s parties can have a strong impact on the well-being and mental health of children. This may translate into posts or blogs describing the benefits of parties and why you should hire a professional company to put them together. Keep in mind that the message should remain strong and easy for your audience to understand.
Target Audience
A strong business idea or an innovative product is a wonderful place to start, but what good are those things if you don’t know or understand those that need or could benefit from them? Your target audience is the group of consumers that your business is catering to. This should be a thoroughly defined audience that will help you direct your messaging and marketing efforts.
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make when defining their audience is selecting “everyone” as their target audience. While businesses can certainly accept customers of all kinds, a more defined audience will ensure their marketing efforts yield the best results.
Using the previous example, our party business may organize parties for individuals and corporations, but their skills, experience, and expertise may be used to their fullest potential by mothers who have multiple children and who place fun and stimulating experiences high on their list of priorities.
So, if your business is new decide who will best benefit from it. If you have an already existing business you can analyze your existing clientele and seek patterns among your best clients or customers. What do they have in common and how can you group them based on who they are or how they interact with your business? Be very specific and detailed. What are they like? How much money do they make? What do they care about and what drives their purchasing behaviors? Things to consider here are demographics like age, gender, income, but it’s also helpful to dive deeper into psychographics which focus more on behaviors. These would be things like their values, their preferences, their beliefs, or even their habits.
Once you have this information, you will be able to direct your brand messaging and marketing efforts to target these specific individuals. Doing this will bring in more of the clients or customers you want, and will help you position yourself as a business they can benefit from.
Bringing it all together
While there are other elements that also make up your brand, the ones we discussed are among the most important as they truly help shape the experience your customers have. Review these elements again and see how they play out within your own brand and business. Work to polish those that could use it, and establish the ones you don’t have.
Bringing together your brand purpose, your brand values, voice and tone, brand messaging, and your brand’s visual identity will help set up the structure for a well-rounded brand your audience can interact with, get to know, trust, and rely on. Create these structures with your target audience in mind and work to deliver clear messaging to avoid confusing your audience or misleading them.
Explore Our Branding Services: Interested in professional guidance to enhance your brand’s visual identity, messaging, and overall brand presence? Discover our range of branding services and see how we can help you establish a strong and memorable brand identity.
Related Posts
Is Investing in a Logo Worth it for a New Business?
Is investing in a logo worth it for new businesses? Is investing in a logo worth it for new businesses?