Building a Strong Brand Identity: Strategies for Differentiating Your Business

Understanding Brand Identity
As part of a comprehensive branding strategy, investing effort into developing a strong brand identity becomes vital in connecting with your audience and cutting through the noise generated by competitors. Your brand identity represents the outward visual expression of your business to the audience. The brand logo, as the most prominent visual element, ideally captures the essence of your brand’s identity. Additionally, colors, typography, and other visual elements contribute to an overall personality that characterizes your brand. Together, these elements shape the audience’s perception and form the basis of a relationship between them and your brand.

Now that we have established the importance of brand identity, let’s consider the three stakeholders in this process: yourself, your audience, and your competitors. Each of these plays a vital role in building your brand identity.

What do you do and what do you represent?
Your value proposition underscores your business. Remember that providing value to your audience goes beyond the product itself; it extends to the experience you offer, along with your business’s purpose/mission, and its values. By visually depicting your value proposition, you can effectively communicate and connect with your audience.

How do you want to be perceived by your target audience?
“What do I want our audience to think about us? How do I want them to feel about us?”

Developing a brand identity involves creating a strong impression and appealing to your audience in a way that resonates with them. Conduct research into your audience’s preferences to gain insights to inform your creative decisions. With an understanding of those preferences, you will then be able to incorporate them into your branding strategy.

Your brand identity serves as a means of communication, conveying information and evoking emotions. Each design choice represents an opportunity to creatively communicate and connect with your audience. This becomes especially important in today’s highly connected digital world.

What is the competition doing?
Familiarizing yourself with your competitors allows you to draw insights to inform your creative decisions.

• Who stands out and what about their brand identity plays strongly to their advantage?

Learn by examining leading competitors and how their brand identities have contributed to their successes. Conversely, examine brands that have faced setbacks or backlash due to their creative choices.

• Are there any commonalities and does this indicates specific trends?

While the aim is to stand out, if competitors seem to be conforming to a particular standard, it might be for good reason and be worth investigating further.

Your brand has a personality which can be uniquely expressed through visual elements
By planning your creative strategy and setting goals for building your brand identity, you can position your brand in a way that is distinctive.  A unique personality stands out, just like a likable personality attracts others. Similarly, a brand with a strong personality of its own can attract and engage with its audience.

Much can be said about the technical elements of design when creating assets that express your brand’s identity. However, these visual elements and their usage should ideally align with the goals of being recognizable, differentiated, and memorable.

Color palette
Colors have the power to evoke emotions, and when used intelligently, can distinctly characterize your brand and form an intrinsic association with it. A single color alone can serve as a differentiation factor. Consider the green of Xbox or the blue of PlayStation, or the color used by major United States banks: Citibank (Blue), First Republic Bank (Green), Wells Fargo (Red and yellow).

Deciding on a main color is essential as it helps define your brand’s overall tone.

• Warm color: can be described as ‘stimulating’, such as red, yellow or pink.
• Cool color: can be described as ‘assuring’, such as green, blue or purple.
• Neutral color: can be described as ‘simple’ or ‘refined’, such as white, black or grey.

You can build upon this by considering your logo, and further expanding the color palette so that it can be applied across various branding materials.

Logo
A logo can convey a lot of meaning, but at a momentary glance, it should be visually comprehensible and represent your brand in a unique way. There are several approaches to logo design based on the brand name.

• Text-based logo: including a wordmark, letterform (brand name as a single letter) or letter mark (brand name as an acronym).
• Image-based logo: including a depiction of something (pictorial mark), a brand mascot, or an abstract symbol (abstract mark).
• Combination logo: incorporating both an image and text (combination mark).

For brands seeking wider awareness, incorporating the brand name as a text component can aid in creating familiarity and association. The addition of colors to your logo, beyond the initial main color, creates visual activity, which can be described as more “exciting”, but also more complicated. The choice should align with the goals you determine in your creative strategy.

Typography
Fonts vary widely, and while there is never a single correct font to use, a carefully selected font can inject personality and emphasis into branding materials. You might select from one of three categories to suit a specific use-case.

• Serif typeface: This uses letterforms with ornamented smaller strokes at their ends, called ‘serifs’.
• Sans-serif typeface: This uses letterforms that omit serifs from the ends of their primary strokes.
• Script typeface: This uses letterforms closely based on handwriting, typically with joined letters and flourishes at the end of strokes.

It’s best to avoid using overly vivid fonts that can be overwhelming. Instead, consider the tone of your messaging and determine whether it’s appropriate to let your brand’s personality shine through.

In the ever-evolving business world, nothing remains static. While It’s crucial to carefully plan and construct your brand identity for the long term, it’s important to acknowledge that the marketing environment is constantly changing. As your business grows and adapts, along with shifts in your target market and, most importantly, your competitors, your brand identity should evolve as well. Be prepared to iterate and innovate your ongoing strategy to ensure that your brand remains fresh and relevant.