Thanks to Clare Rowlands, Senior Graphic Designer for writing this article.
Branding is not just a logo. The logo is incredibly important as it is the face of your business, but branding is also about all the supporting graphics, colour palettes, tone of voice and personality that a business uses to differentiate themselves from their competition.
Your brand needs to:
- Say what your business does in a clear way.
- Give the business credibility in its industry.
- Generate an emotive response from potential customers, which then leads to trust, attachment and loyalty.
- Turn potential interest into a purchase.
Before talking to a design team, you can ask some questions of your business:
- What does the business do or sell, and how is this different from the competition?
- What are the values of the business and the product or service it is selling?
- Do you want people to see BARGAIN, MASS PRODUCED and QUANTITY, or FAMILY OWNED, UNIQUE and QUALITY?
- Who is the target market?
- No matter how much you want your friends to think your business is cool, are they really your target market?
- What message do you want your market to see when they see your business branding?
- In one sentence, how can you describe your business’s most important benefit to the customer in a memorable, emotive way?
- What personality best represents your product?
- Sophisticated and mature, or cheeky and youthful?
- Describe this personality as though it were a real person, and remember this isn’t YOU, this is the PRODUCT, so even though you might be the class clown, your IT business may be the class nerd.
You can use the answers to these questions to help your design team understand the direction your business is heading in, and develop a brand that is relevant and exciting.
