What is Brand Identity?
Brand identity is a set of visual and verbal elements that a company uses to create a unique identity in the minds of its customers. Increasingly, sound such as signature music, songs and tunes are also used as part of brand identity. It includes the company’s logo, tagline, colors, typography, and overall look and feel. Brand identity is important because it helps customers to remember and recognize a company, and it can also help to create a positive impression of the company.
Why is Brand Identity Important for Startups?
Brand identity is especially important for startups because they are often competing with larger, more established companies. A strong brand identity can help startups to stand out from the competition and to attract customers. Building a brand is not just about investing lots of money in advertisement. It is largely about engaging the audience authentically to serve them and listen to them to finetune the organization’s offering.
How to Create a Strong Brand Identity?
There are a few key things that startups can do to create a strong brand identity:
- Define your brand’s purpose. What is your company’s mission? What do you stand for? What do you want your customers to feel when they interact with your brand? This helps the organization to create a niche or positioning in the crowded market place.
- Create a unique visual identity. Your logo, tagline, colors, and typography should all be unique and memorable. They should also be consistent across all of your marketing materials.
- Develop a strong voice. The way that you communicate with your customers is just as important as the way that you look. Your tone of voice should be consistent with your brand’s purpose and values.
- Be consistent. Your brand identity should be consistent across all of your marketing materials, from your website to your social media to your product packaging.
- Be Patient : Building a brand takes time and one has to work with dedication and focus to ensure the brand attains success.
How to Implement Brand Identity Frugally?
There are a number of ways to implement brand identity frugally. Here are a few tips:
- Use free or low-cost design tools. There are a number of free or low-cost design tools that you can use to create your logo, tagline, and other visual elements.
- Do-it-yourself. If you have the skills, you can do a lot of the work yourself, such as creating your website or designing your marketing materials.
- Find creative ways to save money. There are a number of creative ways to save money on brand identity, such as using stock photography or partnering with other businesses.
- You may also consult professional consultants for graphic works.
You may also consult professional consultants for graphic works.
Great brands are simple to reproduce and they maintain a certain degree of consistency. They can be used in various media, such as print, digital and mobile etc. Complex colors and designs pose a challenge when it has to be reproduced in media which may not be suitable for certain colors as well as intricate designs. When the designs are stretched, things like aspect ratio and details should be consistent. Founders must learn the basics of design as well as branding.
Ensure your brand (Logo, identity, and slogans) are protected legally:
Make sure you create a very unique brand identity logo , color scheme, pattern and slogan. Check for similar identities and avoid having legal conflict with those existing identities. It is useful to consult a Brand and Copyright consultant for this purpose. After you design a unique brand identity make sure you register it with the Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trademarks. The process may demand professional expertise. It is worth spending money on this, so that your brand identity can be protected and any future despite can be handled.
Brand is also influenced by the Quality of Products and Services:
As much as identify, startups must strive to deliver high quality products and services. Brand eventually will be about the promise made by the company and how it keeps. This is proved by obsessing with customer success, their experience when they engage with a company and their ability to recall this experience.
While graphics, logo and slogan etc help in establishing a brand, it is not sufficient.
Brand is a “Promise” rather than just design or slogans:
Renowned brand experts approach the branding building process as a process of creating a unique position in the minds of their target audiences by promising certain core values, attitude and benefits. And consistently delivering this value by quality process, responsiveness, empathy and integrity. The external identity is merely used to recall those experiences that your target audience has with your offerings. It is wrong to assume that by designing a beautiful logo, you can achieve the required brand loyalty. This is just the beginning. Brand building exercise is a long process which continues forever, by sticking to the promises and fulfilling those promises.
Business Identity design process:
In the modern day business scenario, every business requires an identity to be successful. These identities give mental imagery to potential customers, partners, stakeholders and the public at large. A good identity, usually a LOGO, Name of the Company or a Brand name and Color scheme for the company all these are vital. Just recall the banks that you are familiar with. What comes to your mind immediately? Probably their logo and certain imagery about their physical systems, such as their ATM or their branches comes to one’s mind. A consistent design without compromising it during reproduction and usage is very important.
Good logo design should also take into account the different media that it might be printed and used on, for example, on package materials, visiting cards, letterheads, envelopes, sign boards, websites, mobile apps, as icons etc. The Logos must also be easy to reproduce and should be simple to understand. Complex Logos cannot be reproduced easily and it may lead to creation of distorted logos. Eventually a company’s identity and its core value would also be associated with this imagery. Some of the best corporate stands for certain core values such as innovation, customer services, or reliable product or excellent design. This perception is always presented to the customers through the experience of usage of the product or services of the company, but that experience is mentally represented by the LOGO and corporate identity that we create.
Engage a professional advertisement artist to design a logo. Even if you come up with a LOGO idea, which most entrepreneurs do, engage a professional to refine it and make it look very professional. Obtain the master designs in reproducible forms for different situations and use them always. It is also a good idea to write a rationale for your identity to state what this logo and colors signify, similar to the way we describe our national flags and emblems. The idea is while describing these values, we can also connect it to the core value of the company. This helps the founder to create a unique DNA for this organization.
Branding and Positioning of a product or organization:
The idea of positioning was popularized by the Management duo and Marketing consultants, authors of the book “ Positioning” , Al Ries and Jack Trout. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positioning_(marketing). According to them, Positioning is about “the place a brand occupies in the mind of its target audience”. Human minds are cluttered with lots of information, products, brands and entities. By correctly positioning a product / service / organization, the owners create an unique imagery and value of their offering in the minds of the target audience. This imagery and positioning is a result of a systematic choice of product / service attributes, pricing, experience, niche that it tends to serve and uniquely it stands out in the market. Branding is also called Brand Positioning sometimes. By wrongly positioning a product or service one may not represent any uniqueness of their offering. Therefore it is hard to achieve the recall in the minds of the target audience.
Here are some additional tips for frugally implementing brand identity:
- Use social media to your advantage. Social media is a great way to get your brand in front of potential customers without spending a lot of money. Make sure to create a strong social media presence and to use it to share content that is relevant to your target audience.
- Partner with other businesses. Partnering with other businesses can be a great way to save money on marketing and promotion. For example, you could partner with a local coffee shop to host a launch event or to offer discounts to your customers.
- Get creative with your marketing materials. There are a number of ways to get creative with your marketing materials without spending a lot of money. For example, you could create a video using free video editing software or design a print ad using stock photography.
By following these tips, you can create a strong brand identity for your startup without breaking the bank. When it comes to valuation and success of a business, Brand plays an important role.
A J Balasubramanian is a serial entrepreneur, with over three decades of startup experience in founding companies, mentoring / incubating startups and writes regularly on topics of interest to startups.