6 Essential Elements to Create a Solid Brand Identity
This is not only an “academic article” or a generic corporate blog entry, its, in fact, a human blog guide to keeping you in the fruitful path of perfection around branding construction. That born as our personal experience creating some brand projects through the past years, we deliver to you this 6 key starting point to reflect on your brand or company ideal process within the field of identity. Hope you enjoy it.
1- FIND & FOCUS ON YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Know their passions, goals, decision-making processes — basically whatever is needed to speak directly to them in the most fluent way. The same goes for building your brand identity. Once you know who you are speaking to, you can adjust your brand-building tactics to reflect that audience’s needs and make a larger impact. Businesses and personal brands need to achieve the same effort when seeking their brand identity goals.
Always follow a guide chart for these key questions:
What are their goals?
What are their frustrations?
What prompts their decisions to act?
How do they interact with other brands and their services/products?
2- CREATE A UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION
What makes you different? Or as Seth Godin says, what makes you “remarkable?” In simplest terms, the answer is your unique selling position.
Here is where a major problem occurs when attempting to create a strong brand identity. Many people immediately study the businesses or individuals who have the largest market share and popularity and intimidate those top players.
“If it’s working for them, why can’t it work for me?” The answer is because your values are likely different, and what works for one business/person doesn’t work for the other.
3- CONSISTENCY ACROSS EVERY CHANNEL
When creating and building your brand identity, keep your messaging and voice consistent across every channel of communication.
The social media channels are obvious but don’t forget your blogs, guest blogs, website copy, PR efforts, newsletters, email replies, paid advertising copy or conversations with everyone that you come in contact with.
4- NO ME, ME, ME TALK; BE GENUINE AND ADD ENDLESS VALUE
This is one of the most annoying behaviors of many people when they begin building their brand, especially those who hit it big quickly.
When you see communication channels of a business or individual that only exploits what they have accomplished or what they offer, it robs any focus on the reader. These me, me, “me” talks don’t offer value to would-be fans of the brand and dilute any value that the brand intends to deliver.
Smaller businesses are notorious for this because they typically look at their biggest perceived competitor, and mimic what that competitor is doing.
Past accomplishments are an essential element to building a strong brand identity, but it shouldn’t be the focus. When a brand brags about their accomplishments, it’s a sign they are stuck in the past.
The brands that will garner the most brand identity strength are those that offer innovative services/products and communicate with a focus on the future over the past.
5- MAKE PROMISES & STICK TO THEM
Those with the most powerful brand identity constantly make promises and stick to them. From people like Steve Jobs who was out to change the world of personal computing to Starbuck’s position on improving education by offering school to part-time workers, these well-known brands make promises and stick with them.
Learn from these greats. If you can keep a promise, people will associate your brand with authenticity. And authenticity streamlines loyalty, turning customers/clients/patients/readers into fans.
6- TAKE EVOLUTION AS YOUR INNER MANTRA
Worlds change fast, really fast and as a company dedicated to offering a constant seductive commercial proposal, don’t evolve could be the most dangerous business decision. Be really careful.
Some, like Apple and Tesla, evolve due to rapid technology changes. But then again, they make an underlying promise to always adapt and deliver the very best products using the latest in technology. Regardless of how some of the world’s most known brands changed, one thing typically remained — the core values of those brands. These are typically deep-rooted and authentic, and when they shift people lose interest.
