When we meet new people, we judge them first by their appearance. They say that we need to know people at heart to truly understand them. The first step in the journey to understand them at heart involves how you perceive their appearance. Similarly, a consumer’s perception of the brand’s visual identity is its first step in converting to a buyer. A brand identity is the visual outward expression of a brand that includes its name, appearance, and how it communicates with people at first sight. You can use brand consultancy services provided by marketing firms to identify crucial areas that can help you develop a strong brand identity. In this article, we’ll explore step-by-step how you can create or revamp your brand identity to drive your target audience towards your products or services.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Create your Brand Identity

A brand identity is a total package of visual representations that express the deeper ends of your brand story to your audience. It is an effective form of first-hand communication with your audience. The below-mentioned steps will assist you in creating your rapport with your consumers.

Step I: Sort Out your Basics

Every brand has a personality! A brand starts to sell certain types of products or services that are exclusive to them and have a unique way of communicating. The first step in establishing your brand identity involves sorting out the basics to build a foundation. These basics are supposed to be exercised at the time of launch. So, before doing anything, be clear about these things: your brand name, mission, values, personality, and a tagline to set the tone. If you are a brand looking to rebrand, ensure to also identify the current challenges of your brand identity, followed by what you are looking to achieve with the new one.

Step II: Evaluate your Competition

Building a brand involves researching the market. While market trends keep changing, something that remains intact is your competition. Using the services of market research management, you can evaluate your competition. The insights from this evaluation can help you recognize the areas where you can deliver better in terms of industry-specific visual recognition, services, or even the place where the audience resonates with your brand. As observed, brands related to particular niches use similar colors; now this allows you to choose different brand colors and stand out.

Step III: Team Huddle: Decide on a Vision

Every person has their own views and expectations. While one cannot accommodate every view, a brand can practice aligning the views of its employees. This discussion with your team will involve asking important questions like:

  • What are the feelings you want customers to feel when they come across our brand?
  • What are the key traits of our brand that we should be recognized for?
  • What type of visuals can help us achieve the answer to the above questions?

This practice can help you achieve two things: one, view alignment across teams, and two, a creative brief that can assist you in crafting your brand identity.

Step IV: Create, Follow, and Design with Brand Brief

After you have recognized and aligned the vision, create a brand brief with all the information regarding the design. This will assist the designer in giving life to everyone’s vision without facing any problems. A few suggestions for the logo, color palette, and typography that you can follow are:

  • Logo: Your brand’s logo is its face, and it influences your identity at the topmost level. A logo design should be able to communicate the essence of your brand to its audience.
  • Color Palette: Research suggests that colors have an impact on human minds and that we often associate colors with different emotions. Therefore, choosing your brand’s color palette is a crucial step in deciding how it will be perceived by your audience. Choose colors that are flexible for the designers to use. To break it down, you can use this technique: 1 main color, 2 primary colors, 3-5 complementary colors, and 2 accent colors.
  • Typography: Choose a type of typography that compliments your logo and is evergreen. Keeping the number of typefaces limited contributes to an intact visual language.

Step V: Set Your Brand Guidelines

Brand guidelines are a set of rules and instructions that can be easily understood and followed. When a brand grows, the number of employees also increases; therefore, the brand guidelines make it easier by making the instructions clear. Ensure that you update it with proper examples relating to different features of your brand’s identity for the best outcomes.

Final Thoughts

Once you have established your brand identity, it becomes more than that. It becomes the path through which your brand gets recognized, recommended, and resonated with. When you have set an identity, your audience wants to see upgrades while maintaining its consistency. Therefore, the above-mentioned steps are a route to creating an identity, but ensuring it upgrades while keeping the basic foundation the same is the trick.