You are what you brand: what to consider when branding

Introduction:

When competitors try to capture their intended audience’s attention, how do you stand out? One way to stand out is through company branding. It’s something digital marketers will consider since having a brand can create a lasting impression on customers when they interact with a company’s product or service and define a company. Now someone could ask this question: How do you create an effective brand? While this blog won’t cover everything about company branding, written below are the basics of what to consider when it comes to branding.

Three things to consider:

Examine how strong your brand image and brand identity is. What makes a brand different from a logo is that a brand will have a strong brand image and strong brand identity. Brand identity is what you visibly see in a brand like color choice and brand image is the associations that customers make with the brand such as the brand’s values. A good start to creating a brand identity is considering color theory and the principles of design.

Companies with a strong brand can lead to more customers willing to spend more money on them. But what happens when a company disregards the power of their brand image and brand identity? It can lead to unsatisfied customers, and even a loss of money. A good example of this is Tropicana. The company rebranded and made major changes.

Consequently, they lost millions of dollars after rebranding because customers associated Tropicana for the straw inserted into the orange, as well as the font. As a result, customers couldn’t recognize their rebranded version and less customers bought their orange juice. This shows that if a company is going to brand or rebrand, brand image and brand identity is impactful and should be considered.

Be consistent with your brand. To follow this, creating a brand guide/brand kit can help. A brand guide will often consist of a color palette, fonts to use, the kind of voice the company wants to portray, a logo to represent the company, explaining their goals and purposes, and customer personas. It can be made through various mediums like a PDF or a website. Slack is a good example of what a brand guide should look like.

Consider DEI. Going off of creating a brand guide, it’s important to make the brand guide accessible. The University of Michigan provides a good outline about accessibility.

Now that the basics have been covered, the question is where to start? There’s a lot of tools that can be used when creating a brand, but written below are some of the tools that are good to start with.

Tools that can help:

• Coolors: A color palette generator that could be used if color palette ideas are needed.
• Colorpick Eyedropper: A Chrome extension that tells the user the hex code of a color. Having the hex codes is helpful for others to be consistent with the visual part of branding.
• Fonts Ninja/WhatFont: A Chrome extension used for identifying fonts that can also help with being on-brand visually.
• Boxy SVG: This is a good alternative if you don’t want to pay for Illustrator or Photoshop. Not only is it free, but it can be useful for creating logos.
• Canva: A personal favorite, Canva can be used to create logos, on-brand slide decks/social media posts, and brand guides.

Best of luck with branding!

Credits: I would like to thank Forge for giving me the opportunity to learn about Digital Marketing. This blog would not be possible without their time and efforts used to teach me.