When trying to attract new customers, it can be easy to forget that you aren’t just marketing your product or services to them, you’ve got to sell the whole brand.
And when we say brand, we don’t just mean your logo. Of course, the way your company name looks and is presented does make a big difference, but if you want to gain loyal customers that genuinely love what you do, there’s a lot more to it.
A brand is like a person, it can have so many different facets, too many to cover in just one blog post, but here are four very important ones that you should keep in mind.
TONE OF VOICE
The copywriter’s (that’s me) bread and butter. Let’s return to the ‘a brand is like a person’ metaphor. If your brand could talk, how would it sound? Does it use a lot of technical jargon or simple vocabulary? Serious or a joker? Is it friendly? Aggressive? These ‘character traits’ are what you will apply to every piece of marketing copy that comes out of the business.
As social media has grown, there’s been a huge trend in brands pushing their personality to feel more like a figure in the community which customers can interact with outside of just commercial transactions. Here are some examples:
DESIGN
It’s not the only thing that matters but it really matters. The choices you make can change the feelings consumers associate with you. Hard, bold lines and vibrant colours give a brand more energy, while duller colours with softer lines can give it a gentler feeling. If you were running a serene spa, customers would likely be thrown off by bright neon colours.
We asked one of our own nutty bunch to give their two cents…
“The importance of visual identity cannot be dismissed in a world where brands have never had so much visibility and reach. They vie for our attention in a digital battlefield, wielding weapons of colour, typography, shape and form in attempts to win interactions with audiences who have the attention span of a gnat.
– Mark Scammell, Senior Designer, Studio Lead
Personally, I love the frivolity of graphic design, it trends, it changes, it dares, but for the most part, it’s throw-away, here today and gone tomorrow. And that’s ok. It should be a moment in time, it needs to change to be relevant and progressive. Brand design, however, becomes more than just an instance, it becomes a constant.
In my humble opinion, the most successful brands use the armoury of design to simply communicate with sentiment and meaning, connecting to us on an emotional level by showing us a personality and value structure that we like and remember.“
POSITIONING AND TARGETS
How and who you target affects how people view you and what they associate you with. For example, if you are targeting people who have dogs, consumers will think ‘pet friendly’ or ‘animal lovers’. The same can be said for your positioning. Products that have high prices give a brand a ‘premium’ feeling but only if they also position themselves as high quality.
Positioning maps are a useful marketing tool for understanding where your brand sits in relation to your competitors, and the parameters are flexible: Price vs quality, taste vs nutritional value, variety vs uniqueness etc… These will all play into a customer’s perception.
MISSION AND VISION
What do you stand for? Loaded question, I know. But when you think about your friends or colleagues, how much do their opinions, morals or values affect the way you view them? Your promise, your impact, your raison d’etre, if you’ll pardon my French.
All of these things are a part of what makes you who you are, and the same goes for your brand. Having a clear mission and strong values will make your brand more approachable and authentic, which will resonate with your customer base.
So, why is it important?
A strong brand identity leads to more memorability and differentiation from your competitors. When choosing between two unknown products that are the exact same and have a similar price the only thing you have left to go by is the brand.
Working on your brand is crucial to standing out from the crowd, no matter what industry you are in, and even if you are not thinking about it, your brand still has an identity. The difference is you aren’t in control of it. So, why leave it up to anyone else when you can decide exactly how you come across?
This is a lot to consider, but thankfully we’re here to help! Our design and marketing experts can help you from conception to completion, with assistance in all areas of creating a brand identity. Whether you just want to make a couple tweaks to a logo or are starting completely from scratch with your guidelines, we will give you the support you need to assure you and your brand will stand out.
Interested? Click on the services tab to learn more or say hello!
hello@nutshellcreative.co.uk