Ready, Set, Brand
A brand isn’t just a name or a pretty image with fun fonts and favorite colors. A brand has a big responsibility. With all the competition out there it is important to have a strong brand identity that stands out and attracts, engages and retains the target audience.
But what is your target audience and how do you develop your brands identity?
The steps below are a helpful guide to creating a strong brand identity.
Determine your target audience
Develop your brand identity
Deploy your brand
1 - Determine brand audience
Research your competition and their audience to determine how to make your product/service stand out above the rest of the pack. Your target audience will help define your brand story and brand identity.
2 - Develop your brand identity
With your target audience defined you can start to develop your brand. Will your brand promote a product and/or service, company and/or person? What is your mission and values? What is your personality and voice?
Once you have written your brand story you can then explore the visual format for your brand. Will it be a logo, symbol or wordmark and will it be descriptive, emotive or invented? Will that logo or symbol be an emblem, mascot or icon? And will that wordmark be a compound name, initials or an acronym?
Examples of brand styles
Descriptive names (Burger King, Lean Cuisine)
Emotive names (Red Bull)
Invented names (Google)
Origin /Founder names (Ford, Gucci)
Compound names (PayPal, Facebook)
Initials and acronyms (IBM, IKEA)
Once your visual style of your brand is determined, you can start to build out your brands identity through the fonts, colors and imagery.
3 – To tagline or not to tagline?
You don’t have to include a tagline, but a well done tagline adds another layer of insight into your brand and connects with your audience on a more emotional level.
Disneyland
The happiest place on Earth.
BMW
The ultimate driving machine.
Allstate
You’re in good hands.
Kentucky Fried Chicken
“Finger lickin’ good.”
These are a few great examples of taglines that create that an emotional connection and take the guess work out of what the brand is all about.
4 - Deploy your brand
To successfully deploy your brand it will need to be accompanied by a comprehensive set of brand guidelines. These guidelines outline logo placement and versioning, include a list of the main and secondary brand colors, primary and secondary fonts and examples of imagery that align with your brands voice, tone and personality.
These guidelines help to maintain a strong and consistent brand identity across all platforms - print, digital, social and ecommerce merchandise.
5 – Sub-Brands.
Now that your brand has been deployed and business is booming, what’s next?
If you are happy with where you are at, congratulations! But if you would like to build on your brands reputation and expand your reach to a completely different audience, Sub-Branding can help make that happen.
What is a Sub-Brand?
Bud Light is a sub-brand of Budweiser
Wrangler is a sub-brand or Jeep
Other sub-brands, like the one below, although not as obvious is successful because it is born from a strong parent brand.
To ensure the connection between the two brands is clear, sub-brands often use the same font or imagery of the parent brand, and then set themselves apart by introducing new names and or colors.
Whatever visual direction you take on sub-brands, to gain the trust and loyalty of your new target audience, the sub-brand must both accurately represent the new, niche, product or service you are providing and show a clear connection to the parent brand whose reputation you are building on.
The brand process can seem intimidating, complicated and can vary widely depending on your product, service, audience and how deep you dive into taglines, sub-brands. But no matter how big or small the task, we hope this guide makes it easier to get ready, get set, and brand.
Contributed by Nicole Ryan, Nonprofit Accelerator associate, with N Ryan Designs.