6 Tips for Crafting a Brand Identity for Your Start-Up
A great name and an eye-catching logo are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to creating a brand identity for your start-up business.
There are countless reasons why having a strong and consistent brand identity is so important. For starters, it helps to make your business and its product or service offering more memorable. Secondly, it aids in securing a sense of authority for your business and can play a role in creating trust among consumers.
Now that you know why a brand identity is vital, you may be wondering how to go about creating one from scratch. Here are some tips.
Look to your brand strategy
You need to complete and feel passionate about your brand strategy before you can even consider creating your brand identity. This is because your identity should both complement and emphasize your strategy, as well as appeal to your target audience. Upon understanding the core of your business, such as its values and objectives, your identity will naturally start to shape itself. You should also take your brand messaging into consideration (your tagline and business ‘tone’) when putting your identity together.
It can be helpful to collaborate with a branding agency, like luxury branding agency London, Ikon, to bring your strategy and identity to life right from the start.
Make important visual decisions
The most essential aspect of a great brand identity is consistency. Therefore, you will need to make some permanent decisions regarding your company’s ‘visual language’. Start by creating a beautiful logo relevant to your business name and purpose. Next, select a color palette that you can apply across the board from your website and your brochures, all the way through to your social media content imagery. From there, you will need to choose specific fonts and tailor your typography.
Other areas of consideration include the way you shoot your product and event photography, how you design your illustrations and infographics, and how you produce video and motion content.
Know which areas to focus on
The question of the moment is, what goes into creating a stand-out brand identity? There are various areas to extend your focus, including ensuring that your identity is:
- Unique: Is your brand identity different from the identities of your competitors? Does it make a lasting visual impression on everyone who engages with it?
- Adaptable: Will your brand identity still apply in five to ten years from now once your business has grown and transformed with the times?
- Clear: Does your identity emphasize the message and culture of your business? Does it fit in with the products and services that you provide, as well as the industry in which your business operates?
- Cohesive: Do all the elements of your brand identity flow and complement one another? For example, if your chosen font is fun and quirky, are the colors you have selected of a similar style?
Get everyone involved
Even though your team is likely to still be quite small, it can help tremendously to rope each individual into the planning and brainstorming phase of putting your brand identity together. Not only will you have access to everyone’s creativity and logical insights, but you can also use the process as a means to unite your workforce and ensure that you are all working towards a common goal and vision.
Think about your customers
Most business owners spend a lot of their time focusing on ensuring that their brand identity aligns with what their business does, rather than thinking about to whom they are providing these products and services.
Ultimately, if your target customer is unable to relate to your brand identity, you will have a much more difficult time building consumer trust and loyalty. You will also find that you struggle to push target consumers towards conversions.
Therefore, while it is important that your identity is relevant to your industry and your products and services, it also needs to be relevant to your target market, as well as their preferences and expectations.
Put a brand style guide together
Once you have successfully crafted your brand identity using the tips above, you will need to take steps to ensure that it is properly put into practice time and time again. This is where a comprehensive style guide comes in. Essentially, this guide should detail all the decisions that you have made, provide simple guidelines to implementing them, and offer specific examples and use-cases. Best of luck in making your brand stand out both now and in the future.