All you need to know for a perfect corporate brand identity
Is your business idea good but struggling to take off? Or do you feel you don’t have a clear strategy for growing your business? Does the competition outperform you?
Your winning move for the success of your business lies in the company itself. Indeed, in its identity. Find out everything you need to know about your brand identity.
Table of Contents
What Is The Brand? What Is Brand Identity?
The word brand comes from English and means brand.
Beyond the literal definition, in practice, it is the set of visual, language, and emotional characteristics that make an activity recognizable from the competition.
This is what makes the company perceived as a solid and transparent entity, especially externally, in the eyes of the target.
All this translates into brand identity, defining what will be conveyed to the public and what will be seen, read, and heard.
For this reason, the brand identity contributes to the success of the product and, more generally, to the business idea.
How Is A Brand Perceived?
To answer this question, it is necessary to understand the idea created in the public’s mind regarding a particular brand.
The interesting aspect, in this case, is that you can build and address this idea and, in general, the perceptions that people have of your brand.
Work on 3 aspects:
- Brand awareness, i.e., the level of understanding of the brand in the reference sector. In order not to go unnoticed and get lost in the sea of companies that compete on the market and the web, you can rely on advertising campaigns on different channels ;
- The brand reputation is how you propose yourself to the public. Highlight all those elements that make your company – or even your product – unique and distinct from the others. In practice, it translates into transmitting your identity and what you are;
- The brand image is an actual appendix of the brand identity, which translates into how people perceive a brand. The idea is that it is a decisive element to arouse emotions in public and guide the choice of one brand rather than another.
What Advantages Does The Corporate Brand Identity Bring?
For no brand, achieving success is immediate. Nor is it obvious.
Making a difference and emerging in the crowded web world is something you can’t do without if you want to carry on your business.
In this delicate task, brand identity comes to your aid. Your online presence will be amplified, and your offline presence will be enhanced.
Are you wondering if this is possible? Yes, the benefits of brand identity are truly profitable:
- Allows you to develop your digital marketing plan to reach your audience
- Show who you are, in your worth and uniqueness
- Helps you connect directly with people
- Create connection and trust in your audience
- Contributes to building loyalty and word of mouth.
Starting from a solid and coherent brand identity, you can get where you want, even when things around your brand don’t go the way you want them to.
What does it mean? That brand identity also has another invaluable benefit: it is your lifeline in an emergency.
How Does Brand Identity Help You Manage A Business Crisis?
Something went wrong. Something isn’t working right, and it’s putting a strain on your work.
It could be a mistake in providing a service, wrong communication on social networks or emails, a condition external to your company, or perhaps a market crisis.
You are going through a crisis, and you cannot let this storm take away what you have built with effort and commitment.
What holds up in these situations are the foundations. In the case of a brand, Foundations are precisely the brand identity.
Hence, brand identity is the resource to face a crisis, manage it better and come out stronger than before.
Are you not convinced? Yet this is the strategy that many well-known brands implement to avoid being overwhelmed.
What Elements Define The Brand Identity?
Here is your challenge: to show the characteristics of your brand. You will need to help customers visualize what it represents, transforming the concepts and values expressed by your brand into images and words.
Telling everyone about your brand is a delicate process. The market and current trends can influence it, but you must never lose sight of what your company is.
Below is a rundown of all the elements that define your brand identity.
The Naming
We have always been used to giving names to things and what surrounds us. The passage allows us to identify subjects and communicate without creating misunderstandings.
Your company needs a name too. And not just any name. What is required is something simple but memorable, original but clear, immediate but unique.
A name is not reduced to a word; it carries the brand’s identity and its whole world of ideas and values.
Choosing the name is not a trivial operation; you have to face a brand naming path to take into account analysis and research. Besides, of course, creativity.
The correct name for your brand may be closer than you think. How to spot it? Among the brand naming strategies, one of the most effective is the DESC technique, proposed by Béatrice Ferrari of Synesia.
The Logo
Like the name, the logo must be that distinctive visual element that allows the public to recognize you on the fly.
By looking at the logo, people must immediately create a connection with your products, services, and the world that represents your brand.
Your hallmark allows you to detach yourself from your competitor and emerge in the reference sector.
The logo must be in line with the brand identity and developed starting from the study of elements such as:
- Color
- Font
- Forms
It isn’t easy to do without a professional graphic designer for logos, but some techniques and tools allow those who want to get their hands on the ball to create a professional logo.
The Tone Of Voice
Words, expressions, and linguistic registers are taken together; what do they make you think about? No idea?
We’ll help you; it’s about your brand’s tone of voice. The ToV is that unique mix that helps you communicate in a recognizable and personalized way.
When we talk about brands, we resort to association with a person. A specific character, a particular way of expressing itself, a particular attitude . The same happens for the brand, which will need a clear and coherent tone of voice.
Choosing the perfect tone of voice for your brand also gives you the great advantage of attracting attention and being understood by the segment of the audience you are interested in.
What is the most suitable ToV? You must certainly be clear about your identity; in addition to this aspect, the study of the archetypes of Carl Gustav Jung and the guide Texts that speak. The tone of voice in the company texts by Valentina Falcinelli can help you not to make mistakes.
ToV is not a matter of personal taste. This incorrect assumption could mislead you. Among the most common mistakes when defining tone of voice we find:
- The choice of a ToV suitable for everyone
- A ToV dictated by fashions and not by the characteristics of the brand
- A rigid ToV, which does not adapt to the context.
How Do You Define The Brand Identity?
In this phase, you need to focus on two elements: who is your brand and who is your audience. Let’s see how to do it.
Understanding Who You Are
The most complex and most important part. To better focus on your corporate identity, you need to take a step back and look at the whole situation as a whole.
We want to suggest some simple questions; the answers will be the guidelines for the identity of your brand :
- How, when, and why did you start thinking and developing your brand?
- What is the context in which it fits?
- Who is your audience?
- What is your mission?
- What values does your brand represent? And the principles on which your company is founded?
- What are the strengths of your business? And its unique value?
- What image do you want to give to the brand? What is his voice?
As we have already said, aspects of brand identity are very similar to the characteristics of a person. To reorder these characteristics and define the brand identity, you can use the Kapferer prism.
The diagram illustrates the six main aspects of brand identity: physical elements, personality, culture, relationship, reflection, and self-representation.
When you have solved all the questions, all you have to do is translate what you understand about your business into practice.
Define The Buyer Personas
Now you know who you are, but who do you want to interact with? Getting to know your interlocutors is as essential as knowing yourself.
Only in this way will you be sure to communicate the right message in the right way to be effective and reach your audience.
It’s time to define the buyer personas.
Buyer personas are semi-real representations of your ideal customer, based on factual data and assumptions relating to their demographics, behaviors, motivations, and goals.
In other words, you have to create profiles, avatars, which describe who you have or would like to have as an interlocutor.
How To Communicate The Brand Identity?
The brand identity is apparent, coherent and perfectly tailored to your company. Is the work done? As with any point of arrival, a new beginning opens up.
Defining your brand identity and leaving it printed in a drawer won’t help your business. You have to get it out of the walls of your company and present it to the public.
How do you do it? You have several ways to go. We’ve rounded up the ones you can’t help but explore.
Visual Marketing
Before words, our brain perceives, understands, and reasoning for images.
That’s why you need to take care of the visual part of your brand. We have already seen how logos and colors are crucial elements in helping people understand who you are. Now you have to take the next step.
Create the right visual frame for your brand so that your audience recognizes you with a single glance. Repeat it consistently in corporate identity, packaging, web pages, and offline media.
Storytelling
From images to words. Tell me about yourself. People want to get excited and feel part of something, showing your brand’s story.
In this, resorting to corporate storytelling turns out to be the best choice. Storytelling communicates through stories. The trick is to use models and processes related to the narrative story to give the brand’s image, its values , or some products.
If you want to use all the resources and your creativity, combine images and words and rely on visual storytelling to create a narrative through images.
Visual storytelling has the power of the suggestive effect and the immediate impact of the images. You will produce an entire idea that the public can recognize and identify.
The Site
Many entrepreneurs doubt the actual benefit of a website in an increasingly social world.
Does it make sense to build a company website, or is the site just a cost?
Even in the age of social networks, a brand needs a website. For at least 5 excellent reasons:
- It is always accessible
- It’s an online business card
- Conveys and strengthens the brand identity
- Builds authority and makes the brand more robust than the competition
- Allows you to sell online with e-commerce.
The site must be personalized; it must reflect the brand and express its values. But it must also guarantee a good user experience, that is, to make it easier for users to navigate, help them find everything they need, and allow them to communicate directly with you.
The Company’s Social Pages
So that your brand is there for everyone to see and go through social networks, in short, you have to do social branding.
In other words, communicate your brand through social media. There is no need to have company profiles on each platform; choose the ones that best suit your sector, your communication, and those most frequented by your potential customers.
In addition to excellent visibility, social networks also help you in your inbound marketing strategy, allowing you immediate proximity to the public, creating communities, and an incentive to word of mouth.
But be careful; the social pages must be handled with care:
- Create company profiles giving prominence and space to all vital information about the brand
- Periodically update the content to offer practical and valuable content with your social posts
- Interact with users by inviting action and replying to their comments and concerns.
How Much Does It Cost To Create A Coherent Brand Identity?
Whether you are starting with a new business, whether you want to give your business a refresh or a decisive change of direction, you cannot help but work on the corporate identity.
Whatever your need, we have just mapped out a path that helps you touch all the elements you need and manage them in the best possible way.
Does the work seem tiring to you? Of course, you need time and energy to study your brand. It is an operation that requires in-depth attention and reflection.
Are you wondering how to approach this step? Do you want a communication and marketing strategy that allows your brand to speak and behave consistently? And also to grow?
Then, evaluate the investment in your brand that you need and keep in mind that an agency can follow you in creating your brand identity and help you dissolve all your doubts.
When your brand identity is strong, your business becomes strong too. The strategy becomes clear, the company grows, and the competition is no longer your problem. Build it now and never part with it.
Also Read: How To Increase Brand Awareness For A Maximized Market Reach
