The Average Consumer Sees 5000 marketing messages a day!

Investing in professional brand design is an exciting step for any entrepreneur. A logo and website make it real. While it can be tempting to jump straight into design, you don’t want to skip the invisible first step – brand strategy.

Brand strategy helps you focus your audience, identify your unique advantages, and build a brand that breaks through the clutter. The average consumer sees 5000 marketing messages a day – it’s easy for brands to get lost if they don’t have a unique point of view.

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Your brand is not your logo. It’s not your colour palette either. An easy way to think of a brand is the gut feeling you have about a company. It’s the overall impression informed by everything you see, hear, and touch from the brand. Before you design a logo or website, you need to know what type of overall impression you want to create –and why.

Good brand designers will include a discovery stage in their processes, but not everyone does. Services like Fiverr, Creative Market, and UpWork put a world of affordable design options at your fingertips, but you want to make sure you’re asking the right questions before landing on a logo.  
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So, what do you need to know before you move into design? At the very least, you want to answer these three questions:

1. Who’s your ideal customer?

It can be hard for entrepreneurs to focus their target. No one wants to turn business away, especially if just starting out. Here’s the thing – if you try to design a brand that appeals to everyone, odds are it won’t really appeal to anyone.

You should be designing your brand for the customer you want to attract. Take the time to really understand who this is – their age and gender, lifestyle and interests. Ask yourself –what is this person trying to achieve? Or avoid? The more you know about them,the better positioned you are to help.  

This is the person your brand design should appeal to. While it's tempting to want to ask your friends and family for their opinions, keep in mind that they're probably not your target audience.

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2.What’s your unique advantage?

Write a list of competitors that offer similar products or services in the same market as you. For each of them, write down their strengths and weaknesses.

Think about how your product or service serves your ideal customer better. Why should your ideal customer choose you over others? This is your unique value proposition. If you win on speed of service, for example, speed could be an important quality to reflect in your brand design.