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.
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.
So, what do you need to know before you move into design? At the very least, you want to answer these three questions:
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.
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.
Write down the values that guide your brand. Is it accessibility? Inclusion?Power? Performance? Equality? What are the overarching values you stand for? A list of 3-5 is good.
Consider your brand personality. Is your ideal customer looking for help and support? Maybe your personality is kind, friendly, and supportive. Is your ideal customer looking for style and inspiration? Maybe your brand personality is fun, trendy, and inspiring.
Think about how you want to make your customer feel, then choose personality traits most likely to bring that out. Again, a list of 3-5 personality traits is enough.
A good designer will cover these 3 questions in their discovery process. If not, you may want to look for another designer. At Wild Idea Co. we help entrepreneurs focus their strategy first, then bring it to life. Strategy makes all the difference.
You don’t want a designer who will simply ask you what colours you want or what logo designs you like. You want to work with one who will interpret your audience, your unique brand qualities, and come up with a brand design that will be uniquely yours.
Give your brand the best chance of success by making time for brand strategy. You can never be too prepared.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates, news and events, directly to you.
