What comes to mind when you hear the term “branding”? Many people link a company’s brand identity to important visual elements like its logo or preferred font. That is undoubtedly a component, but branding extends beyond aesthetics, and a visual identity encompasses more than just a brand’s aesthetic.
Your brand identity is incomplete if you only consider a set of visual traits to be your brand identity. More crucially, your company’s visuals need to accomplish more than just build brand recognition and reputation, which are branding’s primary objectives. Visuals are effective communication that may be used to grab attention, persuade an audience, and build loyalty. Creating a brand identity is going beyond the visual identity of the company.
Let’s examine the distinctions between visual identity and brand identity and how they collaborate to help you connect with your audience both inside and outside of your company.
Brand Identity
We must understand branding before fully comprehending a brand identity’s function and qualities. Some company owners view branding as the distinctive visuals representing their company, such as their logo, typefaces, colours, etc. These are components of a brand’s visual tone, but as we’ll talk about later, they make up a relatively minor portion of its overall identity.
A brand is a collection of beliefs, associations, narratives, and relationships that collectively influence a consumer’s decision to select one good or service.
The art of fostering those experiences is, hence, branding.
A strong brand communicates your company’s unique offerings and commitment to consumers by raising awareness and making you more recognisable. All that calls for more than just a pretty logo or catchy tagline!
You must put your brand at the centre of all your communication efforts if you want to engage with your customers or clients, internal team, and stakeholders. Regardless of your media, a brand identity can help direct you.
Calling, for instance, falls under the marketing, sales, and customer service categories. Customers will be more likely to answer the call and not assume it is a scam call if your business establishes a strong brand identification by ensuring all calls are verified calls that are confirmed, authorised, and bear your logo, among other things.
Typical Elements Of A Brand Identity Are:
Objectives, Values, And Mission
- This trio of fundamental concepts supports all other facets of your brand identity, such as your images.
- Your organisation’s mission is a concise statement of what it does, why it does it, who it serves, and how it differs from its rivals.
- Your vision states your hopes and objectives for the industry, audience, and development.
- Your values are the fundamental ideals and tenets that guide your actions.
Brand Personality
The marketing axiom “know, like, and trust” summarises your objective for attracting clients. It mimics the well-known awareness-consideration-decision pattern that characterises the marketing funnel but emphasises your company regarding your client connections.
What would happen, in other words, if your company became a person? Your personality would make it easier for your pals to get to know, like, trust and believe you. The concept of a brand personality is just that.
How do you communicate with your team, stakeholders, clients, and customers? What are your speaking and etiquette habits? What drives you forward each day?
All of those traits contribute to the personality of your brand. A coherent explanation of your relationship with your audience is part of a strong brand identity. There is no correct or incorrect response. Your company’s brand identity is distinctive and serves as the basis for your visual and verbal presence.
Verbal Accent
The vocal tone of your brand is a crucial aspect of your personality. How do you address your listeners? What dialect do you employ?
Communication is crucial; even small linguistic differences can radically change how someone perceives your brand. Your communication is impacted by how you organise your sentences, the words you use, and the tone you use. You can make your written content appealing and consistent across mediums by establishing your vocal tone. Nevertheless, you can modify your linguistic tone for your target audiences. As long as your language is consistent and appropriate for your audience, changing your tone is OK.
Visual Aspect
The fundamental qualities of your visuals are often included in a brand identity kit’s visual tone as follows:
- Company colours
- Font choices and brand typefaces
- Your logo, its variations, and the best ways to present it
- Stylistic components, including borders, gradients, and filters.
These are mainly technical details, though. Even while they aid in brand recognition, they don’t make up most of your organisation’s communication efforts. Think of them as the foundation of your visual identity.
A visual identity is a comprehensive scheme of hues, typefaces, photographic choices, graphic elements, and layouts that mould the total visual experience of your audience. While these traits may appear to be only ornamental branding features, they are important to communication.
In Summary, while Brand Identity deals with the essence and perception of a company, visual identity is just the part and outward expression of that essence. They work together to create a Brand, that is appealing visually but also resonates with the emotions, values, visions, of the targeted audience.
A strong brand identity provides the foundation upon which a compelling visual identity is built, ensuring that customers not only recognise a brand but connect with it on deep level.