What is branding?
Collectively the aspects below make up the personality of your brand. It takes time and research to figure how ‘who you want to be when you grow up’. Then it takes consistency and planning to align your organization around your brand identity. It’s about making you, look like you, making you recognizable.
Branding is made up of:
- Logo: the anchor for your brand and image.
- Text Visuals: colour palette, and font/type are the easiest aspect about which to be consistent.
- Text Tone: company names, tag line, product names and positioning, and the overall ‘tone of voice’ you use.
- Imagery: the hardest aspect to convey consistently. You want imagery, banners, ads, pull-up, and more that looks like you.
- Values: how you approach the market, and managing the company? What is your mood? Fun and playful. Serious and in-depth. High tech and accessible.
Brand Market Positioning
Core components to figure out your branding start with looking outwards to understand customers and your market space. Positioning is at the level of; your company, (potentially also division), product line or product. Looking at what current approach is a straight-forward way to start.
- How you wish to position yourself relative to alternative solutions in your market space?
- How you interact with customers, service partners, and suppliers, and where do you invest time and resources internally?
- Do you lead with partnership and cooperation, technical sophistication or reliability? All of these things are important but where do you invest most effort/resources.
- What is other aspect are different about your organization (and therefore your offer) compared to competitors?
- If your best / ideal customers, gave you a fantastic complement, what would it be?
Branding Choices
Having considered the external factors and how your currently approach the market, it’s time to ask yourself?
- What aligns with your current capabilities and ambition?
- What’s ‘feels’ appropriate for your positioning choices? Causal versus formal, scientific versus accessible, fun versus serious.
- Do you favour: “Just Do It”, or should it “first time, every time”?
Together these factors underpinning all three items of branding; text, visual and values, wrapping your personality, tone and guiding principles together.
Branding Visual Consistency
Easier to recognize that describe here are two examples of brand consistency grounded in colours. Firstly Artec 3D makes good use of that vibrant energetic orange-red. Gendelity.Org opts for elegant shades of blue with use of filters.
What brand images does your mind evoke? Consider the use of colour, logo, iconography, photos and videos.
Branding Resources 101
- Canva – Getting Started With Visual Style
- What is Brand Image
- Company and Product Positioning, The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace, by Al Ries and Jack Trout from Jane’s bookshelf
- Branding Visual Examples and Psychology
- Company B2C Rebranding Case Study – McDonald’s
- Developing Strong Tone of Voice by Ann Handley
Sample Tech Branding Guides
- Mozilla Brand Guide
- Cisco’s Interactive Brand Guide
- Schneider Electric – Consistency across market segment and products
- From EverNote to EverNote – A Branding Update in text and ↓ in video
For more ideas and inspiration try one of these theme: