In recent decades, branding has been to develop a more personal relationship with their customers. Companies are looking for ways to build a direct, authentic connection to the public more than ever before, and it’s created entirely new industries such as influencer marketing. More personable marketing models are highly effective, but they must fit within a cohesive, compelling brand identity.

What is Brand Identity?

Brand identity is something like an evolution of the concept of the brand image. Rather than being purely a matter of reputation, a brand identity speaks to something more fundamental. It’s the complete picture drawn by your activities in the public eye, your marketing efforts, reputation, the stances your company takes on important issues. Brand identity is the culmination of every individual element and feature of the consumer-brand relationship.

Why is Brand Identity so Important?

Customers aren’t just interested in the goods and services that a corporation has to offer them. While corporations have always made public relations statements and had official values, people have traditionally viewed them hollow.

The modern brand’s program is to cut through this apathy and build a real relationship with consumers, and brand identity is the key to succeeding in this regard. By developing a compelling brand identity, your brand can impress the public that you’re not an unfeeling machine and that their relationship with you is not purely transactional.

Instead, they’ll come to see your brand as something that truly reflects their values. Engaging your brand isn’t just something they do because of your products’ quality, which they’ll stop doing if any other brand gains a slight or temporary advantage. When you develop a strong brand identity, the people it resonates with will choose your business because it affirms their values and importance. This is the power of brand identity, and it’s why every major brand is striving to develop its own identity in the modern economy.

How to Develop a Winning Brand Identity

If it were easy to develop a strong brand identity, then every business would have already done it. There’s a great deal that goes into creating a strong brand identity, but anyone can do it. Succeeding with brand identity requires a strong understanding of your consumers, a sound strategy, and strong execution.

• Understand What Your Brand Stands For
  
  

Before your brand can start developing an identity, you have to ask yourself the big question; what exactly does your brand stand for? Do you have an existing reputation for leveraging or modifying, or are you working from a blank slate? The exact vision of what your brand stands for is something that you’ll have to put a great deal of thought into.

While you’ll have to take steps to make operations and marketing comply with your projected brand identity, it’s easiest and most effective to leverage what you’re already doing. For instance, does your business engage in environmentally-friendly practices or utilize any renewable power? If so, then you can incorporate a green, sustainable angle into your brand identity without doing anything you weren’t doing already.

But the most important element of deciding what your brand stands for is your customers. An emphasis on religion and tradition won’t do so well with one public sector, while another industry will love it. Understand your existing customer base or the demographic you want to reach out to and build a set of values, ideas, and causes that resonate with them. Once you do this, you have the foundation of your brand identity in hand. From there, the question is if your brand identity is serious and professional, humorous, or otherwise, what unique voice it speaks in.

• Strategize
  
  

Once you have the values and ideas behind your brand identity worked out, it’s a matter of deciding how you’re going to actualize them. Simply telling people that your brand represents a particular set of values isn’t convincing and will ring hollow. Instead, it would help if you looked at meaningful things that your business can do and implement your brand identity into your marketing efforts.

In the strategizing process, you need to figure out how to package your brand identity to make it convincing. Social media marketing, content marketing, and influencer marketing are effective ways to convey brand identity by showing rather than telling.

•  Design, Design, Design
  
  

The final step in building your brand identity is the execution; well-designed graphics, convincing advertisements, and the other ways you convey your brand identity to customers. It should permeate your advertising, from subtle choices of symbolism and design. Font types and colors suitable for a fun, friendly brand wouldn’t fit your typical legal office or medical practice and vice versa, so this is something to consider.

If you’re interested in finding professional assistance with your brand identity strategizing and design, Propr is what you’re looking for. We specialize in building brands with a soul behind them, and we appreciate each element of modern branding. Our team can help you nail down what your brand stands for, strategize, and effectively deliver your vision to consumers.

Powerful, resonant branding is at the heart of what we do. Our process always starts at the beginning, with your brand strategy. We help our clients define, refine, polish, and develop clear and concise brand strategies that blur the line between business systems and improve culture, recruiting, employee engagement, marketing, advertising, business development, and sales. Contact us and lets get started!