01 – Understanding Brand Identity

02 – Developing a Clear Message

03 – Crafting Your Brand Identity

Brands are important to companies because they make it easy for companies to sell more. The true value of your brand will be determined by the number of people who perceive your brand to be relevant.

“Brand: A person’s perception of a product, service, experience, or organisation; the art and science of brand building” — Marty Neumeier

Your potential customers, employees, partners and vendors are going to make judgments about you very quickly. Often, these judgments are made before even one word of text is read — so having an engaging visual brand identity can mean the difference between getting attention, or not.

Your job is to behave in ways that will produce favorable perceptions and clothe yourself in a visual brand identity that helps you do that.

Understand the principles at work — and apply these to your situation.

This way you will be able to plan ahead, find the right designer or agency, know what steps to take and what to expect. A little common sense will go a long way.

Understanding your audience is critical in developing a clear and hard-hitting message. This is non-trivial, so it helps to keep things as simple as you can.
The goal here is to understand who you want to know and what you want them to know about you.

Understanding your audiences is critical in developing a clear and hard-hitting message. This is non-trivial, so it helps to keep things as simple as you can.
The goal here is to understand who you want to know and what you want them to know about you.

Rethink How You Describe Your Business

Start by rethinking how you describe your business. Research your target market and take the time to talk to some of your best customers. Find out how they perceive you and why, then learn what problems they look to you to solve. Bonus: take time to look at how your competition describes themselves.

Develop a list of what you provide for your customers based on the research you just completed. Next, articulate your capabilities and spend time clearly defining your remarkable difference: the things that set you apart from everyone else. Based on what you learn, write an About [your company] statement for use on brochures and other marketing materials.

Write a 60 second elevator pitch (keep it short and to the point). Articulate what you do and explain why what you do is valuable and different.

Developing your message will take time — as it should. You’re forming the foundation of your new identity, so don’t be afraid to put some real thought into it.

Working with creatives can be rather challenging, especially if you are more technically minded. Getting an understanding of how design projects generally operate will help you add more value to the process and produce much better results.

It all starts with a design brief — this will lay out what needs to get delivered, and provide background and context for the development of the brand identity assets by the designer(s).

Design projects, by their nature, are less structured than you may be used to. The creative aspect of ideation, and the various processes your creative team may go through in developing concepts and refining these concepts into workable options, is non-trivial.

That said, your participation in the process and your feedback is critical. Just try to swim in your lane and let your designers swim in theirs. After all, you are paying them to do this work.

• Design Brief Review and finalization
• Design Research
• Concept Development
• Concept Refinement
• Concept Review and Selection
• Design Finalization
• Final Delivery