Your brand is a lot more than just your logo
When people think of there brand, they often think of the business logo. The truth is, the brand of a business a whole lot more than just the logo. The brand itself communicates to your customers your business beliefs, it can show that it is a warm friendly inviting business or can show that your business is clean and professional.
Before you can start choosing your colours and fonts you really need to get to know your target audience, are they animal lovers? do they expect fast, no fuss service or would they prefer a face to face personal experience?
This is the first step in creating your brand.
Getting to know your target audience
You might think your audience is too broad, maybe you fix lamps, anyone could need their lamping fixing. But they all have a broken lamp in common. How does someone with a broken lamp feel? why do they need their lamp fixed? is it urgent? These are all questions to start answering and before long you will have created a few character assessments and have a good picture of who your audience is.
Who is your competition?
Once you know your customer its time to look at the competition. How are you going to really stand out? What makes your business different? How will your customers know about that?
Know your business
Your next step is really getting to know your business of which you will be building your brand around. Start asking questions like do I do callouts or work from home? what is your business providing? what do you specialize in? Are you eco-conscious? and if so, do your customers appreciate this aspect? is it important to your brand? What is the experience you are offering when a customer uses your business? Find out your business morals and persona.
You will want to dig deep and find some emotional words that represent your business, ie, glamorous, lush, quiet and silky or maybe warm, lively, chatter, baking aromas and country cottage. then expand on each word, do this for as many as you can and branch out as much as you can.
Once you have this enormous mind map you can start searching for colours and imagery that represent your brand and the emotional triggers you have just elaborated on.
Stick all of this info together to create a vision board for your brand.
Now every decision you make with your logo, fonts layouts will reflect your vision board.
If your business was going to target the high end and provide the most elegant and expensive product, you wouldn’t want to promote and market your business with balloons and bubble font, these types of materials are seen at cheap $2 shops, thrift shops and fairs etc, people would expect a cheaper price walking in. Your brand should be able to tell your customer what to expect.
A graphic designer or marketing expert can help you create your brand’s vision.
Once you have clearly identified what you want your brand to represent, what the emotional response is that you want your customers to experience and the overall feel of your business you can start planning a clever logo, fonts and typefaces, layout options, types of imagery to use & marketing strategies.
