Why Brand Identity Matters, Understanding the Importance of Branding for Your Business
Tell me what comes to your mind when you speak of Famous brand like Apple, Louis Vuitton, Tesla any other company. Do things imagine things like engineers working to build a phone or a Car or those machines which are used to assemble these? No right!
That’s because normally, people don’t connect with these things. Instead, they connect with something called ‘brand’.
What is a brand?
Let’s answer the elephant in the room, what is a brand?, A brand is like a distinguishable trait that distinguishes one seller from another seller.
Let me take an illustrative example for you to understand how brand works. Consider, you and your friend are selling oranges, both of you have started a shop named “Fresh oranges”, now as both of your shops are indistinguishable from each other, they might be misunderstood from the same brand or even from the same person. This will not only undermine not only your image in front of the customer but also create communication gap between your customers and you.
# What really comes under Brand?
Now, Brands are not only the visual aspects of a business. If I come back to the example of famous companies, you don’t buy apple products just because of that bitten apple on the back of every I-phone but also for the experience that apple gives you with that like smooth graphics. high performance, ‘Richie Rich’ comment from friends. With this we also cannot ignore the visual aspects of brands like logo, website and all other flashy things are equally important and essentially present. But what is important about a brand is how audience perceives you.
What is Brand Identity?
Now here’s where the concept of brand identity comes in forefront, it influences the perception of the audience as a singular identity. Anything that is attached to that identity is a carrier of that identity for the audience.
We can easily understand how crucial this is through an example of the orange shop again, Let’s say your friend now decides to somehow distinguish his brand with the help of a logo, so he goes to google, searches for ‘logo’ and paste the logo of Apple, what do you expect? well, apart from the usual suite filed against him. It is also the negative message that it sends of people as being ‘Rip-off of Apple’
For starters, we can understand brand identity in 2 parts, first is the visual identity and second one is the front-end experience.
Visual Identity
This includes what the common people know about brand like
1. Logo — This represents the company image
2. Color Pallet- The set of colors that must be defined and is used in almost all your brand designs
3. Mascot — A Character that represents your company’s core values
There may be more or less things in this list but the core of visual identity can be summed in these three categories only.
Customer experience
Even if you appeal visually great to people, your service does the final talk. So, you have to also influence on every interaction you do with your audience, you can create the best of customers that will not only buy from you but also buy from you consistently. The thing is not to create a mesmerizing experience but to create a similar experience consistently.
How to improve your Brand Identity?
Now that you know that Brand Identity is one of the most important things in business that one has to work on, a natural question arises that ‘how’.
Brand
To improve one’s Identity, one must be able to work on the customer experience first. We have to first make the customer happy from the service they get and now how we look while providing that service. To improve your customer service, you can follow the following steps
1. Identify the pain points of your service
2. Ask the following questions
1. What makes my customers reject my service?
2. What can I do about it?
3. What proves specifically proves the point that my customers are facing this problem?
4. How easy is it to provide the solution for this problem?
3. Now take action and remember to take the action slow and steady
Now, let’s work on Visuals, shall we?
1. First, let us talk about logo, logo will always be on the forefront of all your customer interactions, make sure that it represents the correct emotion and the correct values that you want to convey to the audience.
2. Most companies use Mascots as a medium to interact with the audience during live interactions, so if you are in industries where you need to regularly interact with your audience, then you can definitely consider the use of mascots, make sure they represent values and emotions as that of your audience and your company. Also, focus on make sure that your mascot grabs attention.
3. As far as colour pallets are concerned, use one or two colours of your choice and make sure that they are in contrast
Conclusion
To conclude my point, I can tell you that whatever you want to do with your brand has to be in congruence with your front-end experience with your customer
With this, this is Sagnik Dey signing off.
