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Whatever industry you’re in, and whatever product or service you’re selling, you’re bound to have some competition. What can you do to stand out in a saturated market and how can your branding help you with this? Here are three things you need to know when building your brand strategy, to ensure your business leaves a lasting impression on anyone who comes into contact with it.
1. Know Your Audience
If you’re a femtech business and your target audience is millennial women trying to get pregnant, then your branding should reflect that. That doesn’t mean your logo should be pink with a graphic of a pregnant woman. Quite the opposite in fact. If this is your target customer you need to get to know her as if she was your best friend. If your best friend was trying to get pregnant, would this be the defining part of her life? Hardly. It’s only one part of her whole life journey, and your brand should be able to relate to her whole personality and way of being. What does she do for work? What does she do for fun? What are her goals and values in life? This is part of your market research which should all be incorporated into your brand strategy. If you’re working with a professional brand designer, these factors should influence every element of your brand identity, from the style of the font you use, to the colours you incorporate throughout your website and marketing efforts.
2. Know Your Purpose
You need to remind yourself of why you started your company, and that why should be beyond goals of monetary profit. It should be something that touches the soul of your target audience.
There are more than likely other businesses in your industry that sell the same product or service as you. Despite this, you wanted to start your own company because you had a mission that these other companies didn’t seem to care about. What was that? Maybe it was a charitable factor?
Take the company Toms for example. When the company’s founder was on a volunteer trip there, he witnessed many children running through the streets barefoot and wanted to do something to help. He didn’t just want to design a pretty shoe and make money on it, he wanted to give back to those in need, so he started a one for one model, giving away one pair of shoes to those in need for every one pair bought. Their simple blue and white flag logo references the Argentinian flag. Anytime a customer wears a pair of Toms now, they show their participation in this mission. Toms wasn’t the first business to make espadrilles, but they stood out among their competitors for this unique purpose. They made their customers feel good about buying from them because they knew they were giving back. What mission do you have that your customers will want to help you make happen?
3. Know Your Values
While your purpose is why you do what you do, you also need to know how you will achieve your purpose, that’s where you develop your values. Whatever your values are, these should also be reflected in your brand identity. Take Google for example. Here are some of their values and how these are reflected in their iconic wordmark logo.
- There’s always more information out there: the font they use (Product Sans) is designed to look like fonts seen in schoolbooks, a reminder that there’s always more to learn.
- Fast is better than slow: its clean, simple, geometric form keeps it modern and fresh, the way excellent technology should be
- You can be serious without a suit: this value is evident in the colour palette they use on their logo. While the blue, red and yellow are primary colours, they intentionally used green (a secondary colour) on the ‘l’ to show that they don’t always follow the rules. The tilted ‘e’ on the end is another nod to their sometimes unconventional ideas.
Before I start designing anything for your business, these are just some of the factors I will quiz you about so that I can develop a brand strategy and incorporate that into your visual identity. If you’d like to hear more about my process, or want to chat about your own brand identity, get in touch!
