Brand identity design pertains to the process of creating your logo, colors, and even the font on your stationery and website.

Your brand identity permeates the language you use in your social media posts and ads, and how your front liners talk to your customers. It’s what you say your company is, but — more importantly — what the public says you are.

Therefore, it’s essential that you effectively communicate your identity to the public. This will ensure that your target market’s image of you will coincide with the identity you’ve crafted for yourself.

We are a design agency specialising in brand strategy in Dubai and, in this write-up, we’ll give you insights on how to market your brand identity so it will stick.

Make sure you’re clear about your identity.

How can you sell an idea if it is nonexistent? A brand identity is a concept of who you are as a company or a business. Therefore, before marketing your brand identity, ensure you are clear on what it is.

One of the ways you can test if you know who and what you are as a brand is by creating your positioning statement. This will give anyone a clear and concrete idea about who you are as a company.

You can use Geoffrey Moore’s positioning statement framework as a template for making your own. Below is a readily usable positioning blueprint. Just replace the information inside the parentheses.

For (the target market or customers), who need or want (the customer’s need or gap you’re filling), (your brand name) is a (your category) that offers/provides (the solution). Unlike (your competitor or a generalized statement about your competitors), (the brand name) (your unique service proposition or differentiation), which (the benefit or gain).

Example:

For students who need financial support for their college tuition and living expenses, InvestEd is a student financing company that offers student loans. Unlike other alternatives, InvestEd allows students to pay their loans back after graduation, which ensures students can study full-time instead of working part-time while in school.

For investors looking for a vehicle to grow their money while doing good by helping students finish college, InvestEd is a lending company that specializes in lending funds to college students. Unlike other lending companies, InvestEd has a 100% on-time repayment rate and guarantees the return of its lenders’ capital investment, which minimizes the risk of loss for investors.

Notice that the positioning statement varies depending on who the target customer is. This is the beauty of the positioning process. Writing your positioning statement will enable you to distill your brand’s most essential components:

• Your target market;
• Your category;
• Your unique sales proposition or differentiation; and
• The benefit you bring to the table.

After clarifying your identity, you must communicate it to your target market. 

Generally, at this point, you will discuss your brand imagery (logos, colors, fonts, images). However, we’ll move beyond these brand manifestations and go to the heart of conveying your identity by creating an actionable brand awareness strategy that works for your company.

2. Change your company name if necessary.

Your company already has a name. Should you change it, or should you stick to it?

It depends. Changing your company name may be more harmful than beneficial if you’ve long been in business. However, if your company has no brand name recall yet and it’s hard to remember, has a low impact, or is irrelevant, perhaps you may consider changing it.

Is a name change really necessary? It depends, and ultimately, you’ll be the judge of that. 

Just remember that Google used to be called BackRub, Pepsi-Cola used to be Brad’s Drink, and International Business Machines or IBM used to be Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company or CTR. 

While it’s not their names that made them successful (it’s how successfully they’ve marketed them), they must still have contributed to these companies’ success in becoming household names.

Generally speaking, you want a name that rolls off the tongue, is easy to remember, and readily communicates your identity. 

The name InvestEd, for instance, reinforces the company’s identity as an investment vehicle in the education space. It also reflects the company’s value that education is an investment worth making and hints at an image of magnanimity, an enterprise that invests in the future by investing in youth education.

Caveat: You must also be willing to promote your name heavily. Saying Google probably did not come naturally to the company’s audience when the new name was first introduced. It must have become easier to pronounce only when people got accustomed to using it.

3. Make your brand visuals reflect your values or tell your story.

Your company values are not mere buzz words on paper to be taken out for press releases and parked in a vision-mission statement. These are to be lived every day, and reflected in everything your company does.

What brand identity comes to mind when you think of the beauty soap company Dove? 

You probably think of the Dove logo, including the logotype (Dove in its distinctive font) and the logomark (a depiction of a dove underneath the logotype). Sure, you’ll think of white, blue, and gold, the brand’s current colors.

However, Dove’s image goes beyond the colors, the font, and the mark. You probably associate Dove with real beauty — i.e., a brand that encourages people (especially women) to be true to themselves, to accept themselves and, more importantly, to decide that what’s real is beautiful.

Dove’s success in creating its brand identity is due to its consistency in its marketing campaigns, particularly its real beauty campaign. 

The brand also stayed true to its messaging when it retweeted Colbie Caillat’s song, “Try,” which is about women going without makeup and not trying so hard to look put together.

Have you also noticed Dove’s bottles? 

They look far from the standard soap bottles you see on the shelves. The shape also varies widely from one Dove bottle to another. It’s Dove’s way of providing representation to different body shapes and types — another means by which Dove remains true to its core messaging and, thus, its brand identity.

Injecting Identity Into Your Brand Strategy

Customers may recall your logo, colors, and fonts when they think of your company. However, while these branding visuals are part of your corporate identity and will encourage recall, they are not your full identity.

Your identity is the image, the words, and the story that comes to your target market’s mind when they think of you. Therefore, you want your branding visuals (logo, colors, fonts, graphics, product packaging, and all other tangible elements of your brand) to work together consistently to communicate your values, your story and, ultimately, your brand identity.

As a full-service design agency, Yellow offers end-to-end marketing, communication and brand identity design services in Dubai.

Work with us in planning your brand strategy and executing it flawlessly. 

Contact us now.