Business is transaction and shaping the business by giving it a personality, an idea and an identity is what makes the business a brand. Brand creates the first impression of your business for potential customers and encompasses how it looks and sounds. It is how people identifies your business compared to your competitors and will hopefully make you stand out. Components of a brand can include:
- Name
- Logo
- Tagline
- Tone of voice
- Fonts & typography
- Symbols
- Colours
- Graphical elements
- Experience and more
Branding is the process of creating a brand. It is important as it involves clearly positioning your company or product in the market, devising a brand strategy, possibly creating your name, defining your company’s tone of voice and designing corporate and/or product identity.
Branding is strategic investment and it’s not about designing a logo. The visual identity is a powerful identifier but without thought and positioning its juts a symbol.
The logo is a symbol or a wordmark combined that is the first identifier of your brand. However, a logo is alone is not what your brand is all about. While it is the visual representation for your business it does by itself communicate what you stand for, how you have positioned your product/service, what is your value proposition? Why should consumers/customers buy you? How are your different from the competition etc.
Your brand describes who you are and what you do, therefore it is important your visual identity – your logo, which is utilised for virtually all of your marketing communications, clearly communicates this.
The identity design is not just designing a cute logo. That I am sure can be done by any designer for less than one lakh. An identity design is much more than that.
A high quality branding process involves market research, understanding the category, competition and consumers. Beyond this designing identity is a strategic tool in making sure the brand designed is highly relevant to the audience and at the same time differentiated for the competition. Designing the identity will involve creating of design ideas, graphic symbols, shapes colours, typography etc and making sure all these work in creating a desired personality for the brand. Only if your brand is unique and distinctive it will stand out among the competition.
Branding is a lengthy process which involves talented people from planning, research, design, art and creative teams working in collaboration to get the desired outcome.
When you look approach it like this you will appreciate why a branding exercise costs in lakhs.
Yes, you can develop a brand within a small budget. The key areas to define and articulate will be positioning, value proposition. Then build an idea for the brand through a process of collaborative working. This approach eliminates extensive research, market visits, several rounds of meetings etc. This approach is suitable when most of the answers are available for us from either collective experience or instinctive gut feel. Translate the above understanding into the following:
- - The development of a strapline or mission statement that succinctly conveys your message.
- - Design needs, such as a logo, website, brochure, stationery and packaging
- - Advertising and promotional materials that convey and support the brand promise.