As a business owner, you’ve no doubt spent your time pondering what sets your business apart from your competitors.
You might have documented your thoughts into a business plan, jotted down some ideas into a biography, and commenced building a website of sorts.
But what makes your business unique?
What are the features that help you stand out in a sea of similar businesses and help create memorable experiences with customers?
When it comes time for your business to begin marketing itself, you need to consider what visual elements will help to define your business, how the business will represent itself, and how to speak to customers in the business’s voice.
These visual and personality elements of your business are called the brand identity.
Brand vs Branding vs Brand Identity
Before we continue, let’s start with some definitions to help differentiate between a brand, branding and brand identity.

Let’s dive into some more details.
What is a brand?
A brand helps people identify a company, product, individual, or activity (like a festival or event) so it’s distinguishable from other businesses. It is a name, symbol, term, design and a combination of other elements that helps to set businesses products and services apart from others.
In his book, The Brand Gap, Marty Neumeier explains that ”a brand is not what you say it is. It is what they say it is.” (“they” are the customers).
What Neumeier is saying is essentially this: your brand is made up of many nuances that you control, such as your content, your imagery, and the way you communicate. But in part, your brand is also made up of things that they–the customers–control, such as referrals and word of mouth marketing, due to how customers experience your brand.
What is branding?
Branding is the process of using the elements that are made up in your brand identity to create unique content that’s memorable and helps build trust with customers by showing your uniqueness and personality.
Using unique brand identity attributes, businesses use branding to mark their goods and services with visual elements to make them distinguishable from other goods and services in the market.
For example, your packaging and marketing materials might use a specific font, colour palette, and the company logo.
Branding also includes the way your brand communicates through its tone of voice (also called brand voice). I.e. how you speak to your customers, what language you use, and what impression you want to leave behind.
For example, if you’re speaking to a teenage audience, you might use slang or colloquialisms, or use a lot of emojis. If you’re speaking to a business audience, you might use business jargon, factual information, and use more mature language.
Using your branding voice helps people experience your brand with personality as if they’re speaking to a real person. Using your brand’s visual elements helps people recognise who they’re interacting with.
What is a brand identity?
Brand identity is the visual and tangible elements of your brand, such as your logo, colours and fonts, the way you communicate through your tone of voice, your marketing materials (flyers, brochures, uniform, booklets), website and more.
Your brand identity assists in establishing a visual connection between your business and the people connected to it: your customers, other businesses, your employees.
All of the things your business outputs use some element of your brand identity.
For example, your marketing materials and website will use your logo, fonts and colour palette. Your blog and written communications will use your branded voice to communicate in a unique way. Your social media will use your company logo as the profile picture to help legitimise your profile so customers know they’re engaging with your product page.

So why is this stuff important?
Why is brand identity important?
Using your brand identity’s visual elements consistently helps to build trust and credibility with your customers.
When customers have a good experience with your brand, they are more likely to foster memorable connections linked with it. Having recognisable visuals–logo, colours, shapes–assists in making that connection much more memorable.
Aside from making your brand visually recognisable, brand identities also allow businesses to create consistency in the way they communicate, market their products and services, and connect with audiences through visual means.

Your brand identity has so much potential to foster memorable connections and positive experiences with people, which in turn help create returning customers who are more likely to refer your products and services to friends.
5 elements of a brand identity
Now that you understand their importance, let’s delve into the 5 main elements that make up your brand identity:
1. Logo
Your logo can help customers connect to your business by leaving a lasting impression on them. It has the opportunity to leave a lasting impression on a customer, and your first impression matters.
Logos deliver your marketing message, carry your brand vision, and speak volumes of what you represent just from the image itself – through use of colour, font, style, and clever design.
Creating a recognisable image allows customers to associate your logo with your business, and attach the positive and memorable experiences they've had with your business to that logo. It's a powerful tool for building brand loyalty and returning customers.
Whether it’s a text-based logo, an icon or pictograph, or a combination of both, your logo will help you market your business and make it memorable to customers.
2. Colour palette
Colour communicates meaning subconsciously and consciously: there’s some colours that make you think and feel a certain way knowingly, and some that communicate in a more subtle way.
Due to external forces (such as our educational background, cultural influences, and geographical location), colours will carry different meanings depending on how we’ve experienced them in our lives thus far.
For example, when I think of the colour red, it’s synonymous with anger, fire, bravery, Coca-Cola and Gryffindor. When I think of purple, I think of queer allies, Cadbury chocolate, and Grimace from McDonalds.
Colour can carry a consistent message of your brand’s pledge to customers. It can help foster and support customer’s expectations and perceptions of your brand. And it can help to distinguish your brand from others, or help it blend into an industry that uses similar colour schemes.
Whatever your brand strategy, colours have the ability to convey meaning and carry your brand message. Additionally, colour can increase your brand recognition by 80%, and is typically the component of your brand identity that customers notice first and remember the most.
3. Font
Think of your font choices as the visual representation of what you’re saying. In marketing, it’s not just about what you say, but how you say it, and the right font choices help to achieve deeper meaning behind your words and communicate what you’re saying visually.
Your font choice can affect readability and emotional experience. Funnily enough, no one will really notice if you choose correctly; if you choose incorrectly, they will.
Creating contrast using different fonts in your brand’s written communications–printed materials, website, blogs–can assist in eliciting an emotional experience from your audience. However, too many fonts in use at once can be distracting and have a negative impact on your branding.
Before choosing your font, consider who your audience is and what industry you’re in.
For example, if you’re a wedding planner, you might choose something elegant and decorative, like a handwritten or cursive font. If you are a financial planner, you might choose something corporate and traditional, like serif or sans serif.
Sans serif fonts are largely considered more suitable for digital body content in web design, whilst serif fonts are more suitable for print body or digital header fonts.
When considering using decorative fonts for heading and subheading text, try to ensure it’s legible and avoid using all capitals.
4. Tone of voice
Also known as your brand voice, you can use your brand’s tone of voice to communicate to your customers with a distinct personality across all of your communications–your blog, social media posts, website copy, newsletters, and more.
Through effective use of language, speaking to the audience in their language, and creating engaging stories through content, you can establish a memorable and recognisable personality for the brand.
Content is more than just the photos, videos, gifs and visual content. It also includes words and graphics – such as copy and infographics.
Whether customers know what they want from your business or don't know the first thing about your industry, every word that your business says has the potential to convey your brand message.
For example, do you want to strive for excellent customer service? Your language can aim to support, encourage, and educate customers, helping to guide them through steps by providing helpful links or detailed step-by-step guides. Many businesses use chatbots for this reason.
Or perhaps you want to demonstrate that you’re an expert in your field, but understand that many of your customer base will not understand the jargon of your industry. So you may opt to use plainspoken, confident language that aims to inform and build trust in your expertise with your customers.
When developing your brand’s voice, consider your business as a person and how they might speak to different audience groups in a social setting. How would they interact? What personality traits would they take on and which would they actively avoid? What phrases and stylistic choices might they use on a consistent basis?
Consider who your brand’s audience is and how they speak; consider who your brand is for and write for them.
5. Personality
Your brand personality is simply this: attributing human-like traits to your brand to inform how you talk and behave. Businesses can attribute personality traits to their brand that will help customers grow trust and confidence in your capabilities.
For example, say your business is in the security industry. People want to feel safe and secure when working with a security firm, so you can attribute personality traits that instil a sense of security, trust and safety into customer’s minds. Personality traits such as strength, courage, loyalty and care can carry the message that your brand is right for customers who want to feel that sense of security.
Developing the right personality traits for your brand helps you resonate with the right audience. Customers can relate with the personality traits and build brand loyalty, trust and confidence in your products and services.
Another great example of brand personality traits in action are Wendy’s and Skittles, who both use their Twitter accounts to target a wide audience using humour and relatability.

Brand guidelines
Branding guidelines are a set of rules that are established for how your brand identity is used and represented in different forms of media.
For example, your brand guidelines will set out how your logo is to be used in print media and online, and what are acceptable practices when using it in designs (e.g. file format(s), minimum and maximum sizes, contexts, spacing, and usage permissions e.g where it should and shouldn't appear).
Your brand guidelines will include information about your brand’s history, mission, values, and vision. Using this information, you can give context to how your personality and unique brand identity is formed and what your business stands for.
The guidelines set the rules for the style in which your brand assets are to be used. It will outline the font typefaces, the font sizes for different headings, the specific colours to be used, examples of what this looks like in action, and the specific RGB and CMYK codes for printing usage.
Looking for help with your brand?
Whether you’re looking to develop a brand identity for a new business, rebrand an existing business, or develop some brand guidelines, you’ve come to the right place for advice and guidance.
Our team are nerds at this stuff – we live and breathe creative content and marketing. Whatever your branding needs are, we’re here to help and love collaborating with people to bring their vision to life.
Visit our services page for more information on our offerings, or drop us an email for a free quote.
Comments