Whenever your target market is oversaturated with all types of products, it’s important for you to find a way to make your own brand stand out. Nowadays, people don’t judge products solely on their qualities, each successful product and brand has its own ethos — an identity and personality that acts as the real attraction to purchase.
In order to stand out in the crowd, companies need to understand the message they want to send to their customers. It’s not enough to simply market a product, you need to market an experience. This might seem strange to someone who is new to the market, but experienced companies know that their brand identity goes beyond just its name.
So how does a company reach that point? The answer is branding. Branding is behind the success story of any good business. If you want to create a brand that is well known and loved, you need to understand the core ideas of branding and apply it to your company. This is easier said than done, and that’s exactly why we have created this guide to help you on your branding creative journey. Let’s get started then!
What Is Branding?
Let’s first understand what branding is. To put it in simple terms, branding is the process of creating your company identity by choosing its name, design, and/or symbols that will later be associated with your brand. It’s so much more than just fonts, colors, typecase, etc. But that all does go into how your brand ultimately presents itself to customers.
If we look at it from a more technical standpoint, branding derives from the word brand. A brand usually refers to a set of attributes that distinguish one company from another. These features include elements such as the company name, logo, or tagline. The process of researching and developing these features is known as branding. So in a sense, these two concepts, brand, and branding can’t exist without one another.
Interestingly enough, branding as a concept has evolved dramatically throughout the years. It’s no surprise considering that the idea of branding has been around since 350 A.D. Our lives and needs are much different now than they were back then! Nowadays branding is not limited to just picking a logo and a catchy tagline, it also includes the development of a brand’s presence across points of sale, email, social media, advertising, experiences, and so much more!
There are so many elements to consider when it comes to branding. However, it’s not about just keeping a list and adding checkmarks to everything you managed to include in a final brand package. Branding, at the heart of it, refers to your company’s identity and the experience you’re trying to convey to your customers. Once you understand the message you’re trying to portray, you’ll figure out which aspects of branding you need to work on for your company.
Benefits of Branding
Now that we have a firm grasp of the concept of branding, let’s dive into why it’s so important for the success of your company. There are a ton of benefits to investing in a strong brand, but we’ve laid out five of our top reasons below.
- Gives Your Business an Identity
In the modern world, a business is nothing without its identity. If you think about your favorite companies, you’ll realize that it’s not only their products that you like but the message behind them as well. There’s a certain identity and personality behind all of the products that you use which helps you connect with them. And when you go to buy something new, you consider what the product and company stands for and how they make you feel. This is their brand identity.
There’s a reason we are often attracted to luxury brand products despite the fact that we can find similar products from other brands for much cheaper. Luxury brands have built their brand identity on the basis of high-quality materials, opulence, and sophistication. They’re not simply selling a product, they’re selling a luxurious experience. And you’ve bought into it.
When building your brand identity, ask yourself what you and your company stand for, why someone would want to buy your products, and how you want customers to feel when using them.
- Creates a Connection With Consumers
Once your business identity is established, consumers have an easier time connecting and relating to it. Branding helps build a stable bridge between your brand and its consumers. Time after time research has shown that people prefer buying products from brands they trust and are familiar with.
People are more likely to invest in products that they have an emotional connection with. Through strong branding, you can potentially push a first-time customer into a recurring brand advocate.
- Helps You Stand Out From the Crowd
Beyond just creating a personality for your business, branding helps customers distinguish you from your competitors. So many people can easily name the brand behind the iconic blue jewelry box. If you’re a new company, you have to focus your efforts on establishing how you’re different from all the other companies – and then conveying it in your branding efforts. Perhaps it’s a signature color, an embellished seal on a mailed envelope or packaging, a modern logo design, or a special calligraphic font that you always use to sign with.
A potential customer should be able to clearly understand why you’re different from your competitors. Is it an emphasis on quality? A luxury experience? Perhaps something very sensorial? Or maybe it’s a minimal design with an emphasis on quality over quantity? Whatever your company stands for, or whatever sets it apart from your competitors, it should be taken into account when developing your branding. The more effort and creativity you put into branding for your business, the easier it will be to communicate this value proposition message with your consumers.
- Supports Marketing
Branding in and of itself is a type of marketing. Creating a clear image for your brand helps advertise it by creating an emotional connection with potential customers. In the future, this well-established identity will aid you in creating online and offline advertising campaigns. You’ll simply need to follow the already established brand guidelines to create your marketing campaign!
Don’t forget that as time goes by, your brand can (and should) evolve. So the brand guidelines you made 15 years ago don’t necessarily need to be shown in an advertising campaign (unless you’re going for a nostalgic angle).
- Builds Brand Awareness
Brand awareness combines all the aforementioned little details into one big concept. It’s a marketing term used to describe the degree of consumer recognition of your brand by its name. This is especially important if you’re planning to produce different products under the same brand umbrella. By investing in building a strong brand, well known and beloved by your customers, then the name of your brand may help push current customers of one of your products to try your other products. If they liked one of your products, then they might like the others!
Keep in mind that these are only some of the benefits of branding. Now that we have established the importance of branding, it’s time to dive into some of the key elements of branding.
Elements of Branding
While the actual branding process varies company by company, there are common elements that you’ll need to keep in mind regardless of your company’s size and industry. Consider these four elements of branding to help get you on the right path:
Mission Statement
A mission statement is a short summary of what your company does and why it exists. This is an important element for any brand, as it’s hard to build a brand around a company without an operational mission. This is not only important for attracting customers, but also for keeping your internal and vendors team motivated and focused. It should be just a few sentences but serves as a gut check to remind you if you’re on the right track with everything from marketing to go-to-market strategies and new product development.
Visual Design Elements
This includes items such as the logo, color palette, fonts, and the visual impression that your brand leaves on its customers. When done well, your consumers should be able to easily recognize your brand purely based on its visual elements. It’s also important to be able to communicate your message correctly through design elements, as people often prefer visuals over typographic copy.
Brand Positioning
Brand positioning is the place that you want to occupy in your customer’s mind. While the mission statement has a great effect on your business from within, the brand positioning helps differentiate you from other companies and maximizes relevancy among your customer base. Ask yourself what are the benefits you want people to think of when asked about your brand? Cheap and flimsy or affordable and chic? This is where positioning comes into play.
Online Presence
Online presence has only become important in recent decades; however, it’s just as important as other elements. You can’t have a successful business without communicating with people online. This can take the form of creating your own website to sell directly to customers online (skipping expensive in-person points of sale in the process) or establishing a strong presence on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
How To Create a Brand
Brand and branding are concepts that can’t really exist without one another. In order to succeed at branding, you need to understand the basics of creating a brand. So what exactly does it take to create a strong brand?
Find Your Target Audience
Who are you trying to sell your products to? Before you can build a brand, you have to understand who you’re trying to sell your products to. This way, as you tackle branding elements like picking the right fonts and colors, you can consider what will resonate best with your target audience.
Establish Your Mission Statement and Brand Values
With the target audience now in mind, it’s time to answer some pivotal questions. Why does your brand exist? What is the goal of its operation? Your mission statement is the foundation for your brand. The more thought and effort you put into codifying your brand values, the better support system you’ll have for your brand as you take on hard business questions.
Determine Visual Design Elements
While the conceptual elements are the foundation for your brand, the visuals are what will help you sell it to potential customers. Your logo, fonts, colors, and website design are only some of the things you’ll need to work on when creating your own brand. The better the tools that you use for it, the better results you’ll get. PicsArt is a great place to start to create your brand visual elements.
Establish Your Brand Identity
This is where it all comes together. Design elements, mission, values, products made for your target audience. Now that you’ve outlined your brand promise, you’re able to establish a unique identity for your company. In the long run, this is what helps customers develop an emotional connection to your products and brand.
And you’re all set! Creating a brand is not as hard as you might’ve imagined. All it takes is some dedicated time and thought to nail it down and the right tools to pull it all together. That’s where PicsArt comes into play!
Make Designs with PicsArt To Create and Empower Your Brand
One of the most important elements of any brand is its visuals. Design is crucial to your brand’s success and it’s important to use the right tools to achieve great results. Whether it comes to creating a logo, a business card, or any other brand visual, we recommend you use PicsArt as your go-to photo and video editor.
PicsArt is the best creative tool to get both inspiration from as well as bring to life your amazing ideas. The best part is that you can edit these designs for your brand both on your computer and on your phone. It’s a complete game-changer when it comes to professional design!
Simply open the PicsArt app on your phone or the Picsart web editor in your browser and:
Create an Amazing Logo
PicsArt offers a countless number of fonts as well as a huge number of #FreeToEdit photos that you can use for your brand. Whether you want to create a typography-based logo or a visual one, you have a lot of options to choose from here.
Create Promotional Designs
PicsArt is full of amazing editing tools and templates that make the process of designing both easy and entertaining. Experiment with different photo effects, upscale images, add text, and create your own custom stickers on PicsArt. Once you’ve nailed down a design you like, you can save that aesthetic as a Replays to effectively create your own presets for your brand.
Edit Social Media Posts
The key to e-commerce (or really, most commerce) is having an established brand presence on social media. Strong visuals are hands down the easiest way to achieve this. You need good designs to capture the attention of consumers and this is where PicsArt comes to the rescue. The editing tools on PicsArt will allow you to make quick and quality edits without much effort. Not sure where to begin? Check out PicsArt’s Pinterest and Instagram accounts for inspiration!
Now it’s time to go build your brand!
Make Awesome
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