The importance of creating a relatable brand identity
Your brand is your professional identity; it’s the way you present yourself to your potential client base – and the rest of the world.
Shaping your brand identity
Right off the bat, you want people to get a good sense of your personality and character – essentially, you want your audience to know who you are. So, this begs the question, ‘Does your brand have these two elements?’
Curiosity, engagement and an overall connection – these are important indicators that will heavily dictate the relatability of your brand. Essentially, your brand needs to have a unique personality that induces emotional associations with the brand.
Positioning your brand
There are five questions to answer before creating your positioning statement:
- Who is your target customer?
- What’s your product or service category?
- What’s the greatest benefit of your product or service?
- Do you have proof of that benefit?
- What sets your product/service apart from your competitors?
These questions work in synergy with each other and once you can say ‘yes’ to all of them, you’ll have a much better idea of where you fit in the industry, giving you a foundation on which to craft your positioning statement.
Now that you have a better understanding of your position, the phase of fashioning a powerful identity based on your brand positioning.
Key questions to answer
- What makes your brand distinctive?
- Why do you want to bring this brand to fruition?
The best way to test if your band identity is powerful is to personify it, and ‘introduce’ it to your audience and assess their reactions. Furthermore, you have to define why you want this brand out there. It has to be based on passion – an inherent belief in what you want to achieve.
Once you’re satisfied with the brand’s personality, a voice, tone and style are needed – your brand has to be able to ‘speak’ to the customer and have a tone that is consistent across the spectrum.
In addition, it’s important that it also has a distinctive style. The best way to achieve this is through creating a style guide to which you adhere across all brand channels and platforms.
Does it break through the barrier?
The truth is that people receive promotional material all of the time through digital channels. It’s so common that it’s rendered the majority of us immune to the attempted allure of a click through – and that’s the challenge digital brands face. If it can break through this barrier, you’ve created a formidable brand identity.
Some A/B testing will be needed in order to gauge whether you’re attracting your target audience. A few tweaks may need to be made before you’ve created a successful recipe.
If you feel prospective customers will be able to identify your brand and the core message, values and services/products it offers within a minute, that’s fantastic.
Conclusion
In summary, a brand is the ‘what’ and ‘how’ perception of your company. In a sense, it needs to have its own personality that evokes feeling, connection and has an overall appearance that clearly conveys this ‘character’ to the public. Remember, a brand’s identity will always need to evolve with changes in market stimuli and customer expectations.
