For many reasons, your current brand identity might not be the best representation of your brand. Perhaps you bootstrapped your business and saved money by designing your own logo. Maybe your color palette was chosen because of what you or your business partners personally like. Or maybe your organization discovered a new niche and pivoted without reassessing your visual brand. Whatever the reason, a brand identity with design elements that don’t quite fit will send conflicting messages to your core customers. This can interfere with brand recognition and customer trust. Improper brand development can even impact your revenue! You owe it to your success to examine your corporate design approach in partnership with either your internal teams or with an experienced brand identity agency.
Here are 4 ways to design a more engaging brand identity for your organization.
Before Diving In, Outline Your Goals
Nothing about your corporate brand identity design should be impulsive. You should ask several key questions before breaking out the color wheel or combing through fonts. How do you want audiences to see your organization? Strong and resourceful? Kind and caring? If your brand had a persona, who would it be and why?
Start with what makes your brand special and why you matter to your target audience. Let that information inspire your visual brand, and the result should be something that intuitively conveys these messages. You probably wouldn’t start a company based solely on a brand identity book. But you do need to develop brand guidelines that are inspired by the true essence of your company.
Leverage Customer Insights
Whether you have formal brand tracking in place or just a strong pulse on your core customers, understanding how your brand is perceived is a great foundation for branding or rebranding. Learn as much as you can about your target audience and your customers’ reactions to your brand, and the same of your competitors. A specialized insights agency may be a great partner to help you on this journey.
Include Distinct Visual Languages for Products and Campaigns
Your products and services fall under the umbrella of your brand, but may have their own look and feel that sets them apart. Consider unique product design when developing your brand identity book to ensure it’s a one-stop resource for anyone designing your content. A strong visual language will draw from your established brand identity, but will build upon it to highlight the unique strengths of each of your offerings.
Consider Data Visualization as Part of Your Corporate Identity Design
While many standard brand books consider logo, fonts, and colors, some may stop there. Others go more into depth on iconography, illustration styles, and photography. Still, one element that might go unconsidered is data visualization.
Even if your brand isn’t in finance, insights, or other industries where data visualization might be used on a daily basis, you will still regularly depend on data visualization in your brand’s journey. Consider quarterly reports, shareholder reports, or even that budget meeting where a quality presentation deck design would have come in handy. By outlining how you want data visualizations to appear, you lay the foundation for consistency across months and years of reporting.
Finding the Right Agency to Design Your Brand Identity
Developing your brand identity requires an investment of time and resources. Ideally, though, a quality brand will last you for many years, even decades. So move ahead with an agency you can trust — one that’s known as much for their history of brand identity development as for their level of service. You want not only an end result you can be proud of, but a memorable experience in building the identity that your brand will rely on for years to come.
