The Process of Branding can be a daunting task for new and upcoming entrepreneurs. At PrintLab, our design team will consult and work with you to create a brand that truly represents your business and appeals to your audience.
1. Research your target audience and your competitors
Before you start making any decisions about how to create a business brand, you need to understand the current market, i.e., who your potential customers and current competitors are.
There are many ways to do this:
- Google your product or service category and analyze the direct and indirect competitors that come up.
- Check subreddits that relate to your customers and eavesdrop on their conversations and product recommendations.
- Talk to people who are part of your target market and ask them what brands they buy from in your space.
- Look at the relevant social media accounts or pages your target audience follows and are receptive to.
- Go shopping online or offline and get a feel for how your customers would browse and buy products.
- Who your “lowest hanging fruit” customers are—the ones you could most easily sell to.
- Who your top-of-mind competitors are—the brands that are established and known in the market.
- How your customers speak and what they talk about—the interests they have and the language they express them in.
2. Finding your focus and personality
After we have researched who your audience and potential competition is, we will begin by focusing your brand into what will make it unique above the competition.
You can’t establish your brand to be everything to everyone, especially at the start. It’s important to find your focus and let that inform all the other parts of your brand as you build it.
We ask clients to answer some questions and carry out branding exercises to get you thinking about the focus and tone of your brand.
What’s your positioning statement?
A positioning statement is one or two lines that stake your claim in the market. This isn’t necessarily something you put on your website or business card—it’s just to help you answer the right questions about your brand and aids in creating your brand’s tagline.
Your unique value proposition is the one thing you’re competing on. Find it, go in on it, and make it a part of your brand's messaging.
What words would you associate with your brand?
One way to look at how to build your brand is to imagine your brand as a person. What would they be like? What kind of personality would your customers be attracted to?
This will help inform your voice on social media and the tone of all your creative, both visual and written.
A fun and useful exercise for how to create a new brand is pitching three to five adjectives that describe the type of brand that might resonate with your audience. I compiled this list of traits to help you get started.
What metaphors or concepts describe your brand?
Thinking about your brand identity as a metaphor, or personifying it, can help you identify the individual qualities you want it to have.
This can be a vehicle, an animal, a celebrity, a sports team, anything—as long as it has a prominent reputation in your mind that summons the sort of vibe you want your brand to give off.
For example, if you want to establish your brand targeting entrepreneurs, you might choose to use the raccoon as a starting point: they’re scrappy survivors who will do anything to thrive.
If your brand identity was an animal, what animal would it be and why is it like that animal to you?
3. Choose the look of your brand (colors and font)
Once you’ve got a name down, you’ll need to think about your brand design—how you’ll visually represent your brand—namely your colors and typography. We will help you first decide on colours as this will be the primary communicator of emotion to your audience. Once this is done, we then move to the logo design process.
Choosing your colors
Colours don’t just define the look of your brand, they also convey the feeling you want to communicate and help you make it consistent across everything you do. You’ll want to choose colors that differentiate you from direct competitors to avoid confusing your potential customers.
Color psychology isn’t an exact science, but it does help to inform the choices you make, especially when it comes to the colour chosen for your brand logo.
Choosing your fonts
At this point we will also help choose what font will best suit your brand. Is your brand a streetwear clothing company? Then your may be suited to a heavy and bold sans serif font. If you're brand is to represent an upper class restaurant in London, then you will be better to go for a more traditional font such as Times New Roman or similar.
4. Design your brand logo
A brand logo design is probably one of the first things that come to mind when you think about building a new brand. And for good reason: it’s the face of your company, after all, and could potentially be everywhere your brand is.
Ideally, we want to create your brand with a logo that’s unique, identifiable, and scalable to work at all sizes (something often overlooked).
We consider all the places where your brand’s logo needs to exist:
- Website
- Social media profile picture
- Product Packaging
- Video ads
- Youtube Channel Banner
- Favicon (the tiny icon that identifies your open browser tabs)
If you have a text logo as your Instagram avatar, for example, it’ll be almost impossible to read. To make your life easier, create a square version of your brand logo with an icon or symbol element (called a logomark) that remains recognizable even at smaller sizes.
Invest in a logo that can appear anywhere around the web and in physical print.
As a new small business experimenting with the best way to build a brand and logo, you don't need to choose an icon over a wordmark when you feel they’re both essential to represent your brand. A combination logo lets you get the best of both. This makes it easier to satisfy the condition of creating a scalable logo while still putting your brand name front and center.
If you want us to help you kick-start your brand, get in touch today and would be happy to begin consulting with you today!
