Your brand is the way you communicate value to your customers. It’s much more than just good design; it’s a plethora of tangible and intangible factors that describe the way you communicate who you are to your target market.
Good branding is unique; it’s true to the intention and values of your company. It doesn’t sacrifice its message or image because of trends or new market data. Rather, it values the identity it has created through the driving force of a personal narrative that engages with its target market at every relevant touchpoint.
Truly successful brands are personal brands. By “personal” we don’t mean that unfortunate practice of turning every individual into a living advertisement through social media marketing. Rather, we mean that they understand what it means to communicate personality through brand touchpoints.
Great businesses also know that social media isn’t a place to blare advertisements or push an agent; rather, it’s a place for connection. It’s an opportunity to display the human side of your brand above the commercial side. This is where the text-based portion of your brand has the chance to shine. Developing your brand’s voice allows it to connect in a natural and personable way with it audience.
Brands represent the quality of a good or service; they don’t define it. With that in mind, it’s vital to remember that good design and clever copywriting isn’t an effort to create a facade of quality; rather, it’s doing your best to accurately portray the quality that already exists.
Honest, original, authentic branding is the only kind that will resonate with your target market in the long term. If you want to truly make a connection with your customers or clients in Windsor, you need to make sure that you are effectively communicating the value of your business.
Branding is often limited to logo design — but it’s so much more. A good logo design will be a concise representation of the heartbeat of your brand, but it’s only one element among many. If you survey the business landscape of Windsor, you’ll probably find many different logos — some great and some that are less impressive.
A truly effective logo design will contain many of the key elements of your brand’s style choices — elements like color palette, font choices, and visual elements like shape and form. These same elements will be repeated in many different iterations throughout the visual portion of your brand.
More important than the actual physical design process is the conceptual process. All good design flows out of a place of deep understanding of the ideas, values, and thoughts that your brand should always communicate.
This means that this process begins with asking a lot of questions. It’s a lot like a first date. On a first date, your goal is to get to know someone — and in branding, your goal is to get to know your own company. You need to know it inside and out. Great brand strategy allows you to deeply understand the way your brand interacts with its target market. It always begins with a good, long conversation about your story.
Finally, great brand strategy is narrative-focused. Effective brands weave the (true) story of their brand and put the customer at the center of that story. How does your brand highlight your target market? Do your potential customers feel noticed, understood, and appreciated through your brand choices? Answering these questions allows you to make sure that your brand resonates with the right people. Great brands are not echo chambers of ideals; they are dynamic, people-focused agents of communication.
