Should Brand Identity and Verbal Identity Be Equally Important?
One of the most overlooked elements of brand building is defining and solidifying your brand messaging. Most of our clients share concerns about starting branding because they don't want to commit to just one aspect of their ever-evolving business.
Building an identity that resonates is only one step of a more extensive brand-building process. You don't need to commit to just one aspect of your business to build a successful brand. However, you do need to pay just as much attention to what you say about yourself as you do about how you look in the marketplace.
You don't need a clear and concrete written vision to begin the branding process. When you partner with an experienced brand strategist, you'll work together to translate the most compelling and unforgettable parts of your brand and business into a clear strategy for everything from a blog post to an Instagram caption.
Your Logo Will Fail You
Beyond the shiny veneer of a brilliant visual identity is where customers look for substance and consistency. If you think you only need a logo and everything else will fall into place, and your customers will magically understand all the thought and passion put into your product or service, you're mistaken.
Excellent branding begins outside of a designer's creative mind. It starts with your business's strategic analysis as it relates to the marketplace, your customers, your competitors, your unique advantage, and how all those elements come together to create an unforgettable brand experience.
Your logo will fail you in a visually saturated world if it doesn't echo and remind your audience of a broader vision (read: strategy). Your logo is just a single piece, albeit a vital one, of your larger brand. It shouldn't eclipse the importance of other elements, like brand messaging.
Your Brand Messaging Will Save You
When most companies seek out a marketing, advertising, PR, or social media specialist, they won't get the results they are looking for because they don't have an established brand messaging framework. The specialist may be able to help them clarify their brand messaging, but at the expense of time and money.
In a moment, founders, employees, assistants, and clients should be able to completely and quickly synthesize a brand's entire history, services, purpose, and competitive advantage in just a few sentences or paragraphs.
This will be an impossible task if that message hasn't been clarified from the beginning of each new interaction and reinforced in every subsequent one. When someone asks you what you do or what your company is all about, you should be able to share a 30-second pitch effortlessly and engagingly.
Knowing how you talk about yourself and how your business communicates across multiple platforms is vital. If you can't tell people what you're about, you can't expect them to tell other people what you're about.
So, how do you not fail in the first place?
You’ll start by understanding that having just a logo won’t be enough to resonate with your customer base. Stories are what resonate. Logos reinforce.
Define your brand story. Your brand story should focus on three things: Us, Them, and the Relationship.
For Us: do you know how you talk about yourself?
For Them: do you know how others talk about you?
For the Relationship: Do you want to control that message?
Start with a few basic exercises answering the following questions:
What do we do?
What problem do we solve?
Where can people find us?
Who do we serve?
Why did we start?
As you answer those questions, pay close attention to the story arcs and how they interact with one another. Only once you have key elements of your story put together can you begin to make rules and structures for your brand messaging.
This is where we recommend working with brand strategists to ensure your new messaging framework furthers your broader vision. We also recommend you do core messaging and strategy before you begin working on visuals. Brand messaging shouldn't start by saying, "We need to represent ourselves visually," and then saying, "We should also probably tell people what we do."
Having effective and established brand messaging means that you can always pull core messages and set positioning from one document to publish, write blog posts, send out promotional materials, draft emails, solve customer problems, post to social media, and so much more.
