Did you know
A brand is more than a logo?
This brand includes messaging that clearly defines the mission and purpose of the company.
A brand is commonly thought to be the logo, fonts, and colors associated with an organization or company. While these are crucial parts of a brand, it is important to make sure your brand tells a story that makes your audience feel how you feel about your work or product.
The parts of a brand that you probably know:
- Logo
- Fonts
- Colors
The parts of a brand that you might not know:
- Mission and Values
- Emotional Response
- Tagline and other verbiage
The Process
Step 1 - Discover
Research and discovery are the most important part of the process. What comes out of this step will inform all of your decisions about the brand going forward.
Gather your team and facilitate a discussion focused on how your product or service makes you or your clients feel. Ask yourself, why do you do this work?
Activitites to Facilitate Discussion
Understanding Target Audience
Understanding your client or customer is essential when trying to develop a message to communicate to them. You need to consider how they think, what their lives are like, and how your service or product fits into their lives. Answer these questions to understand your target audience better:
- SWOT | Strengths - Weaknesses - Opportunities - Threats Analysis
- Identify 5-10 types of clients or customers to target
- Have your team write 5 adjectives each that describe your brand.
- Share them all with each other and pick the 5 that resonate the most with everyone in the group.
- Who are we trying to reach?
- What do they currently think?
- What do we want them to think?
- Why should they believe us?
What did you Learn?
You should come away from this process with a clearly defined understanding of your product or service and why it should matter to your potential customers.
Step 2 - Define
Using what you learned, define some attributes of your brand that need to be visible in the logo and color palette.
Translating your Evidence
Using the language and information you gathered from your discussions, translate your brand’s meaning into a personality.
If your brand were a person, what kind of person would they be?
This scale is one of many you can find online that help you understand the your brand’s personality.
Involving a Graphic Designer
This is the part of the process where you should consider involving a graphic designer. They can help distill the information you’ve gathered into a visual concept that tells the story of your brand. If you’re the creative type and want to take on the creative work yourself, understanding what your brand looks like is important.
Step 3 - Design
Once you define your brand and have a clear sense of the visual style you are trying to achieve, it’s time to start sketching out your ideas!
Get Started Sketching
As with anything, start small. Try coming up with 25 to 50 different ideas to play with. It doesn’t have to look pretty yet and there are no bad ideas.
Refine your Sketches
Once you’ve tried out a bunch of shapes, layouts, and icons, pick 2-3 to refine and clean up.
Make sure the options you choose:
- Have the attributes you defined
- Will work at any size; think of mobile and other device sizes
- Conceptually represents your brand
Get the team Back Together
With your 2-3 options, get your team involved to decide which direction fits the personality and attributes you defined early in the process.
Create brand guidelines for your organization that tells everyone how to use your logo, fonts, colors, and messaging.
The final Steps
- Pick 3-5 colors you want to use. — Make sure they fit your personality
- Pick some design elements to use on stationery, business cards, and any other collateral you need
Ready to bring your brand to life? We've got the perfect guide just for your business. (Did we mention it's FREE?!)
A business brand is commonly thought to be the logo, fonts, and colors associated with an organization or company; however, it's so much more! We put together a free guide on creating a business brand worth remembering through our three in-depth steps: discover, define, and design.
Our free branding guide
- Discover
- Define
- Design
This is our FREE resource to you! Our guide will provide mindful ways to implement the growth of your successful business.
• Learn more about what it means to brand your company.
• Challenge yourself to ask the right questions.
• Improve the goals for your target audience.
• Understand the importance of design.
• Keep yourself accountable throughout the process.
Here at The Molo Group, we strive to be a known resource in the digital marketing industry.
Our business model is focused on growing your business by reaching goals and planning ahead for new ones. In a fast-paced business environment, it’s important to be a step ahead of the game. Building your business brand is important, and we want to help. How do we do this? Through our core values of being authentic, collaborative, creative, resourceful, and strategic; not just with our business but by sharing our talents as we work with others. With every discover, define, and design step we approach, this is how we do things here at The Molo Group.
