So you’re finally ready to start building your brand. There are three basic steps when building your brand personality:
1. Define your brand promise: This is a comprehensive definition of who you are, the services you provide, and the value you bring – the why.
2. Develop the creative platform: This is a personality for the brand promise. A campaign or tagline that grabs attention and makes you interesting.
3. Create consistent brand messaging: This is your opportunity to tell a compelling story, engage your audience and make them fall in love with your brand.
When developing a brand promise, you need to focus on two main things:
1. Your audience
- Connect/appeal to your target market
- Differentiate yourself
2. Your ability to deliver
- Don’t make a promise that you can’t keep or it will work negatively toward your brand in the long run.
Now that you have developed your brand promise and have determined where you need to be on the positioning spectrum, it’s time to develop your tone of voice. To do this, I like to think of a brand as a person, creating themes and “traits” of the brand.
Draw on these themes to build consistency and repetition into your messaging.
Now that you know who you are, begin writing down key words that describe your personality. I like to group them into themes. Once I have 5 or more themes, I begin creating what I call “key brand messages” or value propositions.
When developing your key messages, it’s helpful to go back to your client research. Specifically the answers to those three key questions:
- Why do customers choose your business?
- What do they seek from you that they can’t get elsewhere?
- What attributes do customers count on that they would find the hardest to replace if your business weren’t available to them?
Your next task is to determine how you need to look in order to make your audience feel the way you want them to feel. It’s time to develop a visual identity for your brand. This consists of the graphics and design elements that support your messaging The sexy part of the brand Your visual identity needs to be in alignment with your tone of voice to strengthen your overall brand and truly build the personality. When developing your visual identity make sure to focus on the meaning behind your visuals. colors, shapes, fonts, etc. Focus on your personality and ask the questions:
- How does this make me feel?
- Ask others, how does this make you feel?
- What is your initial reaction when you first see it?
- Are the visuals taking away from the message or strengthening it?
Another way to think of it is if your brand were a person and the visuals it’s clothes, does this look like something your brand would wear? Once your visual identity has been established it’s time to get to work creating new collateral using your updated messaging and visuals. This should include a brand guideline document to ensure consistency.
Are you done building your brand and ready to roll it out to the masses? Check out my next blog post Internal Branding – Part 5: Brand Roll Out.