YOUR BRAND IDENTITY AND WHY IT MATTERS
Your Brand identity is the lifeline of your business. It is a key factor in whether your business will succeed or fail. What is brand identity? It’s simple. Brand identity is your brand’s images, products packaging, slogans, website, marketing campaigns, newsletters, business cards, posters, your sales personnel interactions with your customers, and refrigerator magnets. So, brand identity is pretty much everything.
I like to think about Brand Identity as a multiplicator “B” in the following equation:
Business model x “B” = Revenue
What do you want your “B” to be? How do you begin to build your “B”?
LOGO
Logo is the foundation for your Brand identity. Everything else is built on this foundation. Make it wrong, and the whole “B” structure will soon topple. Make it right, and you can build a One World Trade Center there.
Your logo is the first and the most important visual point of contact between your customer and your product. It is the face of your company and the flagship of your brand. Logo development is a complex and a multi-stage process. Why? Because everything matters in creating your logo: your business model, target audience, specific
products, the competition, your preferences, psychology. And, the logo is not made for your company’s board - it is made for your customers. It is something that they will like.
A potential customer will spend less than a second looking at your logo. In that very short moment, you need to transmit a lot of information about your brand through your logo. If done right, the customer will keep looking and maybe make a purchase. Done wrong - well, you’ve just lost a customer.
HOW TO MAKE YOUR LOGO - THE RIGHT WAY
To create the right logo for your brand identity takes skills, effort, and time. We’re not drawing a picture, we’re creating the foundation for your brand personality. All future revenue will depend on it as much as on the quality of your product. In fact, brand identity matters more than the actual product. Simply put, you can sell a mediocre product with great brand identity a lot better than you can sell a great product with a mediocre brand identity. Your logo is the most important component in the branding “B” part in the formula:
Business model x “B” = Revenue
We use a thorough design process that has been tested over the years and is continuously refined and improved. The process includes several quality control checks and feedback loops to ensure a high quality of the deliverables.
We immerse ourselves in your business. Through interviews, we get to know your business process, your products, your revenue streams, your marketing strategy, and your clients. We pay particular attention to your brand’s mission, values, product advantages, and various characteristics of your customer base. We thoroughly research your competition to identify how to position your product in the most advantageous way to beat your competitors.
All data gathered during the discovery stage is systematically categorized and analyzed. We create a map of associations between the common themes and the images. Brainstorming sessions generate ideas and concepts for the brand identity and the logo design. At the end of the concept development stage, we create a set of concepts based on the collected textual data that is ready for the graphic development.
It begins with pencil and paper sketches. We select 5-6 best ideas, further develop them, and select 3 finalists that are digitized. We then experiment with different lines, shapes, and geometric compositions to find the right logomark images.
The logomark images set the ground for the research of the fonts and a further modification of the letters used in the wordmark as necessary. After the right fonts are found and modified, we experiment with different colors to test different look and feel based on the color theory and psychology.
The three logo options are equipped with carefully selected mock-ups to reflect the product, the business model, and the likely application of the logo on various media, from uniforms to billboards. The goal is to show how the logo will look in real life in various applications.
All images are assembled in a comprehensive presentation deck. During the live presentation, we explain the background - how the concepts were developed, and what their relevance, meaning, and the anticipated effects on the customer behaviors are. The goal of the presentation is to summarize all prior development and open a conversation based on the results of the development. The success of the process depends on the client (i.e. you) as much on the designer (us). This is why it is critical to initiate a thorough discussion. Sometimes, these discussions open up new opportunities and result in the pivoting of the entire business model. Sometimes, they offer new insights into how to develop the brand. In the end, they result in comprehensive feedback and a set of goals for revisions.
The first round of revisions based on the client's feedback can include modifications of the images, further experimenting with the colors and fonts, or designing new images based on the existing themes and the feedback. The revisions are followed by another presentation and a discussion. The second round of revisions repeats the process to fine-tune the logo.
After all revisions are done and accepted, we prepare the final package of the logo files in vector, high-resolution jpg, png, and pdf, including black-on-white and white-on-black options.
After the logo is done, we begin a new journey to expand the brand identity into other assets, such as social media icons and banners, packaging, presentation templates, email templates, posters, postcards, stationery, business cards, car wraps, merchandise, and a website.