What is a brand?
Before we get into how to build a brand, let’s quickly dispel a few common misconceptions. Your brand is not just your logo, colors, and a catchy tagline. Your brand is your reputation. It’s the sum total of everything people experience when they think about or interact with your company and its products or services. Your brand is a messy mashup of ideas, emotions, and gut reactions in your customer’s mind, filtered through their subjective experience in the moment. It’s what people say when they talk about you, what you do, or what you make. It’s a reflection of who you are in the eyes of the world, and as such, it’s not what you say it is; it’s what they say it is.
Your brand is what helps answer some key questions people are asking themselves when considering whether or not to become one of your customers:
- Do I like this product/service?
- How will it make me feel?
- Is this the right fit for me?
- Can I trust this company?
- Will I get value for my money?
You can influence how people perceive your brand through how you look, what you say, and what you do. But these days people are tired of being marketed to, especially Gen Z, so how you go about it matters. It’s more important than ever to be authentic, transparent, and to fulfill any promise you make to your customers.
Brand ingredients
Your brand emerges in the minds of your customers through a few key ways:
Verbal identity: Your verbal identity is who you say you are, what you say you do, and how you talk to your customers. A consistent verbal identity should be reflected in any copy you put out there, such as the about page on your website, a post on social media, or the slogan on your product packaging.
Visual identity: Your visual identity is how you present your company and its products or services visually. This informs any design elements like your logo, colors, fonts, patterns, and illustrations, as well as photography and video content.
Brand promise: A promise is somewhat implicit in the act of selling something to someone. They are paying you and expect something in return. Your brand promise is a commitment you make to your customers, encapsulating what they can consistently expect from your products, services, and overall customer experience.
Your actions: What your company and its representatives do has a big impact on how people perceive your brand. If you want to earn your customers’ trust and loyalty, you need to show up consistently and deliver on your brand promise.
Integrity is the key
Think of someone you consider to have integrity. What is that person like? Are they often reinventing themselves, or do they know who they are? Do they seem to have shifting values that drive unpredictable behavior, or do they act in a manner consistent with a core set of principles? Integrity is essential to building a successful brand, just as it is for building a good reputation.
But there’s another reason why integrity is such a great way to think about how to maintain your brand. Let’s take a look at the definition:
Integrity
- The quality of being honest and having strong principles.
- The state of being whole and undivided.
The first definition speaks to the importance of being authentic, telling the truth, and acting in alignment with your beliefs. But the second one brings another aspect to light. What does it mean to be “whole and undivided” when it comes to your brand? We know that consistency is important, but what about wholeness?
I think great brands have this in common: a sense of cohesion that ties everything together like it was all meant to be. There’s an interplay between the 4 brand ingredients I mentioned earlier. The visual identity complements and supports the verbal identity, and the company’s actions fulfill its brand promise. When everything is in harmony, everything makes sense to the customer. When things are disjointed or incomplete, your customers will get frustrated and look elsewhere.
Looking for help with your brand? Let’s connect.
