Branding, you be you…

Ok, lets discuss branding. What it is, why it’s important, and how you can go about creating something that is going to be beneficial to your company.

What is a brand?

Let’s ask the most obvious question to kick this whole thing off. What exactly is a brand? So, this article is not going to be a step by step guide to creating your first brand identity. It’s not going to be a join the dots tutorial on how to create a logo. I’m going to try help you understand what a brand is, and how you should be thinking at a higher level about your brand.

What is your brand? A logo, a set of illustrations, a style, a tone of voice. No. Well, yes but there is so much more to it other than the visual elements. They’re simply the skin of your brand. So, if you think about branding in human terms, your brand is your identity. I have a brand, you have a brand, we all have brands. But it’s not just your face, or your nose ring, or even the clothes you wear. It goes way deeper than that. It’s who you are. It’s your soul. It’s what you value. It’s what you believe in. It’s what makes you you.

So, when you’re creating a brand for your business, it’s so important that you put the ground work into the deeper underlying elements. What does your business believe in, what are your core business values, how do you want people to perceive you. These are the key questions to truly understanding what way your brand will develop. Once you are able figure out your inner-self as a company, only then will you be able to start focusing on the exterior. Your logo, your colors, your illustration style, your tone of voice. All these visual components bubble up from your core. But you can only start focusing on the visual components, once you have a consistent, agreed stance on who you and what you really believe in.

For instance, taking it back to human terms again, imagine you’ve a really crazy, whacky personality, then you may lean towards wearing crazy, whacky clothes, with spiky purple hair. If you’re more traditional, then maybe you’re someone who likes to tuck your stripy shirt into your corduroy jeans, with a big set of keys dangling out of your belt buckle, it’s how you represent yourself visually, it all…