Elevate your brand identity with professional brand design services

To make sure we're clear, let's first cover a couple basics.

What is brand identity?

As we’ve covered elsewhere, your company’s brand is the collective perception of that business and the services or products you offer in the minds of all the people with some awareness of it. Much of that collective perception is out of your control.

One part you can control is your brand identity. This is the way your brand shows up: how it looks, feels, sounds, speaks, and behaves. This includes things like logos, color, typography, messaging and tone of voice, photo selection, animation, and overall vibe.

How does brand identity benefit the business?

Brand identity is one of only a few big levers you have (and control) to affect that collective perception we mentioned. Here are just a couple of ways brand identity benefits a business.

• Buying decisions are over-dependent on visual cues. If something doesn’t immediately feel right to someone, the chances that they’ll stick around long enough to evaluate what’s under the surface drop rapidly.
• The right messaging, written with the fewest perfect words in the right voice, and tied directly to your audience’s goals and obstacles, can form a near immediate attachment with someone looking for your service or product.
• A well-defined and consistently applied brand identity creates familiarity. If your brand identity is familiar to a prospect and your competitor’s is not, that familiarity will often tip the scale.
• All of this also applies inwardly, in the attraction and retention of the right employees. But it’s critical in this case that the brand identity and messaging is genuine. Employees will know if it’s only lip service.

We like to describe these effects as “opening the emotional door (that instant, gut reaction) to rational decision making (the decision to act).”

Is that important?

Yes. Very important.

It was important to Target, who invested heavily in a brand identity that engaged their precise audience. The result was that they survived Walmart’s massive expansion, while K-mart did not. Target has continued to invest in the relationship between its brand identity and its customers (its positioning).

It has been important to Old Spice, who has transformed their brand identity to very effectively move from an old man's brand to that of a much, much younger audience. They redefined their ideal audience, and aligned all their brand efforts accordingly.

It was important to the Seattle Kraken, whose captivating brand identity was teased and revealed over time to build anticipation and buzz. The campaign and final reveal would have fallen flat if they’d skimped on the brand identity.

And on a much, much smaller scale, it’s important in my business. If people aren't engaged strongly enough to get to the decision part, and instead bounce because what we show them (our brand identity) doesn't fit their needs and expectations, we fail.

So yes, it’s important.

And as with most important things (dental work, plumbing, legal issues), it’s worth doing right.

What does doing it right mean in brand identity?

In short, it comes down to a few big ideas:

Clarity (a.k.a. brand strategy)

• Know where you want to take your business (what’s your desired future state?)
• Identify your audience and the problems they face
• Understand your business and how it solves those problems
• Recognize your competition and market landscape, and how your business is unique
• Check your assumptions (best accomplished by an outside party with real research, and not through anecdotes and impressions)

Creativity

• Finding the unique connections between your business offering and your ideal audience (requires the clarity above)
• Concept exploration and refinement
• Creative development

Execution

• Precise execution and build-out around that concept
• Use it well! The right tools wielded by amateurs are often worthless. The right tools left unused in a drawer are always worthless.

Doing this stuff right greatly increases the chance of success in your business. Can a person do this right on their own? I don’t think so.

As a person with decades of experience in brand design, I can absolutely develop and execute on relevant concepts for my business. But I can't do it right without an outside perspective to keep my subjectivity and biases from affecting my decisions or hiding gaps in my understanding.

This is a long way of saying, “Get the right help. It will make a difference.”

If you don’t?

What does doing it wrong get you? Not as much as doing it right.

We’re not here to scold, rant, or judge. Every decision comes with tradeoffs (ask me about my DIY auto repair efforts sometime). But here are some of the things we see companies do that ultimately lead them to us a year later… to do it right the second time.

• DIY tools: Sophisticated tools offered by savvy toolmakers are out there, promising that they help you do this on your own. But they don’t guarantee it’s done right (just like Home Depot can’t guarantee your DIY plumbing doesn’t flood your basement). The wrong concept executed beautifully for the wrong audience won’t get you far.
• Underinvesting (the quick and cheap path): You know the triangle of fast, cheap, good. You can have two, but not three. Budget freelancers and services like 99 designs and Fiver promise fast and cheap. But fast, cheap options don’t take the time to really understand your situation, or to explore connections and concepts fully. They don’t get paid enough to care if it’s good. Meaning, they are not focused on the right idea for the right audience. They’re banking on the fact that their customers can’t tell good from bad as long as it’s cleanly executed.
• Clichés: Using DIY tools and templates, fast and cheap services, or generative AI will almost always lead to the first, easiest idea and no further. In these scenarios, the home builder logo gets a house, the dentist a tooth, the lawyer a scale, and so on). This is great for playing Pictionary, but it’s not great for building a distinct brand identity.
• Subjectivity: Once in a while, someone will come to us saying, “I know what I want, I just need you to make it a real thing.” I understand where this comes from. Brainstorming is fun, and this approach feels like it will save money because it means only paying someone to use the tools. It’s like being your own architect and hiring a builder. There are bound to be problems. The main issue we see here, though, is that they are the only audience they've considered. As we mentioned above, the wrong concept executed beautifully for the wrong audience won’t get you far.