Branding fundamentals for beginners

What is branding?

So let’s start with the question, "What is branding?" A brand is more than just a logo, a brand identity design, or even just a product/service. A brand, believe it or not, has little to do with us and more with them, the customers. A brand is the result of a customer’s gut feeling, whatever comes to their mind when they think or hear of your product/service/name. The customer is the one who creates the brand. So in a way, when we create a brand, we are creating millions of brands because every customer has their own definition of our brand.

A brand is the result of all the work that we as designers and brand strategists put into the research. What is the reputation we’re creating with the level of quality of the products/services we’re releasing to the public? Everything from the company culture to the product design can affect a company’s reputation—and that’s what customers create in their minds through experience. What a company can do is influence the audience's perception of their brand through the use of verbal messaging, tone, visuals, etc.

Why is branding so important?

Branding is a vital part of a business, and when it’s built successfully and effectively influencing customers, it will drive up sales. Good branding will create a memorable impression on consumers and will create an expectation from a company/service. One wrong step, and branding can do the opposite and decrease the value of a company.

• Branding is important because more people will recognize your business, not only because of how it looks but also because of the values and company culture.
• Branding can help you build trust with your customers through perception. A brand reputation is built through the branding process. And this is the brand perception people generally have of a company/service.
• Branding improves advertising campaigns by creating a memorable impression on consumers and keeping them engaged with a product/service.
• Branding helps to create a great company culture, making employees feel as if they’re part of a team and that their place of work is more than just a job.

Before actually taking the step of branding, there are a whole set of steps that you need to follow. It’s essential to follow these steps to build a successful brand, otherwise you'll be creating a brand for just about anyone out there. It’s important to have a specific market.

Brand strategy

To design a brand identity, we need to touch on brand strategy and brand expression, which are interdependent. What is a brand strategy? A brand strategy is what makes a company different from its competitors: everything from brand messaging to visuals and other components that can resonate with customers. A brand strategy is far more than just a logo and a color palette. In fact, it’s mostly intangible.

Why do you need a brand strategy? Because it’s a roadmap to help you get to the end goal. Simply using a logo on a website without research won’t do much—looks can only get you so far. The brand strategy is a plan focused on how the brand will engage with their consumers and influence their buying decisions.

A brand strategy will help companies understand their consumers, competitors, and opportunities. It will define how they communicate through storytelling and messaging with their audience. Let’s take a look at the two groups that contain multiple tools to design a successful brand: brand direction and brand expression.

Brand direction

A brand direction will help you define what you do and who you do it for, and it will let you position yourself within a specific market. There is where you craft where you want to be and set your destination.

Brand DNA

The Brand DNA is made out of purpose, vision, mission, and values. This is the most common pillar you’ll see on most companies' websites or information sheets. This area is often overlooked and quickly put together, but companies need a strong base to build a brand strategy from, so this area should be carefully crafted. You'll see many brand mission statements that all sound the same. It's essential to reflect and craft the points below. The brand DNA is about who the brand is internally, where the company is going, and what it's committed to.

• Brand purpose: This is your why. How is your brand contributing to the world? How are you solving problems?
• Brand vision: As a result of the brand purpose, what does your brand want to achieve? What are its aspirations and intentions?
• Brand mission: Why does your brand exist? What problems are you trying to solve, and how are you planning to achieve your goals?
• Brand values: What do you stand for? What are your ideals and principles?

Target audience

Any product or company has a specific audience. This is one of those situations where it’s better to target a specific group than the general population. Who is this product/company relevant to? Beyond singling out a specific group from the general population, we want to create subgroups to understand key and minor differences within these subgroups. By doing so, we can tailor a better strategy and appeal to the intended group more specifically.

Positioning strategy

Understand your competitors and the product/service that you’re offering. Give your audience a reason to choose you over others. A great way to do this is by analyzing offers from multiple competitors and identifying gaps that they're not filling. These gaps are opportunities that the audience isn’t getting and competitors aren’t providing. Having the same product/service as other companies doesn’t give your audience a reason to choose one over the other.

The product or service doesn’t have to reinvent the market—it simply has to offer something slightly different, e.g. something more convenient, a better buying experience, etc.

Brand expression

After spending some time crafting the brand direction part of this strategy, it’s time to take all that information and figure out how to tell your audience about you in specific language. What sort of words or methods can you use? How are you going to tell your story? What sort of images or language can you use to tell an authentic story? What colors resonate with the audience? Let’s take a look at the points that are necessary to develop a successful brand expression.

Brand personality

A brand personality is one of the ways to get attention from your consumers. Bland corporate copy doesn’t appeal to many people, and these days consumers don’t have that much time to give.

By understanding your audience, you’ll understand their desires, traits, and goals. What type of life do they have? What does their daily life look like? By answering questions like these, you can understand how to show up in their language. We’re talking about messaging, tone, and what type of communication you’ll be using that speaks the same language as your customers. Brand archetypes are perfect here to help you understand the audience and put together a personality that will attract them.

For this point, it’s useful to craft multiple brand personality examples. Invent a few fictional characters and build out their lives, likes, and hobbies. What sort of other products/services do they use? What do they wear? Go as detailed as possible so you can understand the segmented market.

Verbal identity

This point is an extension of the brand personality. Once you build out fictional characters, you can figure out how the brand will speak to them. What sort of tone and words does the brand use? How does the brand talk? What tone of voice does it use? Are you going to be relaxed and funny? Rugged and strong? Maybe soft and laid-back?

Remember that this point goes back to the segmented audience: who are you trying to appeal to? The brand should try to connect with people the same way we as humans try to connect with others.

Brand messaging

What is brand messaging? This tool is impactful, and more emphasis should be placed on it because this is how we influence how the audience perceives the brand. Brand messaging covers all the ways in which a brand communicates: any form of copywriting and messaging across different channels.

What do you want to say to the audience? What is important to them when choosing a brand? What are they looking for? And how can we tell them that we have what they need? A brand messaging strategy is directly related to the brand personality and verbal identity. What is the message, and how are you going to get that message across?

Brand story

Building a brand is about the audience, and telling a brand story is all about them. In order to tell a compelling brand story, we have to make an emotional connection with the audience. Tell a story that aligns with them and their journey. When the audience resonates with your brand story, its inception, and the narrative that drives the company’s purpose, they remember who you are and develop empathy for you, the company.

In order to write a gripping brand story, you need to give an idea of the situation in which you or other people found themselves, set up the adversity or problem that you came across, and then explain the solution you came up with. People get inspired by hardships and ways of getting through them.

Brand name and tagline

This point may feel way too far down the line, but it’s important to do proper research and strategy before developing a brand name and tagline. Doing this too early in the process will ignore the most effective way to create a proper brand with a target market in sight, with a clear idea of who the company is and what it does, and the specific positioning strategy as an opportunity.

Coming up with a brand name and tagline by considering all the points we covered is far more effective. As consumers, we’ll think of a brand and our brains will automatically complete it with the brand’s tagline. Think “Nike, Just do it” or “McDonalds, I’m lovin’ it”. That’s the power of branding.

Visual identity

This is the final point in this brand strategy, and unfortunately, many companies start here as the basis of their strategy. There are many elements to be considered before even getting to this point. Those elements are key steps in creating a successful visual identity.

Now that we’ve researched our audience and our competitors and are clear on how we want to be positioned, we can take the roadmap and reflect on how to build a strong visual identity. Designing a brand identity with a strategy in mind gives us direction and ensures we consider all the research.

Brand strategy is not a short or easy process. It requires time, analysis, and research, often looking more to the outside than to our own company. Many of these steps require us to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and understand what drives them, their likes and dislikes, and their ways of living. Crafting a brand strategy is only beneficial if it helps us create a meaningful, long-lasting, and successful connection with the audience.

Brand analysis

Now that we know about the tools for building a brand direction and purpose, let's look at some real-life examples. For this brand analysis, we’ll take three brands and examine their strategy, what segment of the market they’re targeting, how successful their messaging and tone are, and all in all, why they’re successful in what they do.

Chamberlain Coffee

Emma Chamberlain is a well-known influencer and social media personality who's gone on to land big fashion brands in the last few years. But most of all, she’s a big coffee drinker. Given that Emma started her career in her teens, her target market is focused on younger millennials. The brand's core message and purpose is to get away from the traditional notion of premium coffee brands and create a brand that's full of personality. The brand perception that we have of Chamberlain Coffee is that all the cool people are drinking this beverage. 

There are many coffee brands out there, but none like this one. This is a big departure from the beige-and-brown color palette we often see in stores. Their positioning is smart because no coffee brand targets the younger generation. In order to target a younger segment, it was important to redefine outdated ideas of coffee brands. In this case everything from the visuals to the verbal language and tone is evidently loud and "out there".

Social media personalities mainly attract people because they're relatable or people aspire to be like them. In this case, creating a brand based on a person can go many ways. Emma Chamberlain is famous for being relatable, and this is what the brand strategy focused on. People are multifaceted and complex, so they set out to create a brand identity design that’s loud, quirky, funny, and relatable. The inclusion of characters makes the brand even more playful but also helps their audience identify themselves in them, achieving the relatable/emotional connection.

Red Bull

Red Bull is the type of brand that sells the brand without pushing the product, and since its conception, they have implemented a strategy that still works for them.

When you think of Red Bull, you probably don’t think of the flavour of their drink. You probably think extreme sports and high adrenaline: that's the brand perception we have of them. The brand has created a positive connection with sports, adventure, and extreme physical activity. Their target market is the person who needs a boost of caffeine for adrenaline and to accomplish the most extreme tasks.

At the beginning, Red Bull wasn’t much of a success until they decided to approach their target market in their own environment—college parties, coffee shops, bars, and libraries—and gave out free samples. Today, they still have the same strategy and are incredibly successful: they go where their audience goes. The brand reputation of Red Bull around the world is that it's the top brand for energy drinks. 

The visual language of Red Bull, starting with the logo, is one that makes reference to action and energy. The logo of two fighting bulls with a golden ring represents stamina and power. The logo has remained the same since the company's inception.

Red Bull’s brand tagline, “Red Bull gives you wings,” alludes to the caffeine-boosting drink giving you power and energy to take off. It lifts you up. The brand tagline also goes hand in hand with their marketing by being present in multiple extreme sports competitions, especially skydiving and anything that has to do with flying. This aligns with their target audience's desire for thrill and adventure. Red Bull's brand values are based on achieving goals—no challenge is too hard. 

Netflix

The streaming giant has always had a deep understanding of its audience and has explored multiple tactics to retain a subscriber base. Netflix completely revolutionized and innovated the way we consume content for entertainment.

Netflix has always been focused on data collection and analysis to give a personalized experience, down to the type of images each user is attracted to. Netflix is synonymous with entertainment, and they’ve done a great job of positioning themselves as such due to their premium, on-demand, and ad-free content, original productions, convenience, and high-quality library. Netflix has a strong brand reputation compared to other streaming services as it was one of the first of its kind. 

Their brand visual identity is memorable: a minimalist red and black logo featuring a simple film strip for the "N". This extends to their marketing campaign and other materials, which are easily recognizable and cohesive. Netflix doesn’t offer a product, so there’s nothing tangible that we can review. Instead, they’re offering an experience, delivering enjoyable moments, convenience, and intuitive and user-friendly applications. Netflix has been able to evolve with their audience rather than applying antiquated marketing tactics.

The Netflix target audience is not as niche as the other two brands we've analyzed. By slowly expanding their library with old TV shows and movies, they started targeting an older audience. Later came an even more expansive kids' library, and now games. They also jumped on the mental health bandwagon by offering short meditations. Netflix’s top priority is to engage with their customers and consider what they want. By gathering data, whether through their streaming service or with a poll on their X account, Netflix is constantly evolving while exercising brand awareness for new users.

Netflix has created a brand value that's all about building a team. Some of the best shows have been created by Netflix, and you don't often hear any bad experiences. Netflix values the entertainment experience, and the brand continues to strive to be the leader in an increasingly saturated market. 

That's it!

In this article, I gave you a broad and detailed look at the importance of branding and answered one of the most asked questions in this field: what is branding? Branding is more than just a logo and a color palette. Real, well-done branding is detailed and analytical. A successful brand is built on a strong base made of multiple pillars from a coherent brand strategy.

This approach can offer a clear direction to build a brand that targets a specific market with a clear visual and verbal message, and with the right personality, to create an authentic connection.

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