Brand Identity (2024): Effectively Build Your Brand [+ Models] - Gust de Backer (2024)

A good brand identity is indispensable for any business to ensure that potential customers consider the brand and know what the brand stands for.

1. Building a brand is a lengthy and relatively difficult process, but I’m going to show you:
2. What a brand identity is and why it’s important.
3. How to arrive at your brand identity.

And how you can start building your brand effectively.

Let’s get started…

What is brand identity?

Brand identity is the personality of your company.

In short, Brand identity is the impression you leave on consumers or other companies, the recognizable brand attributes that set you apart from the competition.

Brand identity consists of:

1. Verbal identity
   • Brand name
   • Slogan
   • Brand promise
   • Tone of Voice
   • Story
2. Visual Identity
   • Logo
   • Color palette
   • Typography
   • Layout
   • Images (video, photo & illustrations)
3. Other
   • Smell
   • Taste
   • Sound
   • Location
4. Values
   • Purpose
   • Vision
   • Mission

Brand Identity Prism

Kapferer’s Brand Identity Prism helps describe your brand identity based on character traits of your brand:

This prism is good to use to visualize the core properties of your brand and how they relate to each other:

1. The Psychical: all the physically visible properties of a brand, such as the logo, colors, shapes and brand assets.
2. Brand Personality: the character traits of the brand, such as the brand essence, brand values, etc.
3. Culture: the internal culture in the company. Companies like Google and Apple are not only known for their products and services, but also for their work culture.
4. Relationship: this is about the relationship you have with your target audience or customers. What does the customer expect from your brand beyond the products and services you offer? Good customer service, good customer experience and warranty are some examples.
5. Customer Reflection: what does the target market or most ideal customer look like? Your company probably has several customer segments, but one of them will stand out. Address your most important customer segment, because these are the people who will become ambassadors of your brand the fastest.
6. Customer Self-image: what are your target audience’s aspirations, goals and how do they want to stand in comparison to others? Your brand’s messaging should respond to reflect with the customer their ideal self-image.

Why is your brand identity important?

The ultimate goal of branding is to build brand equity, or the extra value a brand adds to a product compared to the same generic product.

Higher brand equity leads to:

• Increased market share
• Less customer churn
• Lower price sensitivity
• Greater brand recognition
• Higher sales
• Higher profit margin
• Easier access to new markets
• Higher market value of your business
• Recognition and preference
• Lower costs in recruitment
• Saves performance marketing costs
• Higher retention and average order value
• Higher customer lifetime value (CLV)

How to determine your brand identity?

There are several types of brand identity:

1. Existing identity: the identity as you currently measure it with research.
2. Perceived identity: the perception of the identity (image) among different groups.
3. Desired identity: the identity as the top of the organization would actually like it to be.
4. Projected identity: how the organization conveys its brand identity through communication and symbols.

1. Ensure a product-market fit

Without a product-market fit, almost all time, energy and money put into branding is wasted. So first make sure you have a product-market fit before you start building your brand.

2. Complete the Brandkey Model

The brandkey model is particularly interesting for B2C companies because it is focused on outside-in:

1. Outside-in: brand essence is determined by a gap in the market based on external elements. Ideal for B2C.
2. Inside-out: brand essence is determined by internal elements such as culture, value proposition, etc. Ideal for B2B.

The brandkey model can be used to position your brand:

1. Root Strengths: charting the success of your brand to date. What was your original product (parent product) and what product is your brand now known for (flagship product)?
2. Competitive Environment: the brands and products a customer considers when making a purchase decision, include direct and indirect competitors.
3. Target Audience: map out your (desired) target audience, think about demographics, values, behaviors and answer the question why your brand is the best choice for this target group.
4. Consumer Insight: to become a successful brand you need to respond to a relevant ‘consumer insight’, the latent need that underlies the purchase of a product or service. Why do consumers buy certain products and not others.
5. Benefits: describe the advantages of your brand, think of functional or psychosocial benefits.
6. Values & Personality: answer the question “what does your brand stand for and what does it ‘believe’ in?”. Brands that meet certain values lead to higher recognition and acknowledgement. A well-known value system is the VALS typology.
7. Reasons to Believe: the evidence on which the target group should believe that you are the best choice in terms of brand.
8. Discriminator: your differentiating factor(s) from the competition.
9. Brand essence: name your brand essence in a few words.

3. Build a recognizable corporate identity

A corporate identity consists of 6 parts:

1. Logo: the logo that you are going to use everywhere and how that logo should come back in the designs.
2. Color: your primary and secondary colors, try to keep enough contrast in the call-to-action colors.
3. Typography: make sure the typography is easy to read and fits well with your expressions.
4. Layout: try to find a unique but recognizable layout for your designs.
5. Photography: photography should be consistent and fit with the entire corporate identity.
6. Icons: often underestimated, but make sure you have unique icons to create recognition.

Some examples of style guides:

• Medium
• Spotify
• Canva

4. Complete the Golden Circle

Everyone knows what they do, some know how they do it, but few know why they do something.

Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle is a model that ensures your organization knows why they are doing something, how they are going to do it, and then what they end up doing:

1. Why: Why does your organization exist and why should others care? What do you believe in and what drives you?
2. How: how do you do what you do? Where do you stand out?
3. What: what is the outcome of the why. What are the products or services your company sells?

Example Golden Circle

If Apple profiled itself like most companies their message would sound like this:

“We make good computers (what), that look nice and are easy to use (how).”

Apple communicates according to the Golden Circle, from the inside out:

“We believe in challenging the status quo by thinking differently (why), we do that by making products that are beautifully designed and easy to use (how). We sell computers and smartphones (what).”

5. Complete the Brand Equity model

Kevin Lane Keller’s Customer Based Brand Equity model maps the process of brand building by focusing on the value a brand adds to consumers (brand-added value).

5.1 Brand Salience

The identity of your brand, answer the question “who am I?”. Consumers should subconsciously make an association with your brand and product class.

Salience is the degree to which consumers are familiar with the brand:

• Is the brand recognized?
• Do people first think of your brand. In short, is the brand top-of-mind?
• Is the brand spontaneously mentioned?
• Is the brand considered?

Consumers should be familiar with the depth and breadth of your brand.

5.2 Brand Performance & Brand Imagery

In this step, you will answer the question “what am I? Describe the following characteristics of your brand:

1. Intrinsic (tangible): the extent to which a product/service performs in the eyes of the consumer.
2. Extrinsic (intangible): how a consumer thinks about the brand.

To increase overall brand equity, improve product performance (brand performance) and image (brand imagery). Try to exceed consumer expectations, brand imagery can be improved with effective marketing.

5.3 Brand Judgement & Brand Feelings

This step is the reaction to brand performance and brand imagery and is about how consumers think about your brand what kind of feelings they get from it.

Consumers will develop an attitude towards and opinion of your brand. In this, two elements are important:

1. Brand judgments (rational): the opinion consumers rationally form about a brand, this opinion is based on quality, reliability and superiority.
2. Brand feelings (emotional): the emotional reaction of a consumer to a brand. The feelings that a brand evokes in the social environment of the consumer. Factors that play a role here are warmth, fun, excitement, safety, social acceptance and self-respect.

5.4 Brand Resonance

If the consumer wants to enter into a relationship with the brand, there is brand loyalty. The consumer then identifies with (the values of) the brand and is therefore willing to invest in the relationship, this manifests itself in:

• Repeat purchases
• Preferred position versus competition
• Lower price sensitivity

The relationship can be measured by 4 factors:

1. Loyalty
2. Emotional attachment
3. Member of the brand community
4. Active brand engagement

6. Choose your archetype

Archetypes is what sits between the consumer’s need and the characteristics of your product or service:

For example, a Volvo is known for its safety where a BMW is more often chosen for sporty driving.

How do you effectively build a brand?

It’s important to understand that building a brand isn’t just about running branding campaigns, it’s about:

• How people talk and think about your product, service or brand
• How quickly people will recommend your product, service or brand to others
• And how people experience your product, service or brand

The most effective ways to build a good brand are:

1. Mapping all the touchpoints of the customer journey and making sure that a customer journey is mapped out that is well experienced at each point. In addition, it is also interesting to look at the peak and end of the customer journey based on the peak-end rule:
   
2. Ensure that your product or service delivers the desired results and that people are not ashamed to be seen with the product in their social environment.
3. Having a brand identity that fits well with the market but is distinctive.
4. Generating top-of-the-funnel awareness to enforce a preferred position with potential customers (branding campaigns). In this, it is important to have campaigns with good creatives, as this is 47% responsible for the ultimate success of the campaign:
   
5. Differentiate yourself with your competition, unique positioning opportunities can be found in:
   • Complaints
   • Issues
   • Changes
   • Client reviews
   • Innovation
   • Regulatory change
   • Innovation in technology
   • New system
   • Transferable knowledge to new markets or new clients
   • Product enhancements
   • Innovative business replicable in your country
6. Choose how you want to position yourself:
   • Rational: provides functional utility to the customer.
   • Emotional: gives the customer a positive feeling.
   • Self-expressive: reflect the customer’s self image.

Getting attention

Attention can be gather through two ways, external and internal factors:

1. External/Objective Factors:
   • Intensity
     • e.g. loud sounds, bright lights, intense odor, bright color
   • Changes in Intensity/Quality of a Stimulus
     • e.g. a sudden loud noise
   • Movement
     • e.g. animated backgrounds, sliding banners
   • Size
     • e.g. small object against a large background
   • Contrast
     • e.g. contrasting color combinations
   • Novelty
     • e.g. unique equipment, design, etc.
   • Repetition
     • e.g. repeated exposure to a brand name or logo
2. Internal/Subjective Factors:
   • Interests
     • e.g. Personal taste, often changes with age or life stage. Do you have the same dream car now as 13-year-old you?
   • Habits & Attitudes
     • e.g. personal habits, occupation
   • Motives & Organic States
     • e.g. physical/psychological state, a person who’s busy is unlikely to stop what they’re doing to consider your ad
   • Emotions
     • e.g. a person sees your ad and fears they’re missing out
   • Past experiences
     • e.g. Checking the return policy before making a purchase decision due to past issues with returning a product

When to communicate

When are users ready for communication:

• When is their motivation high?
  • When are they interested in communication?
  • When is it their priority to complete the action?
• When is their ability high?
  • When are they at the computer to open?
  • When is their focus high and distractions low?
  • When do they have the information they need?

There are 3 stages of branding:

1. Awareness & Understanding: provide value and facts, educate your potential customers.
2. Commitment: deliver more values than you get, this will get the customer to be committed to you.
3. Advocacy: bond clients to your company, get them involved.

Share of Voice & Share of Market

Excess in Share of Voice (eSOV) = Share of Voice (SOV) – Share of Market (SOM)

See Also

The 7 key elements of brand identity design

1. Share of Voice: how many percent of the conversations in your market are about your brand. The larger your share of voice is, the more popular you are and the more authority your brand has.
2. Share of Market: the market share your company has in the market.

According to a study by Nielsen, if a brand has a higher Share of Voice than its Share of Market that brand will grow:

In this, there is also a distinction in the size of the brand:

This is relatively easy to calculate with the percentage of branded (searches for your brand) search volume versus the full volume of keywords in your market.

How do you measure brand related work?

There are a number of ways you can measure brand related work:

1. Social Media:
   • The number of followers you have.
   • The engagement and sentiment of the engagement.
   • Keep an eye on your brand mentions.
2. Google:
   • Branded searches for your brand (perhaps versus total market searches).
   • Direct traffic to your website.
   • Look at the backlinks your business is getting and how that compares to the competition
3. Email Marketing
   1. The number of people who open your email, click further and/or respond.
4. Reviews and their sentiment.
5. Purchase retention and frequency figures.
6. NPS and a converter survey, a good tool for doing this is Hotjar.
7. Look at earned media, or the publicity you get without paying for it.

In addition, the customer journey can be mapped with numbers using the Pirate Funnel:

The Pirate Funnel also allows you to find the bottleneck in your funnel so you can start testing solutions for that.

Alternatives to the Pirate Funnel are:

• TOFU, MOFU & BOFU
• See – Think – Do – Care
• Hero – Hub – Hygiene

Of course it is also possible to have external agencies do research into your brand and how it is positioned in the market. Think for example of the following:

1. Brand tracking research
2. Needs research
3. Campaign effect measurement
4. Campaign pre-testing
5. Customer journey research
6. Target group research
7. Image research
8. Customer satisfaction research
9. Macro effectiveness research
10. Brand awareness research
11. Positioning
12. Usability research

Branding vs. Performance

Branding and performance should support each other. More branding means a higher ROI on performance marketing because it becomes cheaper to engage new customers and keep existing customers coming back.

The budget split between branding and performance is ideally 60% branding and 40% performance, but that largely depends on your industry and the size of your brand as well.

Performance marketing is only dominant in the first 6 months:

Build your brand…

So, now you can get to work on building your brand.

I’m curious, what do you think is the most effective strategy in growing a brand?

Let me know in a comment.

P.S. Would you like some extra help? Let me know at [emailprotected]

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