Brand Identity: Communicating your brand

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Welcome to our fourth blog in our brand series on realising the potential of your brand. In this series we’re guiding you through the minefield of unravelling the challenges of optimising your brand for business success – from uncovering your purpose to developing the right positioning, finessing your identity and tone of voice to driving brand awareness in a crowded market.

Our latest blog focuses on brand identity.

Branding and brand identity are two statements that are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Our last blog post spoke about brand positioning – the space that a brand owns in a consumer’s mind. This is something that’s intangible. Your brand identity is the tangible interpretation of your brand – the physical make-up that your customers and consumers see.

Before you start thinking about your brand identity, you must first have established your brand essence – why you exist, your values, personality, positioning and voice. Each one of these elements makes up your brand and must be defined before you consider visually communicating it in the marketplace.

Your brand identity is more than a logo – it’s the face of your brand and encompasses your logo, typography, colour palette, messaging and illustration and photographic style. It expresses who you are and helps connect with your audience to buy into your product or service. Your brand identity should permeate consistently through all of your marketing and communication material – but it doesn’t stop here. Any interaction with your brand should be consistent – if you have a shop, not only should it be branded consistently, but your employees should also live and breathe the brand.

Your brand identity can really help you cut through the noise. Let’s take the cosmetics industry, which is well known for having a series of negative connotations – animal cruelty, the use of chemicals in products and wasteful packaging. Lush, the high-street cosmetics brand set out to change this and built its brand on a belief of ‘making happy, effective products from fresh organic fruits and vegetables’. These products are made by ‘happy people making happy soap’. Now, let’s take a look at their brand identity.

Lush shop display
Lush personalised touches
Lush Naked campaign

Everything they do ties back to what they stand for – the typeface used for products mimics handwriting, creating that personal touch. To reinforce this, each product comes with a sticker to show who made it with a happy face beaming back at you. Their stores replicate a fruit and veg market, directly relating to the source of their products. Their staff are happy-go-lucky people who communicate with customers in a manner that replicates what the brand stands for. They have such a loyal following that advocates of the brand are called ‘lushies’.

Every touchpoint is consistent with the brand and what it stands for, and this has helped them grow into a global player in the cosmetics industry in the space of 25 years.

If your brand identity doesn’t truly represent you, or is inconsistent across different channels, it makes it difficult for your audience to understand what you stand for and what you’re trying to achieve. Critically, when customers are confused, they simply buy less or don’t return.

It’s not enough to be consistent, a brand identity that is no longer relevant is also losing you money. Every industry and market is continually changing, making it essential that brands keep up or they lose out. More often than not, the core of the brand, what it stands for and its values, remain relevant sometimes from generation to generation, but the brand’s identity evolves to resonate with new younger audiences.

Cadbury Original logo
Cadbury current logo

So how is your brand holding up? Complete our Brand Health Check and have a free advisory call with one of our Brand Consultants to get a new perspective.