How to build a strong brand identity from scratch?

To build a brand identity that connects with your target audience needs a deep understanding of who they are, what they need, and what piques their interest. According to 2031 A Future World Report, almost 46% of Gen Z feels connected to a brand if it's sustainable and has strong ethics. 21% care about the clarity of intentions of a brand and 17% look for brands with a clear point of view.

Conduct competition research

With market research, you can get an idea of the competitive world and current market trends. You need to analyse your competitors, their branding strategies, weaknesses, and strengths.

Tools like SWOT analysis can help you gain insights and spot market gaps your brand can fill. Check your competitor’s social media platforms to understand their tone of voice and brand messaging, and carefully observe if there are any elements you would want your brand to include.

You should also analyse their target audience to get an idea about their target market and find if there are any similarities. Understand their strategies and learn some lessons from their successes for your own good.

Understand your target audience

To understand your target audience, ask questions such as who they are, what their preferences are, what issues they face, and how your brand can resonate with them.

You can learn about these insights by conducting surveys, interviews, and focus groups. But before moving forward, you have to identify your target audience.

For example, if your targeted audience is a specific age group, such as Gen Z, you can understand Gen Z branding when speaking to this audience.

Define your brand personality

A brand cannot appeal to everyone all at once. Successful branding requires you to commit to a smaller but well-defined niche. When building your brand strategy, make a list of adjectives describing the character of your company, as if talking about a person. Then, consider how it would be portrayed, either classy or trendy. Also, determine if it's mature or youthful.

Plan about the story you want your brand to tell. Your brand story will consist of core values and a mission statement. It will also help your audience feel like they share similar goals.

You need to focus on “why” before dealing with questions like “how” or “what”, as people don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. Take an example of the brand story of Patagonia, which revolves around its commitment to protect the planet and promote sustainability.

Develop the key elements of your brand

Once you have determined the inside and out of your brand, you should start working on bringing it back to life. Most brands start with a messy mood board and evolve to brands people can recognise from just one colour. Brands like Tiffany, UPS, and T-Mobile have even trademarked their brand colours. Here are the key elements of your brand you need to develop.

Brand colours

Colours are powerful tools for communicating your brand personality at first glance. When you select brand colours, think about how they reflect your identity. Look at the existing colour scheme in your space to choose a colour palette, ask your audience about it, and learn what feelings certain colours evoke.

You can take the example of Slack’s green, red, yellow, and blue quartet or the Instagram gradient of warm hues. You will need to choose a primary palette, a secondary palette, text colours, background colours, and accessible colour combinations.

Brand fonts

Just like colours, you also need to focus on signature brand fonts. For example, fonts like Chobani seem to appear everywhere, from wedding invitations to startup brands, books, and website headers.

The old font type was a bold sans serif without curly parts, and their new font gave a warmer and stronger vibe. When selecting fonts for your brand, choose two interfaces and use them throughout your brand to ensure consistency.

The headings should have the largest and most expressive fonts to represent the brand persona. You can also use script, uppercase, or title font for headings, as these styles are hard to read in smaller text.

For body text and subtitles, choose fonts that ensure readability. You can use the same font as your heading but at a smaller size or in a different style, like bold or italic.

Brand logo

Brand logos are the most challenging but important part of a brand, as they must convey the brand's mission, personality, and values in a single image.

Conduct a competitive analysis of top brands related to your industry to find out which brands outperform and why. Use the following logo design tips to ensure you put in the effort where it counts.

The best logo design must communicate your brand personality, create balance, add repetitive patterns, use contrast, highlight a dominant focal point, establish a hierarchy to guide the viewer through the design and incorporate a brand colour palette.

Branded imagery and design elements

Design elements and images also set the tone for your brand. Try to make your assets and layout consistent with a style guide that speaks to the type of filters, colours, or other specs. Brand elements include tints, saturation, contrast, blurring, and the way you manipulate brand images.

For example, it'd be off-brand for McKinsey to use elements similar to Glossier, as one is a corporate consulting firm while the other is a trendy makeup brand. Glossier's style includes pinks, sparkles, and playful edits, while McKinsey uses professional visuals to appeal to a corporate audience.

Create brand voice and tone

The brand voice and tone show how you communicate with your audience. A consistent brand voice can build recognition and trust, while a clear tone creates an emotional response in your audience.

To create a consistent brand voice and tone, focus on your target audience, such as what tone and language will resonate with them, casual or serious. Then, find out how you can reflect your brand personality and values in your communication. Create a set of guidelines to train new team members on your brand's tone.

Build your brand guidelines and branded templates

You can easily increase your reach online with brand templates and keep everyone aligned with your updated brand guidelines. Maintain a digital library or on-brand templates to edit the master file so everyone can use them.

To become the most successful brand, you need to incorporate your brand identity into your marketing, sales, and customer content. This will boost recognition and loyalty. If you want to save time and maintain consistency, create branded templates and brand kits for websites, social media, and branded images. 

Frontify offers the best possible solution with its design system toolkit, which helps you create and manage brand guidelines without any effort. Using Frontify, you can ensure every element of your brand, from logo and colour schemes to typography and imagery, is consistently applied to reflect your brand identity.

Evaluate and adapt your brand identity

Once everything is planned and implemented, you should regularly evaluate and evolve your strategies to meet your goals and match with your audience. The market and audience preferences will keep changing, so you should adapt and grow your brand.

For evaluation, you need to track your brand awareness by finding out how well your brand is recognised by your target audience. You need to focus on brand sentiments, customer loyalty, engagement, sales, and revenue to guide your decisions and make necessary changes.