Before you start making any decisions about your brand, you need to understand the current market - who your potential customers and current competitors are.
Before you start making any decisions about your brand, you need to understand the current market - who your potential customers and current competitors are.
Your brand can’t be everything to everyone, especially at the start.
It’s important to find your focus and let that inform all the other parts of your brand as you build it.
Here are some questions and branding exercises to get you thinking about the focus and tone of your brand.
Thinking about your brand as a metaphor, or personifying it, can help you identify the individual qualities you want it to have.
This can be a vehicle, an animal, a celebrity, a sports team, anything—as long as it has a prominent reputation in your mind that summons the sort of vibe you want your brand to give off.
For example, if I wanted to create a brand targeting entrepreneurs, I might choose to use the raccoon as a starting point: They’re scrappy survivors who will do anything to thrive.
If your brand was an animal, what animal would it be and why is it like that animal to you?
- Make up a word, like Pepsi
- Reframe an unrelated word, like Apple for computers
- Use a suggestive word or metaphor, like Buffer
- Describe it literally, like The Shoe Company
- Alter a word by removing letters, adding letters, or using Latin endings, like Tumblr or Activia
- Create an acronym from a longer name, like HBO (Home Box Office)
- Combine two words: Pinterest (pin + interest) or Snapple (snappy + apple)
A catchy slogan is a nice-to-have asset—something brief and descriptive you can use as a tagline in your social media bios, website header, business card, and anywhere else where you’ve got very few words to make a big impact.
A company logo design is probably one of the first things that comes to mind when you think about building a brand. And for good reason: it’s the face of your company after all and could potentially be everywhere that your brand exists.
A brand story represents who your business is and what it stands for. It sets the stage for every interaction customers have with your brand, in-store and online.