How to Create a Strong Brand Identity in 6 Steps

Brand identity typically refers to a combination of colors, logo, design, name, symbol, and tagline of a company in conjunction with the perception it creates in the mind of its users [Alina Wheeler, 2012]. Things like thoughts, feelings, and expectations are as much a part of brand identity as the logo or tagline. A strong corporate branding possesses the potential to attract more users, create trust amongst them, motivate its employees to perform at their best, and more importantly, set it apart from its competitors in an attractive and unique way, while also having a strong possibility to achieve higher financial returns on its investments.

The importance of product and brand recognition has increased in numerous product fields. While competitive products have converged, in terms of technical performance, symbolic product functions have become increasingly emphasized. Consequently, this calls for the creation of strategically proper “design language” for the brand products that are the ultimate manifestations of the brand identity.

In addition, social media monitoring tools play a vital role, in creating a strong brand identity, by enabling to track brand mentions and analyzing the competition of the market. By exploiting a social media monitoring tool, critical market research can be conducted, identifying top opportunities to build a well-known brand name [Hongwei, Li & Harris, 2012]. Most importantly, it is possible to exploit effective social media monitoring strategies, towards building a stronger and more unified brand identity.

This is possible to be done, by following 6 steps, according to our guidelines below.

1. Create Brand Identity

The first and foremost thing for a company or client in order to create a brand identity is to set a benchmark for the values and services that it is going to provide to its potential customers. What is the company all about? In what ways can it enrich the lives of its buyers? All these things need to be defined first in a clear and crystal manner.

2. Who is your target audience?

“Don’t try to be all things to all people – the best, most successful brands intimately understand and target a distinct audience, thus do not appeal to everyone” [linkedIn].

This includes Age group, Gender, Lifestyle of your potential buyers. Knowing these statistics is vitally important for the growth and success of the chain of products that you are going to offer in the market.

3. Create an attractive visual appeal

“The key to a successful brand is to start with a good, solid logo. A logo, by definition, is a graphic representation or symbol of a company name. With that said, your logo should be as unique as your business and its name” [thoughtspacedesigns].

Let’s face it. Humans are visual. Things that look good, attract people. Your brand identity design needs to have a unique and compelling appeal, while at the same time, it needs to depict or arouse feelings of the values that it is offering. This can be done using taglines, logos, and other ways like cue, smell, or even artifact.

4. Marketing your product

“While making money is important to almost every business, we admire brands that emphasize their willingness to achieve more than just profitability” .

How you do your brand campaigning has a significant effect on creating your brand identity. Marketing in a way that seems genuine, elegant, useful, and enriching to its buyer will go a long way in attracting him and eventually developing trust in your brand.

5. Handling customer responses in times of problems through social media monitoring

Even if your product is genuine, affordable to your buyer, it is highly unlikely not to develop trust and other positive feelings, if you are unable to handle the problems faced by them effectively in times of need. Being sincere and acknowledging your customers’ problems is a sure-fire way of keeping them attached to your brand for a longer period of time, thereby increasing the odds of them referring your brand products to their family and friends.

For this reason, social media monitoring can play a vital role. Social media monitoring in simple terms is a way of investigating all brand associated mentions (which includes its brand identity, customer queries, satisfaction, brand competitor analysis, etc.) to rectify and/or improve the already existing strategies, so as to become more effective in creating a stronger brand identity in the market place, thereby setting itself apart from competitors and gaining the edge. It also helps in detecting disputes that might arise from other competitors over things like copyrights, proprietary rights, and other things, such as misleading marketing of your brand by your competition.

Social media monitoring tools, such as Mentionlytics helps in maintaining and improving the brand identity, for direct and indirect strategies to compete with the brand. Mentionlytics provides its clients, a free trial to gauge their services. It comes with Trello integration, which can notify about any new mentions of the brand around the world, via an e-mail. It places strong values for its clients in the form of effective communication and delivering impressive results.

Other indicative tools can also be exploited for this purpose. More specifically, Social Mention is a web tool that enables clients to trace their respective brands being mentioned on blogs and microblogs. Having an interface, which is easy on the eyes and allows to use free of cost is a few among many reasons for its popularity among social enthusiasts.

In addition, BackTweets is another tool that allows users to locate the tweets from Twitter about the brands linking back to the site, while at the same time unshortening and cataloging the url sent with Twitter.

Finally, Google Alerts can be used to allow users to find news results and changes, according to the topics or keywords which is interested in. Advantages of this tool include getting notified by e-mail, whenever Google detects anything on the web similar to users’ interest.

6. Stay Consistent

“It’s difficult to put any plan into action when you do not understand why you are doing it. So first, you need to understand why consistent branding matters” [entrepreneur].

Brand development takes hard work and patience. Over a period of time, your products and services should stick to the values of your brand like durability, affordability, and customer service relationships, which were emphasized to the buyer in the first place. Maintaining those values will eventually lead to an increase in the buyers’ trust and financial rewards on your investment.