A great brand sets you apart from the competition. It showcases your values, personality, skillset and can help your business exponentially. An affective brand identity makes a memorable impression, gains trust with your customers, and gives them the confidence to know exactly what they are likely to expect from your organisation or services.
Ultimately, a powerful brand ensures customer retention. With 60% of consumers stating they’d prioritise their preferred brand even if it’s pricier, an effective brand not only helps you keep your customers for longer, but you can entice more customers to shop with you too.
A logo is important within any brand, but it's just the start. Outstanding brands combine great typography, imagery, tone of voice to its colours, to name just a few. If you’re new to the world of branding or want to help your organisation grow its brand, this blog post is here to help you discover how you can create a strong identity. We’ll cover things like typography, imagery to colours, but at its core branding is all about consistency, so that’s where we are going to start.
1. Brand consistency
Brand consistency is the powerhouse of visual identity and design. If your brand is consistent across your website, printed marketing material, social media profiles and mobile user experience then this goes a long way.
Consistency is key to establishing a recognisable brand. As documented by Mailchimp:
“Brand consistency means ensuring that the way you present your company—and what it stands for—remains the same across all your marketing channels, unifying the image and message your customers and potential customers see.”
If potential customers see the same values, proposition and design during various interactions across lots of different channels and devices, this adds to your brands trustworthiness and elevates your brands credibility. Consistency should not be overlooked, which is why brand guidelines are crucial within any organisation.
A set of Brand Guidelines document the brand’s typography, imagery, tone of voice, and colour usage that others in the organisation need to follow. However, the bigger an organisation gets the harder it can be to retain the brand, with studies showing that only 30% of brands have guidelines that are well-known and accessible to the entire organisation. Ensuring all areas of the organisation are on the same page helps secure consistency, which makes having these documents even more important. With that being said, what are the key aspects to any strong brand design?
2. Typography
You want to choose a typeface that represents your brand identity. If your brand is friendly and outgoing, then you could choose more of a ‘friendly’ typeface (think curved edges and playful touches). However, if your brand is more serious and corporate, then a more traditional typeface might be worthwhile. For example, we work with a lot of NHS Trusts who need to maintain a professional and accessible brand identity, so the typeface most NHS Trusts opt for is Frutiger.
“Frutiger is a contemporary and flexible sans serif font, which was designed to be clear and easy to read at a distance and in small sizes. It still achieves this objective and has become recognised as the clean, simple typeface which people associate with the NHS.”
Looking at Slack’s media kit, their use of typography corresponds to their brand values: ‘empathetic, playfulness and thriving’ to name a few. Choosing a typeface for your brand requires patience and trial and error, but it makes a huge difference to your brand identity.
3. Imagery
Much like typography, the imagery you choose should also represent your brand and the personality you want to convey. Is your brand more of a human-lead organisation? Do you target the younger generation, or do you want to focus more on cutting edge technology within your imagery?
For example, if you look at Innocent Drinks, their imagery is playful, cartoony and friendly. This is represented by their fun illustrations (they have a nice website too!) and clearly showcases their brand position - it works effectively.
Much like the written word, images are also a form of communication. What is the personality of your brand? How would you describe your business in a sentence? This can form your use and style of imagery.
4. Tone of voice
Tone of voice can sometimes be left behind when it comes to creating a strong brand identity. It’s not as ‘concrete’ as things like your brand colours or imagery for example, but tone of voice sets the bar for the way in which your brand will be interpreted.
Words form the content of your website. They can be used to persuade potential customers, describe your offering, showcase your services and portray your values. They also make up your marketing material, like assets, emails and social media posts - so setting parameters to define your tone of voice is pretty important. Like most of these pointers, do you want to communicate a friendly or corporate vibe?
This links back to your core values as an organisation. If you want more insight into tone of voice, this article by SEMRush is a good quality read.
5. Colours
Great brands minimise their use of colours. This is evident by some of the biggest and most recognisable brands across the globe like Cola-Cola, Mastercard or IKEA for example. Brand colours are mighty, and are one of the most important elements of visual identity and design. Choose correctly and wisely, and more people will recognise your brand amongst the crowd. According to Looka:
“A well-developed brand should make your audience feel something when they see you. Since most colours already have emotions tied to them, you can use them to connect your company to specific moods or feelings.”
To choose your branding colours, consider the different colour meanings, and how it sits within your industry or competitors. For example, your competitors may use blue as their core colour, so it would be wise to choose a different colour to stand out from the crowd. Or if you’re in the health care industry, you probably want to stay away from red, which is associated with danger.
It’s also important to keep accessibility in mind. This can be achieved by using dark, mid and light colours that provide a contrast. We recommend you choose a maximum of 3-4 core colours to showcase your brand. The less, the better. If you start choosing every colour under the sun, it dilutes the potency of your brand.
Good things come in fives
We’ve covered a lot of ground in today’s article, and you’ve found it useful. We’ve talked about brand guidelines and their importance in ensuring consistency, and detailed the four key areas your guidelines need to cover to build a powerful brand. Here’s a little recap:
- Consistency: Be consistent with your imagery, typography imagery, tone of voice and your colours. The more consistent you are with your brand, the better.
- Typography: Choose a typeface that represents your brand through trial and error and once you’ve decided, stick with it.
- Imagery: What are the type of images you will use to communicate your brand? Pick a style and use this business wide.
- Tone of voice: Words are powerful, and your brand’s tone of voice should reflect your brand personality. A good tone of voice corresponds to your brand values.
- Colours: Use a maximum of 3-4 colours for your brand. The best brands in the world minimise their use of colour. Remember to keep accessibility in mind, so it’s wise to incorporate dark, mid and light colours in your brand identity document.
At VerseOne, we’re helping organisations in the NHS and social housing sector with our Creative Services. These cover everything from helping you use GA4 and Heatmapping to understand the needs of your audience, to creating engaging visual content like motion graphics and email designs. Coupled with this, we’re experts in all things brand – from brand identity document creations to logo designs, so take a look at our services and see how we can help you.
Alternatively, if you want to make waves with a website design that packs a punch, take a look at our website solutions and Intranets to help you deliver enhanced customer and employee experiences.
Looking for more free content to help you discover the importance of brand identity? We offer a variety of free to attend webinars that do just that so be sure to check out our events calendar.
View our NHS events calendar
Read Five must-have elements for creating a powerful brand…
