Your brand identity is how your business is recognized and remembered. It goes beyond a logo - it's your values, visuals, tone, and how you connect with your audience. Here’s a quick summary of the 7 key strategies to build a strong brand identity:
Define Your Core Values and Purpose: Identify what your brand stands for and ensure it aligns with customer values.
Know Your Target Audience: Understand their demographics, behaviors, and preferences to craft relatable messaging.
Design a Memorable Logo and Visuals: Create simple, scalable designs with a consistent color palette and typography.
Develop a Clear Brand Voice: Match your tone to your audience and document guidelines for consistency.
Pick the Right Brand Colors: Use colors that evoke the emotions and values you want to communicate.
Create Design Guidelines: Document rules for logo use, typography, colors, and voice to maintain consistency.
Adapt and Update as Needed: Regularly review and refresh your branding to stay relevant.
These steps help ensure your brand is clear, consistent, and resonates with your audience. A strong identity builds trust, loyalty, and recognition over time.
How to Create a Brand Identity From Start to Finish
1. Set Your Brand Values and Purpose
Your brand’s personality begins with defining its values and purpose. These act as the foundation for your identity and guide decision-making. In fact, 77% of consumers prefer brands that align with their values, often spending up to 57% more and choosing them over competitors.
Interestingly, 95% of purchasing decisions are made subconsciously. Let’s look at how some top brands communicate their values and purpose:
Starbucks: "To inspire and nurture the human spirit - one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time."
Core values: belonging, courage, qualityPatagonia: "We're in business to save our home planet."
Core values: conservation, quality, forward-thinkingAmerican Express: "Provide the world's best customer experience every day."
Core values: customer focus, integrity, quality
How to Define Your Brand Values
Reflect on your industry
Think about common frustrations or challenges in your field. Turn those into actionable values that set you apart.
Use clear, actionable language
Avoid vague terms. For example, say “deliver our very best” instead of just “excellence.” Employees should know exactly how to apply these values.
Stay genuine
Values should reflect what your business truly represents. This builds trust and loyalty, which can improve customer retention by 91% year-over-year.
Keep your values simple, memorable, and easy for both your team and customers to understand. Focus on 2–3 key values that capture the essence of your brand. These should be visible in everything you do, from your logo to customer service.
Once your values are set, the next step is identifying the audience that will connect with your brand the most.
2. Know Your Target Customers
After defining your brand's values, the next step is understanding who your brand is meant to serve. This understanding shapes the visual and tonal aspects of your brand design.
To get a clear picture of your audience, focus on three key areas:
Demographics: Look at measurable traits like age, gender, income, and location.
Values and Lifestyle: Understand their attitudes, beliefs, and personal preferences.
Behavior Patterns: Analyze how they make purchasing decisions and interact with brands.
For instance, Visit Australia's campaign focuses on 35-year-old males planning international family vacations who prioritize experiential tourism.
Creating detailed customer personas can help. Include details like:
Demographics: Age, location, income, and education.
Professional Information: Job title, industry, and decision-making power.
Goals and Challenges: Their objectives and pain points.
Behaviors: Buying habits and media consumption.
Interests: Hobbies and lifestyle preferences.
You can gather this information by analyzing CRM data, website metrics, and social media insights, as well as conducting surveys, interviews, and focus groups. Regularly update these personas to keep up with market changes.
With these profiles, you can create visuals and messaging that resonate directly with your audience.
3. Design Your Logo and Visual Elements
Your logo needs to stand out, be easy to remember, and work well in different contexts. Think of Amazon's A-to-Z arrow or Nike's Swoosh - both tell a story in a single glance. Make sure your logo and visuals align with the audience insights and values you’ve already identified.
Start by designing your logo in vector format so it can scale without losing quality. Begin with black and white to nail down the concept before introducing color. Keeping it simple makes your logo easier to recognize and recall.
When building your brand's visual identity, focus on three main elements:
Color palette: Evokes specific emotions.
Typography: Reflects your brand’s personality.
Illustrations: Reinforce your message (like Mailchimp’s signature illustration style).
Every visual decision should tie back to your core values and resonate with your audience.
Before finalizing, test your logo in different scenarios: reverse colors, various sizes, and formats like CMYK, Pantone, and RGB. Starting with black and white ensures it’s clear and effective from the start.
Once your visuals are set, the next step is creating a consistent brand voice to complement them.
4. Create Your Brand Voice
Once your visuals are sorted, it’s time to shape your brand voice to match those same values. This ensures everything feels consistent. Use what you’ve learned about your customer personas (from Section 2) to fine-tune your tone.
HubSpot’s style guide is a great example of this approach. It emphasizes clarity, helpfulness, humanity, and kindness - qualities that earned the brand recognition, like a 2024 Webby nod. As they put it:
"We favor clarity above all. The clever and cute should never be at the expense of the clear."
Here’s how you can craft your brand voice:
Define 3-5 personality traits (e.g., professional, approachable).
Set clear tone rules (e.g., use simple, direct language).
Create a list of do’s (like using active voice) and don’ts (like avoiding unnecessary jargon).
Test your content: Does it sound like something a real person would say?
For inspiration, look at Merriam-Webster. Lauren Naturale turned their word-of-the-day posts into fun, engaging content, leading to a 456% growth in their Twitter audience. This proves that content grounded in strong values can resonate deeply with your audience.
Make sure to document your voice guidelines for everyone involved in creating content. Include:
Key brand voice traits with examples.
Writing style preferences.
Specific terminology to use (or avoid).
Adjustments for different platforms or channels.
Finally, keep your guidelines fresh by reviewing audience feedback and performance data regularly.
Up next: Picking a color palette to further reinforce your brand identity.
5. Choose Your Brand Colors
Once your brand voice is set, your color palette becomes the visual heartbeat of your message.
Colors influence how people perceive your brand. In fact, 80% of snap judgments are based on color, and consistent use of colors can improve brand recognition by 80%.
Take Netflix, for example. Its bold red reflects emotional highs and lows while hinting at theater curtains. Starbucks, on the other hand, uses green to stand out from competitors with warmer tones and to create a sense of calm that's visible from a distance. Start by considering color psychology: blue often conveys trust and loyalty, while green suggests growth and positivity. Your palette should reflect your brand's values.
Stick to 2–6 colors: one primary color, 1–3 accent colors, and a few neutrals. Use a color scheme like complementary, analogous, triadic, or monochromatic to create a balanced look.
Great Jones cookware is a great example of this concept in action. Their nostalgic palette - featuring shades like blueberry, broccoli, mustard, and taffy - evokes the warmth of communal cooking. Pentagram, the design agency behind the branding, explains:
"The branding uses vintage colors, lush illustration and witty messaging to resonate emotionally with consumers and tap into the nostalgia of cooking as a communal activity." – Pentagram
Tools like Adobe Color and Coolors can help you experiment with and refine your palette.
Finally, test your colors across different mediums - screens, print, and merchandise - to ensure they look consistent everywhere.
6. Create Design Guidelines
Once you've designed your logo (Section 3), chosen your colors (Section 5), and defined your brand's tone (Section 4), it's time to bring everything together in a set of design guidelines. This document serves as a central hub for your logo, typography, color palette, imagery rules, and voice - ensuring your brand stays consistent across all platforms.
Here’s how to lock in the details for each element:
Logo Usage
Define minimum size, clear space, color variations, and placement rules.
Typography
Specify font families, weights, size hierarchies, and spacing requirements.
Color Palette
Break down primary and secondary colors, usage ratios, and suitable background combinations.
Imagery
Outline your preferred photo style, composition rules, and digital specifications.
Voice Usage
Include tone traits, do's and don'ts, and examples tailored to specific channels.
"Brand guidelines are crucial for developing and maintaining consistency across all brand communications. They help build a strong, trustworthy brand by unifying all aspects of brand presentation and interactions, ensuring that everyone on the team follows the same rules."
Provide an Asset Library
Make it easy for your team to access approved logos, color swatches, font files, and images by hosting them in a shared folder.
Exceptions
Document any exceptions, like alternate logo layouts for specific formats.
Include examples of correct and incorrect applications.
Updates
Keep your guidelines current by updating them to reflect new channels, formats, or changes in your brand.
With these guidelines in place, your brand will be ready to evolve and adapt as needed (Section 7).
7. Update Your Brand When Needed
As your business and market landscape change, your brand identity should keep up. Regular audits can help you identify when it’s time for an update while maintaining the essence of your brand.
When to Refresh Your Brand
A brand audit can help you spot red flags that signal the need for a refresh, such as:
Inconsistent visuals across platforms
Outdated packaging or design
A disconnect between branding and current company values
Expanding into new markets or product categories
Shifts in your brand’s mission or purpose
Branding that resembles competitors too closely
Take CVS Caremark as an example. The company became CVS Health to reflect its growing role in healthcare. This shift also included removing cigarette sales to align with its mission of promoting better health.
How to Update Your Brand
Start by analyzing website traffic, sales data, social media activity, customer feedback, and competitor strategies. Then, focus on:
Refreshing visuals and modernizing your design
Updating messaging to match your current goals
Strengthening your online presence
Engage your team in the process, test updates with focus groups, revise your brand guidelines, train employees on the changes, and keep an eye on market trends.
Tracking the Results
Once the updates are live, measure their success through metrics like sales performance, customer feedback, and shifts in how your brand is perceived.
These actions help ensure your brand remains relevant and consistent as your business evolves.
Conclusion
These seven strategies - defining your values, understanding your audience, shaping your visuals and tone, selecting the right colors, setting clear guidelines, and staying open to updates - help create a brand that truly connects with people and stands the test of time. A strong brand identity ensures a unified experience that mirrors your company’s core principles and speaks to your ideal customers. Keep your guidelines documented, review your progress regularly, and fine-tune your brand elements to maintain growth and build lasting loyalty.