3 Big Mistakes to Avoid When Building or Renovating a Brand Identity

The visual identity of your business or product/service is a vital tool in communicating its essence. Before someone even considers contacting your business or buying your product/service, he or she will first formulate ideas — unconscious perceptions – about it, based on the look and feel of your brand’s logo. Having a strategically and professionally developed identity will more effectively represent your brand’s spirit, personality and core characteristics, and better resonate with your prospects and customers. In turn, this positive impression will support your sales and marketing efforts through all the channels you pursue, building the credibility you need to aggressively compete in the marketplace.

Here are the three must-haves your brand-building initiative (or brand renovation) needs for success. When marketers skip or bypass these essentials, the lackluster outcome is not only disappointing but costly.

  1. Messaging Platform: To help clients develop strong, customer-focused brand positioning and messaging, Johnson Direct has developed a process that enables us to effectively gather intelligence to detailed message maps, broader branding and positioning or creative/messaging strategy for brand development, rebranding and marketing initiatives.
  2. Brand Identity Design: A brand’s identity must be memorable. You want to achive the highest recall possible among your target audience. The identity you choose must be relevant to produce that level of recognition, and represent your brand’s promise. Through Johnson Direct’s Direct Branding™ approach, our clients achieve brand identity differentiation in the marketplace, communications synergy across all media and the brand promise, and create a long-lasting impression within their niche.
  3. Brand Identity Usage Guide: By creating a brand identity usage guide, you are establishing a consistent application of the brand identity across all marketing efforts. A coherent look and feel of all branded communications is critical for building a solid brand and image. Any use of the brand’s logo, taglines, and other brand elements must adhere to the standards set forth in the guide. There are 13 rules your brand ID guide should enforce.

Brand identity development is among Johnson Direct’s specialties. Here are just a few examples of the powerful logos we’ve developed for our clients:

Branding is as much — if not more — a strategic and methodical process as it is a creative service. In fact, if you embark on a branding, or rebranding, initiative without the proper investment in Fact-Based Research and Strategic Planning, you’ll eventually learn that your focus on creativity and design has been wasted. And in recent times, we all realize that a company’s shrinking marketing budget should be put to work — with measurable results and a positive ROI.

Our process, Direct Branding™, is an in-depth approach that guides organizations through “brand discovery” — taking your brand promise, products and services, values and methods under consideration.

Got a brand-related dilemma? Get in touch with the pro that trademarked Direct Branding at 262.432.0183 or grant.johnson@johnsondirect.com.