The Essentials of Brand Identity: A Step-by-Step Guide!

If your audience could take one thing away from their engagement with your brand, what would it be?

More than just a first impression, a brand identity is the lasting impression you leave with your audience. It consistently showcases your brand’s unique strengths and differentiators through a combination of brand voice, design elements, and story, driven by your MVV (mission, vision, and values).

Beyond this, a successful brand identity aligns with your marketing content when you can build a strong understanding of your target audience, set clear objectives, and develop an honest and ethical approach to how you present information to your audience. This includes compliance with your industry’s standards and regulations.

Table of Contents

Piece by Piece: What Is Brand Identity?

The ultimate goal of any organization’s brand identity is to forge genuine connections and convince your audience to invest in your brand. This requires the perfect convergence of key elements of your branding. Let’s take a closer look at each of these elements and the role they play in building brand identity.

1. Brand Voice

Brand voice is how you communicate with your audience, including the tone, language, and personality of your brand. Some other key elements of brand voice to consider are goals, principles, and intent, Point of View (POV), and specific style choices like syntax, word choice, grammar, and mechanics. It can often be helpful to develop a style guide to ensure consistency across your marketing content and delivery channels.

The tone of Voice, or TOV, is a crucial component of developing your brand voice. A strong TOV helps you craft an emotional experience for your audience through word choices that connect with your brand’s values, such as helpful, friendly, serious, professional, welcoming, et cetera.

2. Brand Story

A brand’s story is the narrative you tell about your products or services, your organization as a whole, and the people on your team and what they represent. It’s how you use storytelling to forge an emotional connection with your audience and how you present your company’s core values and the impact you have on the world. A brand story helps your audience understand your brand’s unique selling points and how you’re different than competing brands. Remember, your story is a living, breathing thing, a story that begins with what your brand represents and continues when customers add to your story with their own experiences when they engage with your brand and its products.

How Brand Identity Impacts Visual Branding

Nothing happens by accident when it comes to branding. Visual branding elements aren’t picked out of a hat at random. Your visual design elements should connect to your brand identity and brand story. Your brand’s personality, purpose, and tone of voice are all important considerations, as well as the values you want to convey to your target personas.

For example, an athletic brand may want to incorporate visual branding elements that convey movement, speed, and energy, whereas a high-end luxury apparel brand will want visual elements that convey luxury, exclusivity, and elegance.

Some visual branding elements to consider include:

Logo
Branding color palette
Typography
Style guides
Product branding
Social media templates
Visuals such as illustrated graphics and photographs
A brand kit that contains these various elements

How Mission, Vision, and Values Build Brand Identity

At the core of a strong brand identity is your organization’s mission, vision for the future, and driving values. Your MVV impacts every level of your organization, so it only makes sense that using these elements to shape your brand identity will help you better connect with your target audience and build a lasting impression.

While your mission defines your company’s purpose, your vision communicates your ongoing impact on the culture around you. Your values are the core beliefs you share with your audience. Each element of your MVV should help build your brand identity.

Your mission statement drives your brand narrative. Your mission statement should tell your audience the purpose your brand serves. It should also convey your unique value proposition that differentiates you from competing brands. By articulating the “why” behind your brand, you can build a roadmap for messaging that forges an emotional, purpose-driven connection with an audience.
Your vision propels your brand into the future. Whereas your mission defines what your organization is doing today, your vision provides a roadmap for future aspirations. It articulates your company’s ambitions, informs your brand values, and guides long-term brand strategy and messaging.
Your values help your brand stay the course. Think of values as ethical guard rails that guide your organization’s behavior, decisions, beliefs, and how you interact with your audience. Values are also a cornerstone of brand identity. They help define your brand’s personality and how you’re perceived, and they can help define your messaging, including tone of voice, the language you use, and your overall messaging strategy. For example, if your brand values innovation and creativity, you might have a personality that is dynamic, bold, and forward-thinking. If your brand values tradition and craftsmanship, your messaging should convey reliability and a focus on heritage.

Compliance in Content Marketing: What It Means for Your Brand

While your MVV helps guide the different components of your brand identity, another crucial component to consider—especially for brands in heavily regulated industries—is compliance to make sure your marketing content is communicating information ethically to consumers, as well as following legal regulatory standards.

Some examples of industries where compliance with marketing standards is especially impactful are those that are most heavily regulated, such as healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, finance, legal, energy, and agriculture.

However, it can be challenging to strike a balance between compliance and creating engaging content that connects with your brand voice and identity.

The Federal Trade Commission Act provides some basic guidelines for marketers. A few of these guidelines can be summarized as follows:

Advertising should be non-deceptive, evidence-based, truthful, and fair.
Ads should not be deceptive by containing or omitting information that’s likely to mislead consumers with regard to their decision to buy or use a product.
Ads should not be unfair in a way that could cause consumer injury they couldn’t reasonably avoid and isn’t outweighed by the benefits.

Other compliance considerations include using disclaimers to limit liability, avoiding unwarranted advice outside of industry regulations, and avoiding duplicate content—both in terms of avoiding publishing duplicate content on your web pages and safeguarding against content theft by others.

What is your brand identity?

Crafting your brand identity requires the synthesis of several core elements and key considerations around your organization’s values, goals, voice, story, ethics, and legal compliance. Telling your story in a way that connects with consumers and provides them with a genuine understanding of what your brand represents is the goal of your brand’s identity. This is no easy feat, but you can achieve a strong brand identity by following your MVV and building your brand voice through marketing content and other communications. Need help? Consider hiring professional content marketers who can help you develop and execute a brand-driven content plan from start to finish.

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What steps are you taking to shape your brand identity? Share your thoughts, experiences, or questions in the comments below—we’d love to hear from you!