Brand is the thing which makes customers loyal, employees want to work for you and people know your name. It’s that feeling which is intangible to the average consumer that makes people connect to your business. But brands don’t just happen by accident. A strong brand identity coupled with an integrated brand strategy will give you the key to success.

What is Brand Identity?

A brand identity is the physical elements which people see related to your brand; be it your logo, colours, or tone of voice. The identity forms the foundations of all assets you produce across your website, packaging, social channels and even your product.

Why is Brand Identity so important?

A brand’s identity pertains to every aspect of the brand that consumers interact with visually, aurally, and emotionally. If a brand has a strong identity, it can better engage with its target audience, and become a brand which people are passionate about purchasing from and sharing to their peers.

Examples of Brand Identity:

Pyrex

Pearlfisher’s work for Pyrex has elevated the household and leisure brand’s renowned red identity. By creating a more modern branding identity, the brand now stands out more and conveys its values of promoting carefree, enjoyable cooking experiences to its target audience. By retaining the brand’s recognizable logo while using Sharpie-style typography for its sub-brands, Pyrex’s confident and innovative approach to cuisine has been brought to life.

Byoma

In Pearlfisher’s work for luxury skincare brand Byoma, we were tasked with assisting this next-generation brand in breaking through the barriers of outdated skincare protocols. The split device ‘O’ used in the brand’s name was designed to reflect Byoma’s mission of shaking up the modern skincare industry with innovative products and formulations, and the use of modern iconography and typography focus audiences’ attention on the brand’s passion for pioneering science.

Byoma’s brand strategy also included custom-designed, sleek, and vibrant packaging that is fully recyclable, and square bottles that enable efficient shipping to reduce carbon emissions. The brand’s bottles are designed to be refillable to position the brand as an environmentally conscious one that promotes a circular approach to skincare.

What is Brand Strategy?

A brand strategy sets out the long-term vision for a company – what are you trying to achieve and how are you going to do that?

It spans multiple departments, including marketing, product, and communications, and fuels every decision throughout the business to make sure every step is a step closer to achieving your end goal as a company.

Why is Brand Strategy so important?

An effective brand strategy helps to define who you are as a business. Without that in place, it’s easy to lose sight of your long-term goals, and you don’t have a way to determine whether your brand is moving in the right direction.

With an effective brand strategy in place, you can start to form deeper connections with your target audience and build a larger customer base, helping you capture more market share and ultimately bring more customers through the door.

Types of Brand Strategy

There are several types of brand strategy you can use to structure your brand and add value. These include:

  • Corporate branding. A core value of business operations and a mission and philosophy that an organization can develop to showcase itself to its target audiences and employees. For instance, McDonald’s is renowned for having a consistent branding strategy across its products, product packaging designs and platforms, all of which feature its iconic logo and bold graphics.
  • Product branding. Making specific products distinctive and easy to recognize and tell apart from those of other brands. The design process is an essential part of this branding strategy, as it enables customers to identify products with ease.
  • Visual identity branding. Translates brand identity into visual language using smart, intuitive graphic design that speaks to customers on an emotional level.
  • Service branding. Focuses on customers’ needs, and enable brands to use their customer service to add value.
  • Online branding. Helps businesses and organizations position themselves within the growing online marketplace. Of the many types of branding, it focuses specifically on a brand’s website, blogs, social media platforms, and digital content to create a cohesive customer experience.

Examples of Brand Strategy:

Bang & Olufsen

Audio lifestyle brand Bang & Olufsen’s goal is to convey the beauty and power of music through luxury consumer electronics. But its product-centric packaging design didn’t align with this emotional mission.

Pearlfisher focused on creating a product branding strategy that drew inspiration from the tactile world of print magazines to capture the anticipation of vibrant music with a narrative-first design approach. The new packaging design conveys the brand’s passion for contemporary culture in a way that resonates with its target market and aligns with their experience-driven lifestyles.

Seedlip

Seedlip, a premium non-alcoholic spirit is another excellent branding example. Using natural inspiration, the brand was brought to life by pairing ingredients and processes in an illustrative design language that focuses on alchemy, discovery, and the majesty of nature.

The updated branding allows Seedlip to establish a new category, align itself with contemporary culture and a niche target audience that chooses not to drink, and translate its ethos into an immersive customer experience.

Hum By Colgate

Pearlfisher’s branding strategy work for Hum by Colgate, a new smart electric toothbrush brand, combined product, digital, and visual identity branding to create a fun, approachable brand experience for consumers.

The project was inspired by the sounds of an electric toothbrush and tells a sensory story through clean visual language that connects the brand with its target audiences on literal and emotional levels. The result is a dynamic, unique, and interactive packaging design and recognizable brand identity that resonates with customers who enjoy creating new, modern self-care routines.

Combining your Brand Identity and Strategy

Frequently strategy and identity for brands become conflated with one another – individually both are important components of any business, together though they can be the route to business success. Your brand identity defines what people see, whilst your strategy is how they see it and how you push that message out to the world.

With brand identity being incorporated into your overall brand strategy, you begin to build a much more consistent picture of who you are and what you stand for, helping to connect with your audience on a deeper level. This is most commonly achieved through a consistent visual identity branding strategy – making sure you are using the same colours/logos/fonts/tone of voice across all of your assets, be it your website, social media presence, or product packaging – but it can also span into the corporate world, where your level of service and your approach forms who you are as a brand, before referrals help grow your business further.

How To Build a Successful Brand

Building a successful brand is much harder in reality than success stories would have you believe. You cannot simply launch a brand and expect it to be successful; you need to take the time to truly understand what your brand purpose actually is and what you are trying to achieve.

Only then can you start understanding your audience and how your brand will be different to all of the others in the market – what is going to make you stand out, what problems will you solve that others can’t, and why is that important to your audience?

To build a successful brand, you need to invest the time in three key areas:

Future-First

At Pearlfisher everything we do has an eye to the future. We spend time discovering how the world is changing and exploring the shifts which shape our lives. Thinking future-first will enables brands to be everlasting amongst their core demographic, appearing to know what they’ll want before they even know it themselves.

Strategy to Unlock Creativity

Taking the knowledge from future-thinking and feeling inspired by the change going on in the world, this needs to tie into a robust strategy. Strategy should be the stage where ideas get focused in on how a brand can use them to connect to consumers.

Create

From here it’s down to creators, designers, and realisers to take the big thinking and strategy and turn it into actionable brand identities and strategies.