INSIGHTS

Branding tips when starting out: 

1. Understand your audience and position in the marketplace
   Make sure you understand your audience, brand personality and position in the marketplace. If you are selling luxury products to 45yr + demographic then your brand needs to reflect this with elegance, simplicity and tone of voice. Whereas if you are an adventure business with an audience of 20-35 then you need to be more flamboyant, confident and bold.   This makes a huge difference so make sure. You understand your audience and positioning. 
2. Keep your audience in mind
   As above, keep your audience in mind. Do not choose a logo or colour palette based on your personal preference, unless you are your primary audience type. 
3. Find the right visual direction
   Create 3-4 mood boards based on your audience, brand positioning and product.  This helps you to understand the direction you need to go in, it’s nothing fancy, just a collection of images, colour palettes, textures, fonts, other marks or logos styles and sometimes descriptive words and typography that all show different routes for a style or mood you wish to reflect for your brand.  This helps save time later when you are working on your logo and colours.
   
   Learn why a moodboard is important for building your brand. 
4. Spend time on the colours
   Your brand colours have the power to attract your client or turn them off immediately, no matter how great your message is. Colour can be pivotal to the success of your brand and plays an important part in your marketing across all channels – your website, printed materials, social media profiles etc… ensuring your colours reflect your brand consistently can be the key to better engagement and brand recognition. Once you choose your colours please stick to them, don’t add more colours to the mix unless you are adding another service or product or having a brand refresh.
   
   Read why colour is important when building your brand. 
5. Be CONSISTENT
   This doesn’t mean being repetitive and boring, just recognisable and trustworthy. You need to ensure your message, tone of voice and more importantly, your brand look and feel stays consistent across all touch points. This is the only way you can start to build brand recognition and trust. Trust is key for people to come to you in the first place. So if you do one thing make sure it is consistent.Brand guidelines are a great way to make sure you and your team stay on brand. They can be simple but help to create clear, defined rules on visual elements such as logos, colours and fonts but also the tone of voice and keywords to use.

If you’d like help building your brand and brand identity, get in touch with Vicky at vicky@creativehutch.com