How to Brand In 3 Simple Steps

Ahhh Branding. Some point in your business you have to do branding unless you want it to be just another product lipstick, sneaker, t-shirt seen as a commodity *GASP*. Or for service providers, doctors, lawyers, accountants that are easily forgotten.

But branding can be a total headache! It’s all thought and creative work but this is a very important step in your business. 

Almost $620 billion has been spending in advertising and branding by BIG Companies and it’s really the BIG deal to be always on top of mind with their consumer and clients

But I’m gonna give you a hack that will make your life easier that these big companies actually do so you can create a brand from scratch.

Remember that this is an overview! There is a lot of nuances that each business has but this quick method is derived from the same principles.

Start with Strategy

You cannot have a brand unless it has a plan and layout of the business.

To start, what’s your business goal? This quarter? This year? By asking this to yourself you always go back to your north star, your goal.

Start by Asking Why.

Why should people care about your business?

What is it about your business that is unique?

These might be tough questions; this is why we need a framework.

Sometimes we need to ask why we need to have a logo, sales page, copywriting service, etc. but before we can do that. We need to start asking ourselves why we need this service or a particular project.

Get a Framework

This is a basic framework from the book Creative Strategy by Douglas Davis where you can derive most marketing and branding ideas that can spark or even pivot your business to something better.

This is one of my client’s positioning statements that we’ve made for her brand.

Create the position Statement

The position statement is key so it will derive most of the creative execution from it. It is the seed that will contain all the fruits of branding work.

"We provide waist trainers to empower women who want to bring all the boys to the yard without feeling discomfort and shame with their bodies."

From this statement, we can come up with visuals, copy, and content that will be aligned with the brand.

This is a template you can use after you’ve created the framework.

We provide [feature] to [adjective][target customer] who wants to [benefit] without [pain point/caveat]

This explains the feature, benefit target market, and the problem you're trying to solve into a one-line statement that can be understood by people!

Build up your Visual Moodboard

After we have created the systematic and logical approach of branding let’s dive into the emotional part.

We need to construct the mood board or style scapes.

Stylescapes is a document that captures the emotion, ideals, and values of the brand in a visual sense. It contains visual cues, designs, textures that represent the brand.

Here are some examples of Mood boards:

Sky’s the limit here you can search different images for your mood board. The best resource is Unsplash, Pexels, Pinterest, Behance, and Dribbble.

The thing to remember here is that the mood board will just act as an inspiration to create the visuals of the brand.

Here are more examples of mood boards.

Creative Execution

This is where we focus our efforts to create the visual identity of the brand, design systems, marketing collateral.

It’s important to be consistent in all areas of the marketing collateral so that it appeases the part of the human brain that craves familiarity. We’re afraid of the unknown. So we need to get exposed to it first multiple times before we recognize and trust it.

Tools like Photoshop, Illustrator if you want to be advanced will help you here.

You can also look at Canva.com for templates designs

If you want more customization that are not generic but templates so the creative production is fast. Envato.com or creativemarket.com can come in handy.

BONUS ADVICE:

Branding is a delicate process of what’s business values are, it’s personality, voice, and tone as well as the personality of the target market.

Remember: creating a brand is like creating another person/persona that your audience/potential customers can latch on to and have a relationship with.

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