Branding is the process of creating a specific value or perception in a person's mind about a business. A strong brand can be ensured only through the simultaneous functioning of the 3 fundamental components of branding. These are Business and Psychology, Graphic Design, and Communication.
Related article: Why do businesses need branding?
Understanding these three fundamental components of branding is essential for businesses to create a successful and memorable brand that connects with their target audience and stands out in a crowded marketplace.
The above ‘Venn Diagram of Branding’ clearly states that branding is a result of the overlapping of Business & Psychology, Graphic Design, and Communication. Let me break it down further and help you understand the importance of various fields and subfields involved in the process of branding.
Please note that this breakdown would be more about the overview of what the components of branding are. I would definitely dive deeper into each of these along with a lot of interesting examples in the forthcoming content.
You may consume this article in the form of a video on Brandzpree's YouTube channel...
Business & Psychology
Business, here, refers to the aspects of business studies that are essential components of branding. The process of creating a brand involves the development of brand strategy, competitor analysis, SWOT analysis, and market research, which fall into the business side of things.
If you’re looking at becoming a branding specialist, it would be very helpful to have some knowledge about the different types of businesses and industries out there. It would definitely aid in crafting a better foundation for the other aspects of the brand to be built upon. Though it isn’t directly useful for branding, it also helps to have a general overview of the various elements involved in running a business like management, operations, and finance.
By definition, psychology is the scientific study of the human mind and people’s behavioral patterns. It includes the study of phenomena such as feelings and thoughts.
We must understand that, at the root level, the aim of any business is to increase its revenue through an increase in the quantity and/or quality of the customers. And, this would be achieved through understanding psychological aspects like consumer behavior, customer journey, color psychology, shape psychology, etc., and developing the ideal target user personas.
The reason why I personally felt like clubbing both business and psychology as a single component of branding is that these are extremely vast and deep subjects and not all the aspects of these fields are truly essential for the process of branding.
Graphic Design
Design, in general, is the planned construction of a functional and aesthetic object or system while satisfying certain goals and constraints. While ‘design’ is a huge subject on its own, spanning various popular professions like architecture and fashion, the closest subset of design relevant to branding is known as Graphic Design.
Graphic design also referred to as Visual Communication design, deals with conveying a particular message through the use of visuals like images, patterns, and illustrations. When it comes to a business, the graphic design component of branding can be seen in the choice of colors, typeface, design of layouts, and the overall planning of the look and feel of the business and its products.
Graphic design has a long list of subfields associated with it. These could be broadly categorized into the following segments:
1. Brand Identity Design
This segment of graphic design deals with the designing of an appropriate logo for a business along with the development of the right color palette, typography, layout, icons, and patterns that are unique to the business. The most popular service called ‘logo design’ falls under brand identity.
2. Print Design
This deals with the designing of anything that needs to be printed and, at most times, is mass-produced on a larger scale as compared to the other segments. These include editorial//publication design assets like books (and book covers), magazines, newspapers, etc., as well as promotional materials like banners, posters, billboards, flyers, etc.
3. Packaging Design
The outer covering of any product that aims at attracting a potential buyer is what is called packaging design. It is, therefore, called the “silent salesman” of the product. Packaging design can be further divided into 3 types:
a. Primary Packaging
This is the packaging in direct contact with the product itself. The design on the tube containing face cream, for example, would be the primary packaging design.
b. Secondary Packaging
This is the packaging that contains the primary packaging. But, this need not always be consumer-facing packaging design. Like, in our example, the secondary packaging could either be a well-designed, attractive box that has the cream tube in it, or it could also be a shipping box containing one or two such tubes. The shipping box here is considered to be a single unit.
c. Tertiary Packaging
This is the outermost box protecting multiple secondary packaging units commonly referred to as SKUs (Stock Keeping Units). The tertiary packages are usually large-sized cardboard boxes used as protection while storing and transporting the products.
4. Digital Design
Any graphic design material to do with digital displays or the internet world can be categorized into this segment. This includes a long range of assets like UI design, website design, app design, social media posts, website banner ads, to even content displayed on digital billboards. Now, with the Metaverse coming into play, this segment could become deeper and deeper with Virtual Reality(VR) and Augmented Reality(AR) ads, etc.
5. Motion Graphics
Sometimes referred to as Motion Design, this segment is essentially graphic design with an illusion of motion. Motion graphics is multimedia footage that combines animation with text, graphics, and audio. These include kinetic typography (or moving type), educational explainer videos, and promotional ads.
Communication
Communication is a crucial component of branding, which is all about how a brand talks and behaves with potential customers and existing customers. Broadly speaking, this refers to both verbal communication and visual communication. It includes the development of messaging, storytelling, advertising, public relations, and social media, to name a few.
In other words, it involves the creation of a consistent voice and tone for the brand that the target audience would relate to. The communication aspect supports the lead generation and sales goals of the business.
Now that we’ve looked at each of the fundamental fields of branding and their importance, let’s dive a little deeper and closer to branding by understanding each of the subfields that are formed by combining any 2 out of the 3 fundamental fields.
Brand Strategy
Formed by the overlapping of ‘Communication’ and ‘Business & Psychology’, Brand Strategy is about researching and understanding the target audience, creating a unique personality for the brand, and developing a plan to reach the desired goals. It’s a long-term plan defining how you want people to feel about your brand and remember it.
Brand strategy is a road map created to guide your brand toward success. It helps the sales force sell more and provides inspiration and clarity to the employees.
As branding enthusiasts, we must understand that the development of brand strategy is a very important stage in any branding project. If you’re a brand designer you would already understand the importance of brand strategy as this forms the basis of any design exploration for the brand.
Building a brand is similar to constructing a skyscraper. Just like how a skyscraper needs a very strong foundation to withstand the weight of the building, we need to have a strong base for building the brand as well. And, this strong base is known in the branding world, as ‘Brand Strategy’.
The brand strategy consists of 3 segments - brand essence, brand positioning, and brand persona. And, these are further divided into 4 parts each.
Let’s look into what are the 12 parts of Brand Strategy…
1. Brand Essence
This is what the brand is at its core, what it truly stands for. The brand essence is about why a business exists, what is it trying to solve, and how do they plan to do that. This includes the heart and soul of the brand like brand purpose, vision & mission, brand values, and brand architecture:
a. Brand Purpose
This is the ultimate reason that the brand exists. Also known as the core purpose, this is a reason beyond just making profits. This is the ‘Why’ of a brand.
b. Vision & Mission
The business’s vision is all about the future goal or status that the brand is seeking based on its core purpose. This is the ‘What’ of the brand. It’s the outcome of your brand as a result of its long-term commitment to its purpose.
The company’s mission defines all the practices that will be followed by your brand to achieve its vision and fulfill its purpose. This is the ‘How’ of the brand. This helps understand how the brand will achieve its ultimate purpose.
c. Brand Values
These are the core principles, ideologies, and philosophies that the brand believes in. Even the company’s employees need to imbibe these because these are the human values that affect the brand behavior as a whole. These directly affect how a brand behaves with its customers, be it the founder of the company, the employees, or anyone who’s representing the company.
d. Brand Architecture
In simple terms, brand architecture is the relationship or hierarchy between a parent brand and its sub-brands. Essentially, it adds structure to a brand portfolio. It includes the strategic naming of the brands within a parent brand's portfolio.
2. Brand Positioning
This is all about understanding a little deeper about where the brand stands within its industry. This includes defining the target audience, doing market research, analyzing the competition, and defining the awareness goals for the business:
a. Target Audience
These are the population segments of the market your brand wants to reach and attract. This is realized by identifying the characteristics of your ideal target customer like age, geographic location, income level, behavioral traits, and personality traits.
b. Market Research
In the branding sense, market research is about understanding the company and the industry, the nature of its offerings, and the business potential in terms of the market size and the business model. This is carried out either through surveys and interviews or through secondary research, which is nothing but gathering insights from the research carried out by any other entity in the past.
c. Competitor Analysis
To help position your brand in your industry, it is very important to analyze various aspects of your competition like their business strategy, their brand identity, their brand messaging, etc.
d. Awareness Goals
This is about setting targets for the ways your brand would reach people and increase brand awareness in general. This could be about increasing leads, getting more inquiries, actively posting on social media, improving website traffic, etc.
3. Brand Persona
Any business’s goal would be to attract customers and this is especially true for B2C businesses. To achieve this, a brand needs to gain the trust of a person. This is done by developing the right character for the brand like the brand personality, its tone of voice, the name of the brand, and the brand’s tagline:
a. Brand Personality
As a fact, people relate more to people. Now, since an important goal of any brand would be to attract people, it is important to personify your brand by developing a brand personality for it. One way of doing this is by determining the right brand archetype that’s suitable for the brand.
b. Tone of Voice
This is how the brand talks with its customers, for example, how they write their brand’s messaging, how they interact with people on social media, etc. The tone of voice is the feeling that your brand generates in its audiences’ minds through a unique style of writing and vocabulary.
c. Brand Name
A brand name is a word or group of words used to identify your brand, products, or services, and distinguish your company from your competitors in the market. Just like the name of a person, the more unique it is, the more recognizable and memorable the brand will be.
d. Brand Tagline
A short phrase that is considered to be the motto of your brand. Ideally, it reflects the brand’s purpose and vision and also tries to be at par with the brand’s tone of voice.
Brand Identity
Formed by the overlapping of ‘Graphic Design’ with ‘Business & Psychology’, Brand Identity is one of the very first visual aspects of the business that a potential customer would come across. Brand identity is considered to be a subfield of graphic design and it comes right after developing the appropriate brand strategy.
Brand identity typically includes elements and guidelines that ensure a consistent visual representation of the brand. This is what defines the overall ‘Look and feel’ of the brand.
As shown above, the Brand Identity design of a business consists of 9 different components. Let’s look into what are the 9 parts of Brand Identity...
1. Logo
A logo design is a unique graphic that helps identify and recognize a brand. This graphical mark could be a symbol, a text, or a combination of both. The more unique this mark is, the better the brand stays on top of people’s minds. There are 9 different types of logos out in the world.
2. Color Palette
The color palette is nothing but a collection of colors that are unique to your brand. In situations where the logo or name could not be used, the color palette helps to clearly identify the brand. The most popular standalone uses of the color palette are in the brand’s advertisements and product packaging.
3. Typography
This refers to the choice of typeface, the font styles, and the spacing between letters, words, and lines that may or may not be unique to your brand. The brand’s typography brings the text to life by making it legible and visually attractive.
A typeface refers to a particular style of lettering. It’s like a family, and the members of the family are called fonts which typically have different weights.
The brand typeface of Brandzpree is called ‘Outfit’ which is available for free on Google Fonts. Here, Outfit Light and Outfit Extrabold are called fonts.
4. Pattern
The pattern is a repetition of symbols or illustrations that represent a particular brand. It helps add aesthetic value to the brand’s products while simultaneously maintaining its identity.
A brand pattern usually comes in handy in applications where there's not much requirement of text and imagery but, the brand still wants to maintain its identity.
For example, Louis Vuitton bags have a very unique pattern that helps them maintain the luxury look and feel that the brand is known for, even in the absence of its logo.
5. Graphic elements
These are either simple or complex illustrations that carry the brand’s color palette and are aimed at giving the same perception as the overall brand.
These aren’t necessarily a mandatory part of the brand identity but it’s definitely an advantage to have them. Their most popular applications are in the editorial designs created for the brand.
6. Layout
In applications where multiple elements of text, images, and illustrations are used as part of communicating a message by the brand, there’s a need for a structure to help provide clarity to the viewer. The layout does exactly that. It provides the rules and visual guidelines for the arrangement of these elements using visual tools like grids.
7. Iconography
Icons are a collection of graphical signs that have a clear meaning associated with them. Icons either represent something that’s unique to the brand or represent general things that are common across the industry.
The most important thing to remember while designing an icon set for a brand is that each of these marks should have the same visual style, for example, the colors could be from the brand color palette, or the corners and the thickness of the stroke on the icons could be similar to that of the brand’s logo.
8. Imagery
Sometimes referred to as ‘Brand Imagery’, it is the style of photography that should be maintained in the images used in any communication or marketing assets that belong to a particular brand.
These are things like the lighting on the subject, the framing, the choice of subjects, and the type of photography itself (whether it’s a portrait, macro photography, landscapes, light art, etc.). These images are used as part of the brand’s communication and need to be at par with the personality of the brand.
9. Visual Language
Visual language is a combination of all the previously mentioned elements. This is used to create a visual system or a visual template as to how a particular brand asset should look like. This is very useful in creating branded content that’s dynamic in nature like a brand’s social media posts.
Visual language is especially evident in packaging design, where a similar layout with the brand’s logo, pattern, color, and typography, is used across all the products as the foundation. Even though each packaging is unique to the product, the visual language is what ensures that it looks like the products belong to the same brand family.
Marketing
Formed by the overlapping of ‘Communication’ and ‘Graphic Design’, Marketing is what promotes the business to potential customers through the use of visual design and content strategy (the planning of what type of content is created and how that content is publicly released). It’s essentially a method of conveying the value of the business and its products to the target audience. Marketing can be categorized into 3 types based on the medium that is used:
1. Paid Media Marketing
This is intentional marketing which is done through paid media like TV commercials, magazine advertisements, social media ads, affiliating marketing, etc.
2. Owned Media Marketing
This includes marketing which is partly intentional. This is through business-owned assets like the website, storefront, social media profile, company brochure, etc.
3. Earned Media Marketing
This includes completely unintentional marketing where the reputation that a company gains over time through goodwill, social activities, or simply just good products and services. This type of marketing is made possible through word of mouth, customer testimonials, and organic influencer content, to name a few.
Conclusion
Though there are various interdisciplinary fields involved in the process of branding, a successful brand is only when all of them work together to create a strong personality and consistent communication that resonates with the target audience and helps in building loyalty over time.
Here are a few reads you might find interesting:
Kommentare