Have you ever wondered why your brand doesn’t seem to connect or stand out to the general population? Maybe you aren’t advertising your brand to the right target market or maybe your brand’s image isn’t relatable, reassuring, or intriguing enough to gain viewers attention. In this blog, we are going to be breaking down various ways to make your brand a fluidly universal language. No matter what generation or where your viewers live currently, they will be able to identify and connect with your company.
When you hear the saying, “Golden Arches” or see a glowing yellow ‘M’, what do you automatically think of? If you said Mcdonalds, then you would be right alongside the rest of the millions of Americans who have consumed fast food in their lifetime. This concept is known as brand identification. Brand identification is a set of visual components that represent a company’s ideas and allows customers to remember a brand and distinguish it from others. This is essential in today’s society to stand out from your main competitors in the industry you are competing in. Holding true to your brand’s image and morals consistently through time will allow consumers to begin to be loyal to your company.
First and foremost, understanding your brand’s mission statement and ensuring alignment between your intended image and how your brand is actually perceived are crucial steps toward achieving business success. Once you’ve clarified these foundational elements during the brainstorming stage, you can effectively outline how you wish your brand to be perceived. This lays the groundwork for addressing seemingly minor details that significantly impact brand recognition, such as maintaining consistent shades of color, typography, and logo usage.
Stemming from this concept, identifying which target market you would like to infiltrate is also extremely important to a brand’s identity. If you are catering to millennials or Boomers, you may want to stay with more neutral colors and large text so that the graphic is easy to read and as straightforward as possible. If you are going to be catering to Gen X or Z, your color pallet is seemingly going to be bright, neon lettering with various elements on the graphic to keep their eyes on the advertisement. This keeps children and teens attention and makes them try and break down what they are looking at. This plays alongside catchy slogans or jingles. For example, Tony the tiger is a mascot for Kellog’s Frosted Flakes Cereal and he says in every commercial and/or ad, “They’reee Great!”. A lot of children can easily recognize his voice and even continue watching the commercial just so they would be able to say it with him; that is exactly why the marketing/advertising team put the slogan at the end.
Establishing these parameters around your brand’s image is essential for maintaining an overall depiction of the brand. The next step, and sometimes the most difficult step, is staying consistent. After the decision has been made for what your brand should look like in regard to color choices, typography, logos, etc., you then need to delegate that decision through every level/sector within the operation. Creating consistency on all social media platforms, websites, and apparel will ensure a fluid representation of what you want your brand to look like.
Overall, there are so many different ways that brand recognition is established and understanding how important it is will make or break your organization. Through various outlets, such as social media, your brand can be promoted. But if you promote your company differently on all these platforms without consistency, your brand will not gain a following. It is essential to gain a following and influence brand loyalty amongst your viewers to outshine your competitors. Every brand has its own image; how do you plan to stand out and rise up?
