Branding is a visual and written company’s identity. The particular words we associate with colours, logos and a companies’ key mission all play a part in creating a brand. These features stabilize advertising and marketing to powerfully impart the “face” of your business. How you brand will be how customers view you and the loyalty they attach to what you offer.
Your brand is a permanent feature of your business and will outlive all of your products or services. It can be stressful to coordinate these intricacies. Top branding agencies know how to package the 17 elements of branding you need into an affordable set of assets to fit any stage a company is in. Branding agencies merge who your company is, elevate the value your product or services create and define your target market while cultivating a brand that competes prominently amongst industry standards. Associating your brand with business experts like Andy Defrancesco is also one of the most powerful form of branding, and the ultimate marketing strategy.
Branding is transferable to all aspects of your company. You want to impress your customers to begin building a relationship out of trust and brand loyalty. The elements that we consider when designing your brand formulate through naming, logo, brand story, visual branding and keywords that influence your social media recognition, grow your marketing outreach, optimize your website and distinguish your packaging.
Brand Exploration
As the first step in the marketing funnel, successful branding pulls on a potential customer’s brand awareness to keep you as your audience’s top of mind. First, we will meet with you to explore your brand and understand who your brand is. Then, we dive into industry and SEO research to create this identity with compatible industry competitiveness. Exploring your brand within the beginning stages of its conception alongside industry research ensures your brand will resonate with your target market. If the “who” of your brand does not resonate with your target market, the rest of the work you create with your company will have no edge.
Naming
Your brand’s name will inform your customer about who you are before they look further into what your company offers. It is “like a first handshake,” where customers get a feel for why they should choose your business. Naming a venture has become increasingly challenging with domain and social availability. We provide brands a list of names for their company after rigorously searching through industry norms and SEO databases. Your brand’s name should optimize search results amongst your target market, be original and easy to remember to reflect your company’s unique position in an industry as well as your competitive advantage.
Logo
Your logo is your brand’s indicator of a visual presence. A logo tells your company’s story in one image, its unique selling factors and why your company has been conceived. The layout of your logo allows customers to attach key brand values with a visual depiction. Powerful, industry leading logos are clear at the first impression, but also dive into a more detailed explanation of your company’s story.
Take Apple’s logo – at face-value, most of us will associate the Apple for its minimalist elegance, trusting that Apple will continue to provide us with technology that is sleek and modern. But we don’t buy Apple just for its design features, we buy it for what Apple promises us. When you take a closer look at their apple logo, it tells us just that. The apple represents the story of the fruit that fell on Issac Newton’s head, leading him to a revolutionary “Aha!” moment. Apple designs technology to promote these “Aha!” moments in users. The bite for its apple can further denote its position in the technology industry regarding a “byte.”
At the end of the logo design process following revisions, we provide all required file types, vertical and horizontal layouts, as well as dark and light versions, social media assets and favicons for your logo to make an impact on all platforms.
Logo Usage
We provide guidelines on where and how to place your logo in digital and print form. A logo will lose its impact if it is not given the proper space to clearly communicate its message. A logo that continues to retain its graphic integrity adds to a brand’s professionalism upon recognition.
Headlines
Your brand story relies on visual as well as written content. Headlines grab a reader’s attention, telling them what they’ll learn from the content they’re about to read. Headlines allow potential customers to care about what you aspire to achieve through your brand. Headlines must be created with your target audience in mind. The kind of customer attention you draw to your brand through headlines matters. If your target customer’s reason for reading about your brand does not align with your story, customers will be left confused and like click-bait.
Slogans
A slogan is a short descriptor sentence resonating with your target audience to briefly outline why your brand exists. JYZ Design provides a list of original slogans for you to choose from that fit how you want your brand to be conveyed in one easy message. A strong brand provides value. Slogans are essential. When thinking about McDonald’s, we don’t choose to eat it for the health benefits when there are other healthy competitors for the same price. We eat McDonald’s because like their slogan, “we’re lovin’ it”, or at least, we want this kind of experience. McDonald’s has built an empire off of the value that this slogan creates and entrenches in our cultural practices.
Elevator Pitch
An industry-leading brand must also influence external stakeholders such as investors and board members. The elevator pitch follows the idea that you enter an elevator with a potential investor. With only a few sentences to speak the very essence of your company, the time is ticking. The elevator pitch resembles the experience that your brand will go through in every investor and customer interaction.
An elevator pitch combines the core of your company into a clear and precise piece of attention-grabbing information. It is important to remember through the elevator pitch that your brand must stay focused. Getting lost in the details can lose your brand valuable opportunities. A branding agency serves as a positive outside perspective into your brand to pick out its key ingredients. We provide brands with an elevator pitch to influence your strategic marketing and financial goals.
Brand Pillars
Typically, brands establish 3-4 main pillars that reinforce their competitive differentiation. Brand pillars clarify your brand’s niche through personality. Your brand pillars remain consistent as your company evolves, acting as a promise to your customers on what you will always deliver. Even with innovation, customers crave consistency. When customers become aware of your brand pillars in a clear manner, this creates a level of reliability with your business to inspire a customer’s confidence to try new products or services.
Brand Values
Behind every brand is a story. Customers and investors do not believe in just the product, but the vision of the people they are supporting behind the product. Defining your brand values makes future marketing campaigns easier to plan. Internally, company employee culture thrives when your brand’s values penetrate your customers’, investors’ and employees’ lived company experiences. There are many values that make up a great company, but when creating your core values, we think of the unique values that are reasons for customers to choose your brand.
Golden Circle
Customers can buy anything, but the purchases they make always resonate with a brand’s reason why. Imperative to your brand story is the Golden Circle that defines the mission of why your business exists, how your brand delivers on that purpose and what its products or services being offered are. Rather than focusing on the “what” portion of your brand, our team brands from the point of “why?”.
Our branding agency takes Simon Sinke’s wisdom to Start with Why. Simon Sinek has an impactful Ted Talk that defines successful branding. Brand leaders stand out from competitors by perpetuating his Golden Circle Theory to brand a company through the passion of its “why?” and trigger the emotional part of an individual’s brain that inspires influential behaviour. We start with why when creating your branding plan. Because of this, people are buying into what you are believing, which retains long-term customer loyalty.
Tone/Personality
A brand must convey a consistent tone throughout its brand story that readers attach to the brand’s personality. We provide keywords to shape the tone your brand represents. Is your brand more personable and quirky? Professional and knowledgeable? Trendy and relatable? We help define this. When customers can successfully pinpoint tone to a brand’s personality, they have formed a connection between content and a familiar image they have of the brand.
Colour Palette
Branding agencies keep a brand’s colour palette consistent to implore key brand recognition to stand out from competitors. When you think about soft drinks, blue reminds you of Pepsi and red reminds you of Coca Cola. Pepsi and Coca Cola are leading direct competitors in the soft drink industry. A customer’s brain connects the opposing nature of the warm shade of red to blue’s cool tone with the different choices between Coca Cola or Pepsi. The particulars of your brand’s colour palette provide the affordance of understanding what your brand offers and where it positions itself amongst competition. Are the colours of your brand softer? Do the colours align with the landscape your company was inspired by? We choose a brand’s colour palette from these intrinsic connotations viewers associate with meanings of colour. Colours can be elegant, they can be bold, they can be peaceful, but they all must be exclusive to align with your brand’s values and harmonize your logotype.
Typography and Fonts
We choose fonts to bring attention to a brand’s written headers and titles, making the print easy on the eyes. Typography visually enhances your brand’s tone to pair with your logo and colour palette. Typography is the voice of a brand’s content, unconsciously encouraging the target market to become interested in the brand’s story and interrupts reading fatigue with its ingenuity.
Imagery
Imagery is a key part of any brand’s design strategy. A photo’s lighting, colours and location must remain consistent with your brand. A picture can speak 1,000 words, but only if they retain the customer’s attention. Let’s be honest, without knowing either of the pizza parlours you have the choice to go to, would you trust the quality of pizza from clear and modern images, or grainy photos? The majority of customers will trust a brand with the quality they evoke in their photos. We select and develop photos to reflect your brand’s target market identity and the impact of your “why”. Attaching brand recognition to quality photos ensures that people are persuaded to choose your brand in a meaningful way.
Brand Keywords
We provide your company with a list of branded keywords. Using SEO market research, these brand keywords will define your social media, website and professional content, ensuring that your message is generated organically to your target market. Thomas Stern expands on the essential use of SEO to “own as much real estate for your brand,” because Google asserts that branded keywords have over two times higher conversion rates compared to non-branded terms. When your brand shares content, it should never miss an opportunity to reach as many potential leads as it can.
Social Media
The visual and written elements of our branding strategies are crucial to enhance your brand’s social media presence. The future of the business environment remains online. Social media necessitates these clean, confident and unified brand visuals and keywords. Our branding process includes brand optimization for the short formats needed on social media. Social media is an amplifier of branding as customers share, like, comment and add to the original intended structure of your brand through their interactions. Users will only interact with your brand if they resonate with it. If they do not interact, your social media will not grow its following or achieve successful returns on investments.
Website
A brand’s website is one of the main homes to its identity. A website domain, like social media, combines these elements of branding to successfully create an eCommerce platform with an edge. Our branding agency builds upon these elements with additional website design and social media marketing options.
Branding Makes Marketable a Companies’ Identity
Branding cannot be pieced together, it has to be connected through an intricate overlay of these elements. Your brand needs to translate throughout the internal and multi-platform functions of your business. It must be clear, concise, competitive and align with who your company is. Branding agencies understand that these elements act as the starting point of great marketing, profitability and impact in the combination of written, graphic, video and photo expertise with industry experience.