Brand Identity & Marketing: Best Practices

by Dan Matthews, Guest Contributor

Brand identity (or lack thereof) can make or break your business. While things like false marketing claims and lack of a recognizable logo are great ways to tank your business, best practices such as consistency and attention to color and design can help take your business to the next level.

A great business is nothing if no one knows about it, appreciates it, and benefits from the services it provides.

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By learning, following, and sticking to the best practices for brand identity and marketing, you will be on your way to finding success for your business.

Key Elements of Brand Identity Design
It can feel overwhelming when you’re starting from scratch to build a well-loved and well-recognized brand. Your brand is a major way that potential customers decide to choose and identify with your business over another. Luckily, the seven key elements of brand identity design can help keep you on track.

Clear Purpose & Positioning
Before you start designing an amazing brand identity, you need to ask yourself a few questions about your business. What is your purpose and goal? Who is your target demographic? Why is your product better than another similar option?

Answering these questions will help you figure out what’s unique about your business and what you should highlight in your brand identity. Start with a pencil and some scrap paper and just write down everything that comes to mind. Once you get it all out, you can narrow and focus your purpose and positioning.

Market Research
Researching the market and your potential customers is an essential step in building a brand identity and being able to successfully market your business. Surveys, conversations, and online resources can all be used to gather information and guide your decisions about who you’re marketing to and how you’re going to do it.

Likeability
Building a business is one thing. Building a likeable brand identity for your business is another. Think about your business and your brand as having a personality. What kind of person is your brand?

Figuring out that personality will be key, because it will (and should) come through in every aspect of your marketing, from communications to graphics. Consider writing a brand personality statement to boil down your brand’s trait’s into a bite-sized chunk.

Memorable Logo
A business is nothing without a memorable logo to identify it by. Your logo should enhance your brand and be one of the first things that comes to mind when people think of your business. After all, a logo is the face of your company. Your logo should be instantly recognizable and flexible enough to be portrayed on everything from large signs to social media posts.

Attractive Color Palette
Having a striking visual presence is one of the best ways to build strong brand identity, and that starts with choosing an attractive color palette. Different colors convey different emotions, so a little research can go a long way in choosing colors to identify with your brand. Play around with different color combinations until you find one that you love.

Professional Typography
Choosing fonts can be an intimidating process. There are just so many. However, it is a task worth undertaking to help your brand identity become stronger. Choosing a primary font for your branding that complements your logo and color palette should be a priority.

Supporting Graphics
Graphics are essential to any strong brand effort. Icons, photos, and design elements can all be used throughout your marketing practices. One great step to take is to create brand guidelines that show how all your design elements and aspects of your brand identity should be unified and used together.

Brand Identity & How It Helps Your Business
So you’ve worked hard and created your brand identity — but how does it actually help your business? According to Maryville University, a strong brand identity helps your business in four major ways: consumer perception, competitive differentiation, consumer recognition, and ongoing maintenance.

Sometimes, a customer’s perception of your brand could differ from your brand’s identity and how you define it. If you want to use your brand identity to create a powerful online presence, you’ll want to work to close this gap (if there is one). Brand identity helps you control your business’ reputation, and that’s extremely important to consumer perception.

Brand identity also helps your business by showing customers why they should patronize your business instead of another — and they can only do that when they recognize that your business can help meet their needs. Brand identity creates consumer recognition.

Finally, ongoing maintenance of your brand identity and marketing practices will keep your business up to date with current ideas, trends, and shifting practices.

Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices Draw Increased Scrutiny
At this point, you know what you should do, but it’s also important to keep in mind what you shouldn’t do. Brand identity and marketing best practices are “best practices” for a reason, and straying from them can be catastrophic for your business.

Perhaps above all else, you want people to trust your business. When you do something that breaks the trust between you and your customers, that’s considered a “worst practice.”

Take the case of a certain pharmaceutical company, for example, that used inappropriate financial bribery to promote a product. The financial interests of the company were prioritized over the well-being of the customer, which ruined the trust that had once been present.

When negative information like that gets out to the public, it’s hard to get customers to disassociate that with their idea of your company. You should do whatever you can to use best practices to define and manage your brand identity for yourself and not let poor choices affect people’s perception of your business.

By understanding the key elements of brand identity design, knowing how brand identity can help your business thrive and grow, and avoiding “worst practices” like in the case of the pharmaceutical company, you will be well on your way to running a business that customers relate to and will seek out.

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