I’ve been asked many times, “Hey, can you design me a simple logo?” More often than not, I also hear, “Hey, how much does it cost for a simple logo design?” But that’s a topic for another time. The first question alone is loaded and tough to tackle.

Many people come to me with a rough idea of what they want their logo to look like. That’s fine, but I often ask, how do you know that’s what your target audience, users, or customers want to see? Remember, we’re designing for your audience, not just for you. If you want to reach your target market, we have to meet them where they are. Before designing a logo, it’s crucial to flesh out your business’s brand. A solid brand strategy is key to creating an effective identity.

Here’s a bold statement I believe in: Designing a logo (or marketing materials) without any strategy can be dangerous for your business. Strategy is crucial. Without fully strategizing your brand, you might negatively impact your company’s success. Creating a logo without considering your ideal audience can be harmful. If you like X, but your ideal customers need Y, you’ve missed the mark. You won’t attract the right leads or the number of customers you want. Conversely, a sound brand strategy can positively impact your business.

1 –  Good strategic design of your brand is all about how you want people to feel about you.‍

We can go a little deeper and say that having a good strategic design of your brand is all about how you want people to see you. It’s about how you want them to feel when they’ve interacted with you, seen your logo, heard your advertisement on the radio, or read your post on Instagram. 

To quote one of the masters of branding himself, Marty Neumeier, from his book The Brand Gap: “A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company.”

You can’t always control perfectly how you want your customers and users to feel about you, but you can influence it. This process is often referred to as Brand Strategy. I think that if a business hasn’t really strategized its brand, its marketing and business efforts will potentially be wasted. Brand strategy is your roadmap for how you want to get into the minds of your customers using the appropriate channels, messaging, visual design, audio design, etc… and then the way they feel once it’s in their minds.

I don’t think that a good brand strategy is necessarily manipulation either. With a good strategy, you’re not trying to convince anyone to buy stuff they shouldn’t or don’t need. I think it’s important to be genuine and try to sell people on the ideas that you truly believe in yourself. It’s to share with your customers the personality of your company, why your product or service is special, how it will improve their lives in some way, shape, or form, and why you do it better than anyone else. It’s important that your business communicates what you value. Simon Sinek says “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe. 

Also just a side note: I think Marketing and Branding are different things, but they overlap. In my opinion, having a clear brand strategy at the beginning will determine a lot of your marketing strategy. In effect, you save money on marketing in the long run. You have alignment on your team, in your messaging, and in your design, so your efforts in marketing are not wasted. ‍

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2 – Clear Direction

‍This leads me to my next point. Brand strategy gives your designers, copywriters, and marketers a clear direction. Really, it gives everyone in a customer-facing position a direction. It helps your employees get on board with communicating to the right audience, using a more unified voice and tone. A solid strategy helps ensure that the people who would be interested in your product, service, or company are being spoken to. 

A good brand strategy should deliver a brand visual style guide, or graphics standards manual. This is a document that will help all designers in your company get on board with delivering products and materials that have a unified look, feel, tone, and voice. As a result, visuals are unified and consistent, leading to earned trust from your customers.

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3 – Minimizes Subjectivity ‍

A good brand strategy eliminates a ton of subjectivity. Gone are the days of “I don’t like this” or “Change the color to this because I like it.” When you are working towards a goal of aligning your brand, target audience, and business objectives, the process leaves little room for subjective opinion. Objective business metrics and results are what we are looking for. Instead, we now shift the focus to questions like: “Will our current customers like this?” or  “Will this packaging design increase sales of the product?” or “Will placing this button here/there encourage more users to click on it, therefore increasing transactions?” etc.‍

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4 – Determines Who Your Ideal Audience Is‍

“When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one” – Meredith Hill

“Everyone is not your customer.” – Seth Godin

This speaks to everything I have been learning regarding the importance of niching down. It’s impossible to do everything for everyone. It’s important to focus on the one thing that we are the master at and speak only to the people who need what we have and care about. We can’t serve everyone. 

Speaking directly to your “tribe” and ideal customers is going to be far more effective than casting a wide net hoping that someone listens. Where are the people that believe what you believe? What are the compelling events that would cause these people to look for a solution that you provide? What are the psychographics?

When you produce a social media post, what kind of language are you using? Is it the same kind of language that your audience uses? Are you sharing on the right channels where your audience hangs out? All of these things can be determined by a solid strategy.

Knowing your target audience helps also align the culture with what business category you are in.

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5 – If your brand was a person, what kind of personality would he or she have?‍

I’ve been thinking about it like this. Brand strategy is partially like a personality test for your business. I just talked about how you can’t be for everyone. That’s true even in personal friendships and relationships. Not everyone gets along with everyone else. Most people choose to hang out with people who are like them or believe in the same things (psychographics). Thinking of your brand as your business’s personality type is a good way to simplify some things.‍

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6. Knowing your Competition‍

What makes you different from others? The first step in answering this question is to know your competition. If you want to strategize how others are going to, not only tell you all apart but choose your company among the others, it’s important to know those others. It’s good to do a little online research and dig into who the other organizations are that are doing similar work to you. Maybe pick two to four of your closest competitors and see what they offer, their messaging, their colors, their clientele, etc….and try to differentiate. 

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So, how do we strategize my brand?‍

There are many people utilizing lots of different processes. I will talk about some of the important things that I consider in my own brand strategy process. First I’ll credit some of my sources of knowledge. I’m a huge advocate of these brands myself. A lot of my process is based on the “Core Discovery” framework from the design business education organization called The Futur. I also use elements from their Brand Messaging Kit. Other features that I have incorporated in my brand strategy process come from Douglas Davis’s book “Creative Strategy and the Business of Design”, along with some elements from Seth Godin’s book “This is Marketing.” Other books that have shaped my thinking include “The Brand Gap” and “Zag” by Marty Nuemeir and “Designing Brand Identity” by Alina Wheeler.

I have meshed a lot of these frameworks and tools together to create my ideal products that serve my clients. Most of these items are hashed out in a collaborative work session. These are some of the exercises or tools that are used in a strategy:

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Brand Positioning Statement – The positioning statement is a key factor in that “roadmap” I mentioned earlier. This is an internal statement that a business can use to help craft website headlines, design a logo, and find audio to use on an educational video or photography on Instagram. You can pretty much ignore perfect grammar or the idea that run-on sentences are “bad” with this. This statement is built on attributes of the brand. These attributes include: the product/service itself, culture, target audience, tone, feel, impact (benefits), and X-factor. I’ll probably go more into this in another blog post.

StoryBrand BrandScript – This is a fantastic framework for setting up your customers as the heroes in their journey so we can communicate how we can solve their problems.

Onliness Statement – Sort of like the brand positioning statement, but this one dives in deeper at what makes you different from everyone else.

Customer Profiles – This looks at who our ideal customers are and brings personality to them. This really narrows down who we are speaking to and what they need from us.

User Journeys – This is a step-by-step add-on to the customer profiles. We walk our customer through the purchase funnel, to see where we can meet their needs.

Marketing and Business Goal Prioritization – This helps us align on what order we need to work on what projects, and in what timelines. 

Competitor Analysis – If possible, this research should be both qualitative and quantitative if possible. Who’s winning in sales?

Brand Immersion – Understanding your existing brand if you are not a new company.

Consumer Interviews – Talking to a handful of people about their relationship with the product/service, category, and competitors they usually go with. This can be a huge foundation for insights in the strategy. 

Identity Design – The creation of your Logo and other important brand elements.

Graphics Standards Manual – Or brand style guide. The roadmap for others to follow going forward.

Conclusion

I hope this helps in understanding why brand strategy is important to your business. Before designing any marketing materials, or a logo, it’s necessary to have a roadmap of what the brand is. Unification and consistency are critical. Target audiences must be reached in the appropriate channels using the correct design styles to help your business succeed. I love brand strategy. It helps align goals, customers, and employees. It helps us all understand why we should all get on board with the values and benefits that your organization has for us.

-Kyle Dolan