Branding vs Visual Identity: Why I Say Branding When I Mean Visual Identity
If you're a business owner, you've probably heard the term ‘branding' in relation to how a business looks: logo, colours, and typography.
But the proper term for these visual elements of a business is visual identity and in fact, your visual identity is just one part of branding your business.
In this article, I'm going to dig a bit deeper into the different areas of branding, how they relate to small businesses in particular and introduce some questions you can apply to your small businesses to take your branding to the next level.
What is branding if it's not logos, typography and colours?
As we touched on earlier, branding is your logos, typography and colours, but it's also the entire experience of your business. All the elements of branding work together to influence how people feel when they interact with your company.
Some examples of what your brand is made up of, outside of its visual presence are:
The story behind your business
The values that guide your business
Your target audience
The gap in the market your business fills
Here are some more specific examples to help you understand just how much of your business influences the perception of your brand:
What you talk about on social media.
The content in your email newsletter.
The welcome someone gets when walking into your shop.
Where or how your product is manufactured.
The guarantees you offer with your service.
Hopefully, now you are starting to see that every aspect of your business contributes to your overall brand and that the visual identity or logo is just a small part of the puzzle, even if it's the one most commonly referred to.
If visual identity and branding mean two different things, why does everyone say branding when they mean visual identity?
The rise of small businesses has brought with it a different approach to branding.
Small businesses mean smaller budgets, and they can't afford big agencies to consider every element of their brand. As we've seen above, it refers to so much; imagine the cost of having specialists consider all these things!
Smaller studios and designers cater to small businesses by offering a strategic approach to delivering visual identities. This allows a small business to get the best of both worlds.
Because this approach is so common now, branding and visual identity have become interchangeable terms. Even I tend to say branding when I mean visual identity because it's the term most used by my customers.
What does strategic branding for small businesses involve?
At Small Type Studio and many other smaller design studios, strategic branding considers everything that makes up the brand and uses this to design a visual identity.
This is done by asking the right questions at the start of the project and presenting them in an easy-to-reference PDF.
I use this PDF to guide my design process, but it also gives my clients the clarity they need to build the other elements of their branding, organically and intuitively.
This strategic approach to designing an identity is much more than just making something look nice whilst still being affordable and quick.
Questions you can ask yourself to get clarity about your brand and apply it to your business more intentionally…
Now you understand how investing in your small business branding helps you more than just getting a lovely logo, you might be keen to dig a little deeper into your brand and gain some insights that will help you shape your business as it grows.
Below are a few of the questions I ask my clients at the discovery phase of the branding process.
Grab a notebook and jot down your answers…
1.What are you offering to your customers, and why should they care?
This is not just what you are offering, but the value behind it.
2. What sets your business apart from the competition?
What gap in the market are you filling?
Is there a story or belief that really sets you apart? What is it?
3. How do you want people to feel after every interaction with your business?
Happy, more confident, empowered?
Now define how you can build this feeling into a few key stages of the buyer's journey.
4. What unique promise do you want to make to your customers?
How will you deliver on this promise?
5. If your brand were a person, what voice, personality, and style would it have?
Maybe it’s you on your best day or the more confident, colourful person inside you. Have some fun with this one!
Answering these questions should bring up some key themes.
Can you come up with a sentence or a couple of words that sum this up?
Here are some examples to get you thinking…
My brand [name] is young and cutting-edge. We want to hear what our customers have to say and are always reevaluating how we do things and why.
My brand [name] is an expert in our field, but we want to attract people who are new to [product] and always make our knowledge accessible by communicating our expertise in a down-to-earth way.
At my brand [name] communication always comes first but this is not all we offer. Our organisation is made up of unique individuals who add rich and welcome diversity to what we do.
Now write this summary on a piece of paper and stick it on a wall near your desk to refer to when creating a newsletter, updating your website, or planning your next piece of content.
You can even use this sentence or these words to guide how you approach all aspects of your business, not just your content.
Summary
After reading this article, you should have more of an understanding of how your logo relates to your branding and just how much of your business influences your overall brand.
By answering the questions in this article, you'll have some much-needed clarity about what makes your brand special and a written summary that you can apply to your next piece of content or business venture.
If you would like to gain even more clarity about your business and have those insights transform it into a gorgeous visual identity, drop me a line to arrange a discovery call and let's start building your small business brand!