What is Brand Identity?

"Brand identity is more than just finding the right logo to place on coffee cup sleeves or mount above your front door. It’s about crafting a personality that amplifies the core elements to your brand’s DNA." - Jared Rosen Wayfair Senior Brand Manager

Speaking of brand identity and its importance in marketing, one must always remember that it is very important to choose the correct, suitable and most relevant colours, fonts, logo, and tagline. The right combination of these will help you build a stronger brand that people can look up to. To understand branding better, let’s try and understand consumer psychology.

Why is choosing a colour important for brand identity?

An understanding of colour psychology in branding gives you another advantage in branding and shaping the perceptions that drive consumer behaviour. The psychology of colour as it relates to persuasion is one of the most interesting and controversial aspects of brand identity. While the effect that colours have on our emotions differs from person to person based on gender, cultural context, personal experience, and neurological variances, there are some general guidelines based on countless colour psychology studies that we can follow.

Choosing the right colour for your brand:
There are a few aspects that go with the process of selecting brand colours. By considering these aspects one may make the process of selection easier for their brand.

• Choose a colour that is authentic to your brand
• Choose a colour that incorporates your brand’s personality
• Choose a colour that appeals to your audience
• Choose a colour that differentiates your brand Choosing each colour also reflects its properties and association of it with the brand.

What does each colour mean?

• Red: Passion, Love, Strength
• Orange: Energy, Happiness, Vitality
• Yellow: Happiness, Hope, Imagination
• Green: New Beginnings, Abundance, Nature
• Blue: Calm, Harmony, Technology
• Purple: Creativity, Royalty, Wealth
• Black: Power, Wealth, Depth
• Grey: Security, Reliability, Intelligence
• White: Purity, Cleanliness, Virtue
• Brown: Nature, Wholesomeness, Endurance.

How to choose an appropriate logo for your brand?

While choosing a logo for your brand you may consider the aspects which are most likely to be affected when the logo will be used over various platforms. - Usability - Scalability - Typography - Colour range Next comes a tagline which will help your brand’s logo express itself and let people know a bit more about your products and services.

Choosing a tagline for your brand:

A tagline is a sentence that summarises what a company does, promotes a value or a clear message, and/or clarifies the purpose of a brand. Consider taglines as the purpose statement of a company distilled down to a few words. So how can you come up with a catchy tagline for your company?

Make it significant: Communicate a message that will interest and be understood by your target audience.

Make it distinct: Create a memorable phrase by using structure, rhythm or rhyme. Think of a unique way to say a well-known phrase.

Keep it brief: Use as few words as you can, ideally no more than five.

Incorporate it into the design of your logo: Create the visual identity of your company with the phrase incorporated into the logo.

Considering all of these will enable you to develop a more solid and reliable brand in the marketplace. Consistent use of typography, colour, graphics, and language is necessary to develop a distinctive brand, but it’s worthwhile.