How To Come Up With A Strong Brand Identity For Your New Company

The three core components of a companies brand identity are the name, logo and brand guidelines. Whether you are an online company or a high street one, these will effectively create your shop front, they determine how quickly a potential customer notices it, whether they are likely to buy from it and what their overall first impression is. Everything must be taken in to account when creating a brand, from colours to shapes and double-meanings of words. Here we’ll take a look at the most important elements individually and look at the importance of each thing as well as which order they should be done in.

Naming Your Company

This is perhaps the most difficult part as the name will stick with you forever, logos can be changed, and branding can be changed but the name will be there constantly. There are different ways to go about naming a company and it very much depends on what you are selling/offering and what your aims are. For example, many tech companies tend to go with single words which often don’t actually have anything to do with what they do. Some of the best examples of this are Apple, Amazon and Twitter – if you didn’t know anything about these companies before hand and you just read their name and saw their logo you’d probably have no idea what they are about. Apple have managed to create a very strong brand identity off their name since its inception and have changed it quite dramatically from the original multi-coloured logo to their black/white/great sleek, minimalist style that is now seen as the ultimate in cool.

Coming Up With a Relevant Logo

As we mentioned earlier in the article, the logo can be changed and therefore it isn’t as important as the name but it is still used to symbolise you company on your website, in your stores, on your products and can often be the foundation of the success of a brand. For example, look at a clothing brand like La Coste, they have a mini crocodile on their clothing which is quite unusual for a clothing brand but it has become so synonymous with it that people can instantly tell what brand you are wearing. A logo doesn’t necessarily have to tell people what you do, it doesn’t need to mention your companies name BUT it does have to be eye-catching, and it has to be memorable so that people can easily describe it to other and word of mouth can help to grow it.

Creating Your Brand Guidelines

Brand guidelines are very important, they are effectively the blueprint to your business and whatever you do going forward from building a website to printing leaflets, kitting out your shop, doing letterheads and invoices or even product creation will all tie back to your brand guidelines. If you employ a company that specialise in it like a branding agency Manchester, they will work with you to create a font, different font sizes and styles, font colours, background colours, spacing, headline styles, sub-heading styles and so on. Your brand guidelines will be a document you can send over to a marketing agency when you start advertising and they will have everything they need contained within that document. It is important to keep them up to date and to ensure that you are modifying them along with the your brands progression. You will typically find that your brand guidelines will be updated every year or two and then this will mean changes are needed to promotional material and your website.