Brand Identity Design Services: A Complete Guide For Growing Businesses

With marketplaces more competitive than ever, it’s never been more crucial for businesses to stand out from the crowd. A cohesive and well-defined brand identity is no longer a luxury, but an essential for any business that wants to grow. But what exactly is brand identity, and how can brand identity services help businesses to reach their goals?

We’ll break down the key elements of what makes a strong brand identity and how this benefits businesses ready for growth. Comparatively, we’ll identify the signs that your brand identity needs updating or refreshing, and the drawbacks this can have on business growth.

Professional brand identity design services can be helpful for businesses that are:

• Feeling lost building a new brand identity
• Unsure if their current brand identity is working
• Know their brand identity needs a refresh, but are not sure where to start

What Is A Brand Identity?

Your brand communicates to the world who you are, your values and what you want to achieve. Your brand identity is how you communicate these elements. These elements make businesses instantly recognisable and memorable and forge connections with consumers.

If the brand is the soul of the company, then the brand identity is its body. It’s how the brand is presented and interacts with the world.

Key components of brand identity include:
Visuals: this is usually the first thing people think of. This includes the logo, colour palette, typography, imagery and other graphic elements.
Verbal: this is how your brand “speaks” to people, including your brand’s tone of voice, taglines and how language is used across different materials to help build an identity.
Sensory: this is how your brand is communicated through all of the senses. Not every sense might be applicable, but each of these contributes to building the brand identity. This could be through product packaging (sight and touch), a jingle for a TV ad (hearing), the scent used in a shop (smell). The more senses that are used, the more of an immersive experience brands can create.

Benefits of a Strong Brand Identity

Investing in a strong brand identity delivers significant returns for any growing business. It’s not just about looking good; it’s about building a foundation for sustainable growth. Some of the key benefits for having a strong brand identity can include:

Instant Recognition and Memorability

With markets becoming more competitive and saturated, having a unique brand identity is an essential to help your business stand out. A distinct and consistent brand identity not only avoids your business blending into the crowd, it also helps customers remember you as they go about their daily life.

Whether it’s through a vibrant colour palette, witty copywriting, or inventive OOH campaigns, keeping each channel cohesive with your brand identity leads to your product or service being at the forefront of people’s minds.

Builds Trust and Credibility

People are more cautious and comparative than ever, meaning you can quickly lose potential customers if your brand identity isn’t well-thought-out. Your brand is all about creating connections with your customers, which is a vital role for your brand identity.

A well-structured brand identity builds trust, credibility and can lead to a loyal customer base, meaning more recurring revenue for the business.

Attracts The Right Audience

Your brand identity communicates to the world who you are and who you want to attract to your business. Therefore, having an in-depth understanding of your target audience is crucial when designing your brand assets, as you want to use elements that resonate with this audience.

For example, a skincare brand targeted at teenagers might choose a vibrant colour palette with playful copy and patterned packaging. Whereas a skincare brand targeted at adult women aged 45+ might choose a more neutral colour palette, with more clinical copy and aesthetically pleasing packaging that would look nice displayed on their bathroom vanity.

When your brand identity isn’t aligned with your target audience, you risk alienating the customers you seek, and attracting less desirable audiences that are not key revenue contributors.

Benefits of Brand Identity Design Services

It can be difficult to identify signs that your brand identity needs updating when it’s your own business, which is why brand identity services are a popular choice to help with this process. A lot of businesses also struggle with the lack of time, resources, or expertise in-house to conduct an overhaul on their brand identity. Bringing in external services, such as a design agency, is a popular choice as it brings a wealth of benefits.

Bringing A Fresh Perspective

Firstly, external agencies can offer an un-biased perspective to your current brand and new brand ideas. Too often businesses can develop tunnel vision to their own branding and marketing and can miss clear signs or errors in their own materials. It can also occur when brand guidelines become restricting to the teams, leading to underperforming assets and a bland brand identity. This external perspective can provide out-of-the-box thinking and push fresh and inventive ideas that in-house teams stuck in the tunnel vision process might have never though of.

Bringing Their Expertise

Another crucial benefit to brand identity design services, is that they plug the gaps of expertise that you might be lacking in-house. Quite often brands become limited in creativity because in-house teams are not equipped with the specialist skills to elevate the brand further. When it comes to your rebrand, you want to get this right, as we’ve detailed earlier, a weak brand identity can be costly. Therefore, bringing in a specialist team with industry knowledge and new skillsets can be a worthwhile investment that leads to long-term gains for the business.

Access To Quality Assets

In-house teams can be limited in the resources or budgets to carry out a full rebrand. However, an external service already has these assets to hand, meaning business budgets are spent more efficiently and you still get access to top-quality assets. From utilising a suite of assets for brand materials, to equipment for creating professional-quality content, brand services can offer these resources without businesses having to make the long-term investment to purchase it for themselves. These services also ensure that businesses are provided with everything that they need to rollout a fresh, professional brand identity with clear guidelines and assets for all the relevant marketing channels.

What Brand Identity Services Include

Brand identity services offer a multi-layered approach to helping businesses develop their new brand assets that are aligned with their business. Here is an overview of what you can expect to be included in these services:

Strategy and Research

This involved in-depth market, audience, competitor, and key trend analysis to understand where your business currently sits in the marketplace. Then, we can define the brand’s core values, mission and market positioning.

Building The Brand Story

We then take the research and strategy and use them to build the brand story. This is where we craft the soul of the brand and what makes your brand unique amongst the competition. You can read more about what a brand story is and how to write your own in our earlier blog post.

Visual Identity Design

We’ll bring your brand identity to life with a suite of visual elements which can include: logos, colour palettes, typography, illustrations and icons. These elements are all customised to the different channels and touch points that matter to your business, so this can vary depending on which areas you use for marketing. This ensures that your new brand identity remains consistent and recognisable no matter how and where someone might see or interact with your brand.

Brand Messaging and Tone of Voice

Now your brand has the look, it’s time to give it a personality. Although the visuals also help with crafting this, your messaging and tone of voice is crucial to ensuring you get this right. Developing clear, consistent messages helps to communicate how you want people to feel when they interact with your brand, helping forge connections and make your brand stand out from the crowd. Your messaging can be as creative as you want, but the main thing is that it tells people instantly the type of brand you are and, more importantly, if you’re the brand for them.

Brand Guidelines

When all of the elements are finalised, we’ll collate them into a document which compiles everything about your brand identity across all channels and touch points. Now, your teams have one place to reference when making new marketing materials or writing new content to ensure cohesion every time.

Brand Rollout

Brand identity services also includes support in the rollout of your new brand. From making sure that all your assets and channels are updated and following the new guidelines, to making sure your team are confidence with the new guidelines, we make sure that the new brand rollout is smooth and impactful.

Brand Identity Case Study: Elevo

We worked with growing consultancy business Elevo (formerly Corrin & Co.) to transform their brand identity. They found that their current brand no longer reflected the growth of the company and as they entered new and international markets, they wanted a brand identity that reflected their current goals and attracted new target audiences.

Their mission is to help workforces in businesses of all sizes through management training, mental health workshops and team days. Although they wanted a new brand identity that reflected their growth, they didn’t want to lose the personal part of their business, which is the people they help everyday.

We first worked on their new name, which became Elevo. Deriving from Latin “to lift up”, putting their core goal of supporting people and businesses at the forefront of their brand.

Our design team then took their new name and crafted a custom logo that included linking the first letter ‘E’ and the second letter ‘L’ together to symbolise forging connections, keeping their mission at the heart of their brand identity.

Green and yellow were chosen for the brand colours as green symbolises positivity and creates an approachable feel, while yellow adds an eye-catching contrast. In an unexpected turn, Harry, one of the directors, sent us a photo of his dad’s van, which was also green and yellow. This visual connection brought the brand’s roots to the forefront as it was born from the tragic loss of Harry’s father to suicide. As something that deeply affected Harry’s ability to cope at work, he wanted to use this experience to support others.

For the typography, we choose a bold, modern typeface that is easy to read. To inject personality into the brand, we included graphic elements that could be used across both digital and print materials. Taking a big leap forward from the previous site, we introduced different animations using their brand shapes to make it more engaging. The brand is now positioned to make a genuine impact in workplace wellbeing, with a purposeful identity they can be proud of.

You can find the full case study here.

Brand Identity Design Services: A Complete Guide For Growing Businesses

Brand identity is a complex part of the business, however, it’s a crucial element to help fuel further growth. Your brand identity is how you communicate to the world who you are and why people should purchase/enquire about your services.

Having a brand identity that is dated, misaligned or inconsistent can be costly for the business, as you risk disengaging potential customers and attracting audiences that are not part of your target market. However, a strong, cohesive and consistent brand identity can help attract more of the right people and retain a loyal customer base, leading to higher recurring revenue and better business growth.

It can be difficult to notice the signs that your brand identity needs an update, which is why brand identity services are a popular option for businesses. These services include a muti-layered approach from understanding your brand, to creating a suite of assets to help you have a refreshed, more aligned brand identity across all of your different touchpoints.

This is the journey that we took with our clients Elevo, who worked with our design team on their brand identity transformation. They wanted a brand that reflected their growth, current values and kept their mission of helping people at the core of the elements.

Is your brand identity ready for an update? Book a call with our design team today.