Creating a brand identity in a popular niche can be quite challenging. A strong brand identity will not happen overnight because it’s not about adding a logo and picking a few colours. In this article we discuss How to Design Your Brand Identity When You’re in a Competitive Niche.
Unique brand identity in 2021 is an exciting step towards creating a growing and successful business. Especially when you are in a competitive niche, having a brand identity will make you stand out of the pack and deliver your message accurately to your targeted audience.
Brand identity makes your business memorable to people who interact with your brand. Irrespective of the channel and platform, a concurrent brand identity will ensure that people get the same experience whether they are using live chat support on the website, engaging on a social media platform or looking at a YouTube advertisement.
It covers what and how to deliver your message to the targeted audience. It creates a foundation for the roadmap to woo your audience.
However, while creating a brand identity for a brand of a competitive niche, you need to approach the designing aspect strategically.
Collaborating with your team of editors, copywriters, managers, and customer support will help you channelise your message efficiently through your brand identity.
Today, we are going to discuss how you can create a brand identity when you are in a competitive niche.
Table of Contents
What is Brand Identity?
A brand identity is how a brand or a business presents itself to the world. It makes a company unique among the competitors and allows the company to present itself uniquely while selling similar products and services.
Brand identity will include visual and textual elements such as colour palette, logo, website landing pages, signage, product packaging, brochures, taglines, pamphlets, and more.
Brand identity allows you to create a reputation and develop a perception of the company. It is about how you want your prospective customers to see and remember the products they think of your company.
Brand identity will help you define your brand image. People often consider both of them the same but the brand image is how your customers see your brand and brand identity is how you, the brand owner, define your brand and want your customers to perceive it the same way.
5 Steps to Create Your Unique and Strong Brand Identity
In this era where there are tons of ventures competing for the same market niche, it becomes crucial to have a unique brand identity to stand out of the pack and become profitable.
A strong brand identity will be unique, memorable, and resonate with your target audience.
Understanding the company’s goals will help you decide how it should look before you design your brand identity.
Without a well-crafted strategy, the marketing of your company or brand will feel flat and one-dimensional.
Here are 5 steps through which you can also build a unique and strong brand identity for your business.
1) Research Your Audience
This is the basic step. As we have discussed, if a strong brand identity resonates with the audience, then you must figure out everything about the people to whom you are selling to.
For example, if you have created a brand identity for millennials but most of your buyers are of Generation Z, then your entire brand identity will not resonate with your major consumer base.
Therefore, figuring out who your target audience will help in marketing to them, and your attempt to grow your business will be successful.
Go to your sales data and determine who your current consumers are. Know their age, location, preferences, hobbies and every tiny detail that will help you pitch your product in the most relevant way possible.
Look up your competition and dissect how other companies approach their brand designs.
The tricky factor is ensuring that your brand fits into the right market in a competitive niche and looks relevant against other brand’s image.
After doing your research, collaborate with your design team to create a brand design that feels both unique and memorable.
It’s very important to stress your unique selling point (USP). What makes your brand different from that of your competitors?
Your USP needs to be referred to in your brand design. Knowing your brand’s values will help in being more confident in creating a fresh brand identity in a popular niche.
2) Create Your Brand Name and Tagline
Depending on your operations and the size of the organization, you need to define the name and tagline of your brand.
If you’re branding yourself and your talents as a freelance graphic designer or as a writer, then your name will be your brand identity.
If your company has more than one person and wants an original identity, think of your company goals and values and what you want to accomplish. Do you want it to be straightforward or inventive?
Depending on your brand name, you should also purchase the website domain and sign up with the same social media handles. It’s essential to keep your website domains and social media handles in mind while creating your brand identity.
Inconsistent branding on social media accounts and domains will confuse your target audience and make it harder to find you.
Avoid some common mistakes, such as long names or overly complicated names.
Brainstorm your team with your friends, family members, co-workers, employees, or take a survey of as many people as you can.
To visualize your brand identity, play word-association games to create new ideas for a name, slogans, or taglines.
3) Choose the Right Typography
Typography is a vital component of your overall brand identity! But it can be challenging to find the right font that will fit with your brand image and help your customers perceive the way you want them to.
Even to an untrained eye, every font has its personality and character. Some things to keep in mind are:
- Avoid gimmicky fonts. Some fonts are not fit for professional use, such as Comic Sans.
- It’s important to stick with two or three font families for a more cohesive look for your brand: one for your display font and one or two for the body.
- Make sure the font is readable. Sans-serif fonts (like Helvetica) are generally used online, while serif fonts (such as Time New Roman) are typically used for print and books. Think of the user experience while choosing the typography for your brand.
- Make sure your font matches your audience. A technical document written in Papyrus or Comic Sans won’t be seen as professional.
- A timeless look will never go wrong for your brand image. Timeless typography will allow your brand identity to have a longer lifespan. A classic, clean, and timeless font will never go out of style.
- A well-chosen and consistent typography will help in practical and cohesive communication across all platforms— and that’s a big part of creating a unique brand identity.
4) Select the Right Iconography, Graphics, and Images
The right icons, visual symbols, and creative photographs are a significant part of brand development. They give your brand a personality that shapes your brand identity in front of the targeted customers.
All icons of your brand should be cohesive and look like they belong to the same family.
All photos should be light, airy and taken in as natural lighting as possible. Infographics on your company website can communicate logic and facts in an easy way to your audience.
If you are planning to explain your communication through a visual, then an expressive graphical abstract will give you the visual edge and let you explain complex and long-form message creatively.
5) Pick the Right Color Palette
Visual elements are very important and key in conveying the brand image and goals. And, of course, colour plays a significant role in creating a unique brand identity.
Some colours represent certain things in people’s minds, such as a fresh, natural colour like green will represent growth (Whole Foods, Animal Planet).
In contrast, red represents urgency, passion (Target, Coca-Cola). The colours you choose for your brand image will reflect your brand’s purpose and intent.
Colours best represent your company’s values and attributes. Soft pastel colours represent youth and serenity.
Make sure the colours aren’t too contrasting otherwise the image will look too bright to comprehend. If you lower saturation and opacity, the layer would look transparent which might not help your brand identity.
Keep in mind the platform that you serve. Like, if you work mostly online then you must take care of how the colours look on digital devices.
Usually, an RGB colour palette is preferred for digital devices and if you are printing your products, then you can use CMYK.
Conclusion
We hope these five tips will help you in creating a brand identity that’s different from all your competitors in the same niche.
The brand identity needs to have a unique and distinctive design that shows off your creativity while still communicating your brand and its values.
Creating a new brand identity for your brand or business can be challenging, but it can also be a rewarding and creative challenge if you use the right tools.
You can also comment directly on posts and have a discussion on which strategy will suit your brand.
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Author bio
Fabricio Pamplona is the founder of Mind the Graph, an online graphical abstract maker – a tool used by over 400K users in in 60 countries. He has a Ph.D. and solid scientific background in Psychopharmacology and experience as a Guest Researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry (Germany) and a Researcher in D’Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR, Brazil). Fabricio holds over 2500 citations on Google Scholar. He has 10 years of experience in small innovative businesses with relevant experience in product design and innovation management.