October 17, 2022
How to ensure a killer brand when starting a business.
When you start a business, you always have high hopes that it’s going to be successful and that you’ll have a brand that’s seen, acknowledged and remembered.
Firstly, it’s important to understand that your logo and brand is not something that should be scrimped on. In fact, it’s important to think about your target audience and how you want your business to be perceived by that target audience. For example, if your business markets luxury gifts to high flying corporates, a logo that doesn’t scream ‘luxury’ but something far more mediocre, then it’s likely you won’t attract your target market and the dollars you’d be hoping they spend with you. Be honest, have you ever been given a business card or gone to a website and you just think ‘nope’?!
Secondly, once you have your logo sorted, it’s important to keep your branding consistent, which is why you need branding guidelines! Yes, we bang on about this a lot, but it really is important. Have a think about a logo you’ve seen recently, maybe as you drive past their shop, then you get a flyer in your mail and the logo and branding look different. Then you see their car drive past and the branding looks different again. WTF?!
By far, the best way to ensure brand continuity is to use the same graphic designer/agency/studio to create everything from your website, car graphics, signs through to catalogues etc. Studios/agencies will have a network of talented professionals they work with (such as signwriters, apparel printers etc) on a regular basis that get the results the designer intended. These talented professionals will normally receive a lot of work from a graphic designer and will ensure that the product is of a higher quality, cheaper (because they don’t have to absorb the cost of design into the job and because of the volume of work) and if any quality or colour issues are experienced, will more likely make good on the job.
Whilst it may seem unnecessary at first to pay for design when many signwriters will do it for the cost of the production of the job, living with an expensive car wrap where the sign manufacturer has not perfected the design of your branding or the production of your businesses exact colour tone or followed the branding guidelines to a tee can be embarrassing.
With branding guidelines, if you choose not to use the graphic designer that created your awesome logo, at least you can provide the branding guidelines to another designer/signwriter who can use these guidelines to keep your brand looking the same. Once you can nail a consistent brand across digital, web, print, social, signage, vehicles etc, then this is where you start to get….. Brand Recognition!
And lastly, you need to get your brand out there! For a brand to be ‘killer’, it’s also about saturation. You want people to see it on their way to work, on their social feeds, on various marketing collateral, on Google remarketing ads, in newsletters, on vehicles, so much so that when you say ‘hey, have you heard of XYZ company’ they answer with a big, resounding YES!
So, what’s the take-away here?
Don’t scrimp, be consistent and get saturated (not literally! – you know what we mean ;-))
Need help with your brand? Why not make a time to come and chat with us – 1300 494 990.
