At image.works, we spend a lot of time helping our clients troubleshoot their marketing problems.
One of the most common challenges we hear is: “How can we stand out from our competitors when we offer a lot of the same things?”
The answer is simple. Your brand identity (or brand personality) will help you stand out. Your brand identity includes brand fonts, color palette, copywriting tone and graphic design and imagery style. It can even include the mediums you use to connect with your audience.
Developing Your Brand Identity
Has your team established brand-identifying adjectives that describe your organization and how you want people to experience it? Having a few unique brand identifying words is a game-changer for brand identity.
For our purposes, we’re just going to focus on how it influences your branding and marketing. The first thing you need to do is select your brand-identifying words.
To do this, imagine that your organization is a person. What kind of person would you want them to be? How do you want your community to experience your organization? How would you want them to describe you?
You might gravitate toward “trustworthy, honest, reliable.” But we want you to go deeper than that. A lot of organizations – and honestly, most people – could be described as trustworthy, honest and reliable. But those words don’t give you any sense of what their personality is like.
Here’s a list of brand-identifying words to help you get started. Pick two or three that embody your organization’s values and your personality (and don’t pick three words that all mean the same thing).
Brand-Identifying Adjectives
Let’s say you’ve picked adventurous, cheerful and thoughtful. Now let those words guide your brand fonts, colors, copywriting tone and graphic design and imagery style.
If the words you picked conflict with your current design and copywriting style, then it may be time for a brand refresh. A brand refresh will spice up your marketing and give people a better sense of who you are as an organization.
And if you’re thinking "We’re a [bank, credit union, hospital, college, landscaper, construction company] – we don’t usually think about our industry as adventurous, cheerful or thoughtful," maybe that’s a good thing.
Remember, you’re trying to stand out. You want people to notice you, be intrigued by you and feel a desire to connect with your organization. So pick words that feel true to who you are and how you want to be perceived, but also pick words that will help guide your marketing in a way that helps you stand out from your competitors.
To summarize, you’ll want to:
- Get your organization's key players together to pick your brand-identifying words. You want there to be alignment and agreement when selecting adjectives, because you’ll need buy-in from everyone for this to have a widespread impact.
- Pick two or three words that embody your organization’s values and personality. Make sure they each have a unique meaning. You don’t want multiple words that all mean the same thing.
- Use those words to assess your branding and marketing. It may be time for a brand refresh.
Need help? We’ve got your back!
Here’s how we can assist with branding and marketing implementation, and we’ve also got some resources for you:
- Once you’ve selected your words, we can help you implement the tone and feel across all your branding and marketing.
- If you’re struggling to determine what you need, we have branding cheat sheet that includes a checklist of items you may need updated. Email us about it!
- Want to learn more about this? We recently hosted a branding webinar. Check it out!
Have other questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out for assistance: info@imageworksdirect.com