Brand identity and design

You’ve segmented your customers, considered targeting and understood where your brand might sit in the market. Now it’s time to undertake the important process of committing the identity of your brand to paper.

A brand usually comprises a logo, sometimes a brand image and a set of attributes that help consumers recognise it.

Let’s look again at Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola has a logo featuring its name written in a distinctive font.

It uses the colours red and white.

It has a brand symbol too; ribbon imagery that it features on all its packaging. Coca-Cola’s bottles are a shape that reinforce its specialness and distinctiveness from other colas.

If you remember, Coca-Cola’s brand is about authenticity and remaining classic over time. It is ‘the real thing’.

When you’re creating a brand identity, you need to consider:

• Naming
• Logo
• Icons
• Colour and type

Once you’ve created your brand assets, it is really important to enforce their use. You can create a brand guidelines document that helps everyone in your company understand what fonts, colours and logos they should use.

The article in the ‘See Also’ section below compiles some examples of brand style guidelines from different brands so you can see how they are laid out.