Three Must-Haves For Your Brand In 2022
This isn’t an article on how to set your business goals for 2022. I aim to give you structure and guidance on how you can assess your brand with the new year in mind. I think it’s something too quickly forgotten by startups, while they worry about making sales and marketing themselves.
I will give you some specific questions you can ask about your brand that may help shape how you do business in 2022.
Brand? You’re thinking, but I’ve already done this. My designer created the logo in a cool font, which I finally approved after much consultation with my wife or husband. I always use the same JPEG in my word doc, so what else do I need?
When I talk about branding, I’m referring to that all-encompassing thing that represents your startup or business. It includes all the ways you communicate to your audience — beyond the logo.
Imagine your brand as a shop
I realise traditional bricks and mortar shops have been dying a slow death before COVID. The analogy is your ‘brand’ operates much as a traditional store did. You have your identity in the form of a logo. It’s the thing that people see first, like the street sign telling folks, who you are and hopefully giving them a clue as to what you do from the outset.
Beyond that first identifying piece, there are a bunch of things you do and say as a business that tells the customer they are in your ‘store’ — an experience that will, hopefully, be unique and rewarding.
Some of those things are simply the way your staff talk to customers, the phrases they consistently say, which is the tone of voice. Perhaps it’s the way you stack the shelves in your store, or how many colors are on display at any one time. And of course, there are the obvious ones like brochures and flyers. Do you have a specific format? Square? Or do they always feature a photo of your ideal customer enjoying your product or service on the cover?
All of the above and many more contribute to your brand.
A little side note
In my design agency work, when we’re about to start a digital marketing campaign for a new client, we ask for their brand assets. The process goes something like this;
‘Can you send me all your creative assets, including your logo?’
In 90% of cases, the client thinks of their brand as a single element — The Logo. Soon enough an email arrives with a jpeg and then they say, there you go. Hopefully, you can use this file I found.
‘Do you have any other files?’ I ask. ‘Fonts? Colors?’ …’brand guidelines?’
Silence.
Another email eventually arrives. Attached to it are a rag-tag collection of logos in GIF, JPEG and maybe a PDF file. Sometimes font files are attached too. The client has cobbled together what they think is their brand as a package. (apparently to appease me). Because that was what a graphic designer emailed them many years ago, but they forgot (or don’t know) that EPS files are what most designers use. And that SVG files are the best format for websites.
The real problem is not that they have such poorly managed files, it’s that they don’t understand the depth and breadth of their ‘BRAND’.
And they almost always don’t have a brand guidelines document to share. If they do it’s usually a pdf consisting of a few pages with basic descriptions of their logo in recommended colors, examples of how NOT to use the logo, and maybe headline fonts they should be using, (which most of the time by looking at their marketing material they have long forgotten).
Ultimately we start their campaign with nothing but a logo and a few colors.
What are the questions you should be asking about your brand?
Below are three essential things I question when I come into contact with a new brand. This is how you should evaluate your brand.
- Are all digital versions of your brand workable and legible?
- Is your brand guidelines a useful document?
- Does your brand have a personality?
I’ll break these down in more detail.
Number 1: Where your customers first see your brand matters. From our data, over the last two years, the traffic has shifted even more toward mobile than in previous years. The irony is that people are likely to be working from home because of a pandemic and yet they still use their mobile devices for searching and purchasing. Our stats consistently show 70% — 80% of all interactions with clients’ websites are on mobile devices.
The issue I come across time and time again is a client’s logo that has been designed by a previous design agency that looks beautiful on a desktop but when viewed on mobile is so small, or doesn’t scale well to fit on a vertical screen that it’s almost illegible.
The reason is that graphic designers work on their amazing 27" iMac screens all day and create a stunning logo that is approved by a client on a similar large screen. Nobody thinks to test it on a mobile and see if it will function as a brand within a space of 300 x 90 pixels for example.
Test out your logo on mobile phones. Check how consistent the scale is when scrolling on your website. Is it legible when viewed on Instagram and other platforms? Are other identifying elements like colors, fonts and photos displaying correctly on devices compared to a desktop version. And if you are a business that still has a physical store, you’ll need to compare what you are showing in your store with these digital elements. Are they all speaking the same language? Are messages in some areas not working because of the smaller scale?
Recently one of our clients had a very expensive brand built by a top agency in Australia at great expense. We checked how it was looking on their mobile website and the logo was so small it wasn’t legible, while the photo and colors washed out the key message. Overall there was a huge gap between the experience their printed marketing conveyed compared to the digital experience on mobile. They had never thought to check as they’d approved the website from their boardroom on a 72" flat screen.
Number 2: A set of guidelines that enhance your branding.
I think there will be entrepreneurs and business owners rolling their eyes at the suggestion they need a brand guidelines document. And to be fair, the type I see in my work sent to me by clients lacks any substance, and it seems pointless. For the reasons I mentioned above, they are a few pages put together with those basic essential elements like a logo and how to use it.
In my experience, clients take a look at the guidelines the first time they receive it from their graphic designer and then never open it again until someone like me asks for it.
The problem is the document doesn’t address the essential use-cases of a brand. I’ve seen some amazingly comprehensive ones by large corporate companies like BHP or Coca Cola. But how useful is it for a startup of three? This is where we should rethink this and perhaps call it the brand bible or brand book.
This is where more lofty ideals and the personality that informs your business comes into play. This document can have the story of how your business started, a mission statement, brand personality or examples of tone of voice as well as useful and practical things like photography style, product photos and how to use paragraphs of text. When you treat this as a communication piece to your ideal audience, the personality of your business shines through and makes the document all the more vital.
A great example of this is Urban Outfitters Brand Book. When seeing it, you are left with no doubt as to who they are. https://issuu.com/themarkit/docs/urban_outfitters_brand_book_final_p_d1cb1321abd5a6
If you were to hand your brand guidelines to a new employee would they come away with the same impression about your company?
If you haven’t got a brand guideline or book, maybe now is the time to invest in one.
Number 3: Does your brand have a personality? This last question could be an extension of the previous one. If you have gone through a process to write your brand values, brand persona and mission statement you might know what I’m talking about. If you’re blinking at the words on the screen right now, then I guess not.
This is where we can get into areas some business people don’t want to know about. It’s the ‘fluffy’ stuff they say. Or the kind of things that marketers and branding agencies use to justify their huge fees.
The brand personality tries to dig into the very essence of the ‘who’ and ‘why’ of your brand and ultimately how your business came to be. If you are the owner of a thriving business that’s been around for a few years, there was a time before, when you thought Hey! I have an idea to create an ‘X’ business. And presumably, you felt passionately enough to devote your time and money to get it off the ground. That’s where the personality is drawn from.
Numerous exercises can help articulate these principles online. I won’t go into it in this article as it’s turned out to be long enough as it is. Have a look around online and see which method suits you.
Instead, I’ll give you a few great examples of companies that are nailing their brand personalities.
Asana. This one might seem simple on the surface. It’s a platform you might have come across for project management and collaboration. When you read how they talk about their brand, you can see they are thinking about how it will grow in the future. For example, they talk about setting a standard against which all subsequent branding work would be measured. The story is in this great article, written by one of the people who led the rebrand: https://www.micahdaigle.com/asana
Airbnb. They describe themselves as carefree, youthful and with a spirited attitude. They are an online booking service for short stays after all, which sounds straightforward, but once it’s layered with their personality essence it elevates them above other competitors that might offer the same.
Apple. Yes I know it’s the obvious one. The reason I decided to include it is that it is an obvious example. Any search for branding experience, brand personality brings up Apple sooner or later. They know exactly who they are and how they speak to their customers. They are consistent in their tone of voice, their photos and so many points where the customers interact with them that I could fill a whole article about this part alone. (And, yes, full disclosure I do own a few Apple products).
Conclusion
We are only just beginning 2022 and there is already uncertainty in the air. I think it’s even more essential to strengthen your brand in such a noisy and uncertain landscape. Just telling your customers you do things better isn’t enough. When your customers find you online they are making an assessment based on many things beyond the product or service, even if they don’t realise it. How are you going to capitalize on that?
Maybe the first step is asking the above questions about your brand. Discover if you need to correct some fundamentals that will nudge your customers to decide on whether you are the right brand for them.
Make 2022 the year that you not only stand out from the crowd but leave them behind because you’ve built something truly unique into your brand that goes beyond just selling and competitive pricing.
Good luck!
