Identifying Your Brand Pillars: Keys To Successful Branding

• PURPOSE – Before you started with your brand, you must have had something about how the brand will serve a purpose, the most important thing about your brand is what purpose it serves and how it will be beneficial to the people. Your brand purpose is the meaningful reason behind why your brand exists. To derive your purpose, you need to look at who you serve. Your business solves a problem for someone. Whether that problem is hunger, thirst, a flat tire, the need to get from point A to B, or a lack of experience in a particular field, you provide a solution to a problem your ideal customer needs or wants, to solve. 

• VISION – Your vision is where you see your brand in 10 years, your vision is where you plan your business to be in the future in the longer run. Thinking about where you want your company to be is a prominent part of brand creation. It is about projecting your brand into the future and painting a picture of your future brand.  When you go back to the brand purpose and realize that your brand is about impacting other people’s lives, you will be a little more ambitious about the future. For example, Microsoft’s vision was to put “A computer on every desktop in every home”. This vision was great enough to inspire a movement without being too big for the leadership team to buy into it.

• MISSION – The mission of your brand revolves around both the vision and the purpose it serves. It is a strong commitment to delivering to people what they expect. Brands on a committed mission aligned with their purpose and vision set the tone for a strong working culture. Those who come to work every day and feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves have meaning in the work that they do, which instills happiness. Brands boasting happy people radiate this through their interactions and become known as much for their attitude as the solution they offer.

• VALUES – To define in simple terms, values are the morals that you follow and display in the working of the brand. Brand values are the rules of engagement and the moral compass for the way you do business. If your mission sets in place your overarching commitment in achieving your vision for the future, then your values are the behavioral commitments in your day-to-day activities. Communication is the key to ensure that there is a collective underlying message in every conversation you make with your clients. People that know us, know what our core values are not because we tell them but because of our actions and behaviors over time. The same is true with brands. It is common practice today to list your core values on a dedicated page of your website, but without the actions to go along with the words, they are little more than marketing.

• POSITION – This refers to the place that your brand occupies in the market or the position of your brand that comes down to your audience, competition, and differentiators. Your competition is likely to be already serving your intended audience so understanding their appeal, as well as their strengths and weaknesses, allows you to uncover opportunities. Differentiators are why your audience will remember you. What is it that makes you different from your competition? Why should your audience choose you? Even if on paper, your competition is towering over you in terms of capabilities, you can always find something that sets you apart and makes you memorable.

• PERSONALITY –  Your brand personality is who your audience is and how you present what appeals to them, along with the position you want to take in the market. Your audience wants to see themselves, or the best version of themselves, in your brand so when a brand portrays the personality of their audiences’ aspirations, they resonate on a powerful level.

• CORE MESSAGE – Your core message must be built around the thing that makes you unique from other brands, your core message is underlying and should be incorporated into all forms of communication. You can craft a concise and memorable tagline from this but the core message itself can be up to two sentences.

• BRAND IDENTITY PLANNING – Your brand identity system is basically how you plan to present a set of visuals to form the look and feel of your brand. A brand identity system includes Primary Logo, Secondary Logo, Lockup Variations, Colour Palette. Typography, Image Style, Graphics Library, Brand Style Guide.

The purpose of the visual identity is to initiate a brand recall and visual identity with numerous distinct visual elements working as a team to create a look that is aesthetic and has a much greater chance of making that visual connection and triggering that memory.