HOW TO CREATE AN EFFECTIVE BRAND
20 MIN READ
BY TICKETY BOO CREATIVE
What is a brand? How can you create an effective one? As an award-winning branding agency, specialising in retail and design, our role is to work collaboratively with a business, giving it an identity beyond a logo that makes it resonate with an audience and stand apart from the competition.
Our goal is to give you a greater understanding of branding and to make you feel empowered to engage in the creative process. We believe in Thoughtful Creativity. This approach to branding sets the foundations, creates a framework for how you want to be perceived, and delivers that proposition to your audience.
THOUGHTFUL CREATIVITY
LOGIC
It’s important for a brand to have strong foundations.
A clear brand framework can give clear focus and longevity.
IMAGINATION
The creativity that makes you distinctive and brings it all to life.
Brand assets that are reflective of your brand strategy will help you stand out and be more consistent.
connection
Building meaningful relationships with your audience.
A strong understanding of your target audience is key – what are their challenges and what inspires or motivates them?
WHAT IS BRANDING?
The dictionary defines it as “the promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design”. We believe it’s more than that. Brands are how your audience connect with your product or service.
“People don’t want what you make. They want what it will do for them. They want the way it will make them feel.”
A BRAND IS MADE UP OF KEY PARTS
Your why
What’s your purpose? Why do you exist?
Your mission
Definition of your brand's goals, objectives, and approach.
Your vision
What are your future objectives?
Your product or service
What do you do?
Your DNA
What do you mean to people? Are you a ‘feel-good’ brand, trustworthy, adventurous?
Your values
What are your beliefs? What do you stand for?
Your USPs
How are you different from your competitors?
Your audience
Who are your people? What are their challenges and motivations?
Your brand assets
What makes you distinctive: logo, typography, photography, illustration, and tone of voice.
Getting it right is about making sure you have strong foundations in place. This will help give your brand focus and give you a framework for any creative, marketing or business decisions. It’s important to put people first, always, and with the right approach and nurturing they can become dedicated superfans.
“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
WHY YOUR BRAND IS SO IMPORTANT
Your brand is not only an opportunity to speak with your customer (even without words), but it’s also a way of letting them know what to expect from you. It can be how you make your audience/customer feel, which is very powerful.
“Your brand is an important part of your business. It can help with your focus, make you distinctive and when created effectively, can have the power to build a meaningful connection with your audience.”
It’s how you draw your line in the sand: We don’t just make flip-flops – they’re made locally, responsibly and for every pair we sell, we donate one. In just a short sentence you’re already leagues above the ‘We make flip flops’ brand. Your brand is the ever-evolving opportunity to educate and clarify what makes you a better choice.
Our perception can have a lot to do with how we react to a brand’s influence. In a 2016 study, subjects were given golf clubs to try. One group got Nike branded clubs and the other got unbranded clubs. The Nike group actually hit the ball further than the unbranded group. What this tells us is there is a gap between objectivity and subjectivity – Prince Ghuman, Forbes.
In short, brands are powerful things, they can convince us that our performance is heightened by Nike or our eyes more protected by Ray-Bans. It’s within this playground of perception that you can make your mark and be a meaningful, relevant part of your customer’s life.
01.
Logic
Building a strong brand framework
We can’t undervalue the importance of this critical stage of building your brand. Get it right once and it can last for years, as the solid foundations of a brand can truly stand the test of time.
YOUR BRAND’S PURPOSE
Also known as your ‘why’. It’s your reason for being. Why should your audience or customers believe in/choose you?
“Purpose-driven brands achieve more than twice the brand-value growth of brands that focus purely on profit generation, and purpose clarity is directly correlated with financial performance.”
For example, this is ours. …Working together to inspire and empower through thoughtful creativity. This isn’t simply a way to start to give your brand an authentic identity, it’s what customers increasingly want from brands they engage with.
“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.”
YOUR BRAND VISION AND BRAND MISSION
Your mission should define your brand's goals, objectives, and approach, while your vision is future focused. Where would you like to see your brand years from now? Will your mission get you there?
Think of it as:
Your mission is today.
Your vision is tomorrow.
Both are essential and should complement one another and be an extension of your brand purpose. Take some time to reflect on your goals and challenges:
What are your business objectives?
What are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats?
What are your top three challenges?
Do you have what you need to overcome these?
What do you want your business to look like in five years?
What does success look like to you?
KNOW YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Understanding your audience is crucial to being able to offer them something useful, relevant, and meaningful to their lives. Are you familiar with what your audience looks like? It’s important to note, that your audience is likely to be more than one persona and there’s a happy middle ground to having somewhat broad appeal, while solving a specific challenge they might have. Knowing your audience goes a long way in making a connection, particularly if you’re a story or mission-based brand. You’re more than the product you offer.
“More specifically, we find that successful brand campaigns embed their messages in stories that touch, thrill, or amuse their target audience. Increasingly, consumers also expect their favorite brands to create value beyond product benefits.”
UNDERSTANDING THE MARKET & WHAT MAKES YOU UNIQUE
Where do you fit in the market? You need to have a good understanding of your competitors so it’s important to do your research. What are they doing well? What can you learn from them? How can you differentiate your brand? Are there any affinity brands and what can you also learn from them? The more you know, the better you can make informed decisions for your brand.
Understanding the market can help you answer why customers should choose your brand over another. What makes you unique? Write down everything you think makes your brand, then narrow it down to three key points and really think about how these could be communicated in the simplest way.
WHAT'S YOUR STORY?
It should be a cohesive narrative that captures both the facts and the feelings of your business. Having a compelling story behind how your brand was created is one way to make a genuine connection with your target audience.
YOUR BRAND DNA
You can craft yours by thinking of your narrative – how you began your company, your mission, your values, your USPs, your audience and how you choose to speak to them.
We love a post-it, which is why we think this very simple, yet effective, exercise to describe your brand works. Place adjectives in one of two categories:
We are...
We are not…
Once you have a list of key words under the ‘We are’, pick the three which are most relevant to your business and group any similar words underneath. From this, you can then start to formulate your brand DNA.
YOUR BRAND VALUES
Our values make us who we are – and who we want to be. Values shape the decisions we make, they inspire us and guide our relationships with each other.
Customers seek brands with shared values – whose purpose, personality, beliefs, and actions reflect their own. However, the most important thing is to walk the walk. Customers will see through (and rightly call out) brands who don’t stay true to their own belief system. Look at our values and how we work closely with brands to discover and develop the values that best represent them.
02.
imagination
The creativity that makes your brand distinctive
YOUR BRANDING
Now that your strategy is set, it’s time to bring it all to life through your brand’s own distinctive style. As we know, a brand identity is much more than just your logo. It’s important to reduce the subjectivity; the most effective branding is rooted in the ‘why’. This will allow you to create ownable assets that represent your brand, your customers, and your audience, directly supporting and expressing everything that’s set in your brand foundations.
These assets are your brand visual toolkit and include:
Logo design
Typeface(s)
Brand colour palette
Photography style
Graphic language (iconography, illustration)
Tone of voice
They are all a physical representation of your brand’s personality. Every detail is considered with lots of creative imagination injected.
YOUR BRAND PERSONALITY
Brands, like people, should have personalities. Your brand personality helps you stand out amongst a crowd – it makes you memorable and unmistakable. Your values might be set, and stronger than your competitor, but without a compelling way to deliver them (your personality), they can fall flat. It provides a real focus for your messaging, which helps create credibility and inspire trust.
Customers love consistency. It makes brands instantly recognisable and creates a feeling of familiarity, so if your communications reflect your brand personality this will resonate with customers. And it’s not just for your customers – inspiring colleagues matters just as much and consistent messaging, rooted in the foundations of your personality, makes it easier for everyone to articulate what’s special about your brand. Read more about why nailing your brand personality matters.
A great way to begin to develop your brand’s personality and tone of voice is by experimenting with a strapline (if you don’t already have one). How can you better define your brand in an instant? Just like a logo, a strapline can say a lot about your brand in mere seconds. It’ll give your brand greater recall and recognition amongst the market and give you another competitive edge.
For excellent tips and tricks (as well as defining what type of strapline you should have in the first place), visit our power of a strapline blog
“How your brand is presented can influence the kind of customers you appeal to and shapes its perception.”
For Sad Girls Club, we maintained a fine balance of creating a brand that spoke to its own audience while elevating its proposition to build trust and recognition, attracting big name sponsors and advocates.
Monkey Puzzle Day Nurseries also has this same duality. The brand had to appeal to both parents and potential franchisees – it has personality, yet it’s professional. Having this flexibility in your brand’s toolkit means you can dial the personality up or down depending on the audience you’re speaking to.
Winn-Dixie was inconsistent and their customers didn’t know what they stood for. We worked collaboratively with the brand team to help define the brand DNA, personality, and brand assets, as well as working with them on engaging brand guidelines.
While we often recall a brand for a handful of big symbols (McDonald’s golden arches, Coca Cola red), it’s the small details that customers remember when they interact with a brand. From micro design elements to an engaging tone of voice, small details can make a big impact.
CONSISTENCY, NOT UNIFORMITY
If you’re building a business that needs support from time to time, how do you ensure that everything you’ve established follows through?
“Consistency is key for a successful brand. If you have strong brand foundations and a visual toolkit, being consistent can feel effortless.”
Whether it’s a fledgling start-up or something far more established, brand guidelines are a huge part of how a brand stays true to its vision. Internally, it is a crucial, unifying document for every area of the business to truly believe in, which externally will give increased cut through and greater impact with your audience.
Without it, every piece of communication – be it online or in the real world – becomes muddled, confusing, or potentially off putting.
FOUR WAYS TO BE CONSISTENT WITH YOUR BRAND
Don’t follow trends that don’t share your brand’s space.
Practice what you preach.
Communicate a clear and simple brand statement.
Uniformity is not the same as consistency. Instead, create a visually consistent experience.
03.
Connection
The meaningful relationships we nurture with you, your brand and your audience
BRANDS WE’VE HELPED
For us, defining, creating, and evolving brands is part of giving the best hopes of success for the future. For our client, Winn-Dixie (a supermarket chain in the US), we set the brand DNA and tone of voice – creating guidelines to ensure their personality always shines through and the customer always wins.
Transforming the store experience really brought this to life for the brand and for the customer. Creating new experiences to go ‘beyond retail’, like Was Taproom, an in-store destination is the way forward for retailers. This launch was so successful it became the genesis of its own standalone sub-brand, WDs.
Meanwhile for Sad Girls Club, a community which had already amassed a large, dedicated following, our rebrand sought to bring credibility, to build fundraising and sponsorship capabilities while retaining their authenticity.
We proved it’s possible to do both – allowing the brand to grow and evolve with its membership, while giving them a platform in which to ultimately support that community more effectively. From quadrupling donations in the first year, to being in a music video by recording artist Drake, the branding has helped them achieve their goals and more.
The rebrand was the winner of a Brand Impact Award in 2020 and received an honourable mention at the Creative Review Brand Effectiveness Award 2022.
“The investment paid off almost immediately. Brands began to take us more seriously and the donation totals quadrupled in the first year.”
BRAND SUMMARY
As brands continue to emerge and jostle for space, and the same pool of people, it pays to get your brand foundations right. Take the time to find your vision, explore your mission and articulate that confidently. Wherever your brand is at in its journey, laying the groundwork will mean you can then capture your audience’s imagination and attention, making your brand distinctive.
HOW CAN WE HELP?
Businesses face new challenges all the time. We’re just as agile as you are. Whether that’s supporting your internal teams to deliver new creative projects or brand strategy, helping you reach your goals, or understanding how targets and objectives shape a brief up front. We work with you to get a deep understanding of your brand values, DNA, and audience, while conducting our own competitor research and wider industry trends to have a clear picture of what success looks like for your business.
HAVE A PROJECT IN MIND?
HAVE A PROJECT IN MIND?
No two businesses or clients are alike. That’s why we love what we do. It’s never too late to start thinking about your brand. Whatever your goals or challenges we’d love to bring award-winning, thoughtful creativity to your business. It all starts with a hello.