Brand Positioning: How to Build Unforgettable Branding
When you create a business, it’s important to know who your audience is, how your company is perceived, and the overall look and feel of your brand. These are all aspects that go into brand positioning. (If you’re new to branding, we write more about it here.)
Brand positioning can be hard work, but it’s definitely achievable. With the right set of brand guidelines, you’ll equip your business with a dedicated rulebook—a source of truth you can look to again and again.
So, how exactly do you get that source of truth? Many companies hire agencies like ours to take care of their brand positioning and guidelines. Still, it can be hard to invest in agency services if you don’t really know what you’re getting.
That’s why we’re talking about the benefits of brand positioning and the takeaways you’ll get from focusing on your company’s personality.
How brand positioning can help you
Increase understanding of your audience
Create a cohesive tone for your design + copy
Pinpoint brand colors
Find fonts specific to your brand
Choose an image/illustration style
1. Increase understanding of your audience
Even if you don’t know every single customer, you probably have an understanding of your base and what’s appealing about your business. Does your brand promote luxury? Convenience? Wellness? The personality your company exudes is likely the very thing customers love about it.
Knowing why your brand engages people will also help you understand those people. But even with a basic knowledge of your customers, it’s still important to learn as much as you can about visitors to your site or store.
In fact, the world’s most successful companies do intensive research about their audience, learning how they interact, purchase, and shop.
And yes, the corporations of the world do have billions to spend on market research, but you can still gather learnings of your own with a scrappy budget. Agencies can help you track analytics, send out surveys, and monitor engagement to learn about your audience.
Once you know more about your customers, you can position your brand to better suit them. Consider partnering or integrating with other businesses to improve customer experiences. Connect with local vendors to sell your product, or even sponsor a community event to get the word out about your business.
2. Create a cohesive tone for your design + copy
Good creative impacts emotion and can even increase sales. In fact, according to one study, every euro invested in a highly creative ad campaign nearly doubled the sales impact on average, when compared with the same investment into a noncreative campaign.
Because of that, quality design and thoughtful copywriting need to work in harmony when it comes to your branding.
Create a voice for your copy, content, social, etc.
In order to understand your brand’s tone, you need a defined voice that touches all of your marketing materials.
Your long-form content may be less direct than your site copy, and your social content may be more conversational, but your brand’s voice should remain the same.
Think of it this way: You probably speak differently to your friends than to your neighbors. But at the end of the day, you’re still the same you. This is the approach you can take with your content. Formal or fun, it can still be the same brand.
Above is a screen-grab from the KFC website. As you can see, the copy is short and direct, as is the design. Still, there’s a lot of personality in the copy (e.g. finger lickin’ good benefits), and the design adheres to strict colors while still offering the quirky style KFC is now known for.
On the other hand, the above image is from the KFC Instagram. Since there’s more room to be playful in social media marketing, this post has a colorful video of a person eating a chicken sandwich, as well as a tweet from a KFC customer.
The copy requirements aren’t as stringent here, and the voice is still quirky and fun. The KFC colors are also pulled in (although not quite so strongly as on the site).
Choose words and formatting carefully
In addition to a unique voice, your brand also needs specific rules for formatting words, sentence structure, titles, and more.
Let’s get into some examples.
Some brands with a casual voice use sentence-case headlines:
This is an example of sentence case
Other brands with a more formal voice use title case:
This is an Example of Title Case
But some brands use all caps, or they use periods after sentence casing, or their blog titles are different from their copy headlines. In other words, it’s important to have a clear set of rules.
But formatting doesn’t stop there. Your brand also needs set spellings for certain words.
For example, is selling online considered eCommerce, e-commerce, or ecommerce? Is “internet” a proper noun? There are several questions like this that your brand will need to answer.
Personally, I use “I statements” in my blog posts; for some brands, however, that would be a huge issue, because the author needs to write as the company rather than an individual contributor.
It’s a lot to think about, but all these elements are important pieces of your brand positioning, and with them, your brand will be that much stronger.
3. Pinpoint brand colors
Without rules, things get messy fast, and that includes color choices. As we’ve talked about before, different hues have different psychological associations, which should be part of the holistic approach to your brand.
Because we make creative collateral for brands, our company colors needed to promote professionalism and maturity (with a good dose of fun). You can see how our palette is both bold and muted, helping us communicate our layered style.
On that same note, the voice of our brand is witty and authentic, rather than overly silly or serious. By creating writing that works in harmony with our colors, we can continue to show our style to existing customers and prospective customers alike.
4. Find fonts specific to your brand
Chances are, your business exists in a saturated market. So, it’s important for it to stand out. We’ve talked about how you can differentiate your brand in terms of audience, tone, and color, but another way is through your fonts.
Serif fonts (aka letters with tails) are serious, classic, and journalistic. Sans serif fonts (what you’re looking at now) are more casual and fun.
There are also specialized fonts you can purchase on sites like Type Everything, or free fonts you can download on sites like Font Squirrel. A specialized font can give your brand that competitive edge, even if you only use it sparingly.
And this doesn’t mean you can’t use a common font for the majority of your site. For instance, something like Helvetica is well-loved and classic. But not all common fonts are popular: You may already know Comic Sans is infamous among designers, so be sure to do some research first.
5. Choose an image/illustration style
Photography
Not all images are created equally, and this includes stock photos. When you develop your brand, it’s important to also develop its photography style.
For instance, are your photos black and white or are they in color? Are they dark or ultra-bright? Should the people in your photos be more youthful, more mature, more businesslike, or something else?
These are all things to consider as you work on your brand positioning. Extremely bright, traditional stock photos may give your business an enterprise feel, whereas candid-looking shots may add to the relatability of a brand.
Illustrations
Much like photography, illustrations need a lot of consideration if they’re going to be used on your brand. Illustrated characters have been widely popular among tech companies, so if you do use illustrations, they should be unique, with specific standards for how they’re created.
Icons also fit into this category. If your brand uses icons, you should have a specific library to choose from. Consider what fits best with your broader design style, and then include your icons in your set of brand guidelines.
Conclusion
As you start positioning your brand, remember to give it character and a defined sense of self. Through set guidelines, you can begin to build more than a company; you can start building a brand with a personality.
Creating your own guidelines is a simple way to start positioning your brand, but if you need help forming those essential elements, our agency can help. We offer several services, including rebrands, strategy, and more. You can contact us here for your first (free!) consultation.
