Brand identity design connects you to your audience and is the most reliable and effective way to distinguish your organization from amongst your competition. It’s why you can see the famous “swoosh” symbol and immediately know that the brand being represented is Nike. But it’s not simply the visual representation of your brand through the use of color and design; it’s your brand’s story, values, people, products, and unique qualities that truly convey a strong association to brand identity. Beyond association, it’s an impression customer has with your brand, whether it’s quality, leadership, reliability, luxury, affordability, sass, or value.
Your brand identity design paves the way for distinctive brand marketing opportunities to support your brand strategy. Brand identity design plays a key role in distinctive marketing and should project a consistent message to target audiences.
Distinctive Marketing and How It Relates to Brand Identity Design
Distinctive marketing establishes brand trust through consistency and familiarity and helps companies develop long term relationships with customers. Leveraging visual collateral helps businesses shape customer perception.
Logos
Integral to distinctive marketing, logos set the tone for all other brand imagery. It can encapsulate an entire message within a single image and is a core pillar of successful marketing campaigns.
Colors
Color association is woven into the very psychological fabric of brand values. Distinctive marketing makes strategic use of brand colors to articulate a company values; green for sustainability, orange and yellow for playfulness, and so on.
Iconography
Represents important brand themes, concepts, and ideas are used to improve customer understanding of a brand’s story. Marketing expert Neil Patel asserts that iconography in marketing increases brand engagement.
Infographics
Cuts through the marketing clutter and helps brand campaigns go viral. Infographics are shared on social media three times more often than any other marketing content, and convey brand content in easily digestible ways.
Brand Identity Designs that Tell a Story
Brand designs can depict entire stories about a company’s connection with its target audience. Companies use designs to speak their audience’s language, and when done effectively, can demonstrate the harmony between brand and customer.
- Edgy, Retro Designs Represent Gen Z: The famous 1990’s Southern California skater culture brand, Vans, features a retro-classic, edgy brand identity design that resonates with nostalgia loving youths. Their iconic checkerboard pattern, simple color palette, and skater symbols are popular with teen consumers and represent that demographic’s vintage-loving preferences and scorn of throwaway trends. As Vans seeks to eschew trends and be a constant source of cool, it remains a hallmark for younger generations.
- Do-it-Yourself reliability Resonates with Boomers: Home Depot, the do-it-yourself home improvement brand, utilizes a bold orange and white color theme, and a no-nonsense logo inspired by transport freight cargo that baby-boomer audiences associate with trust, practicality, and self-sufficiency. This generation’s strong work ethic, appreciation of value, and tendency towards self-reliance is advocated within the brand’s color, stark choices, and iconography and aligns with the brand’s marketing objectives.
