Luck and a Brand Developer.
First off, we get it.
Perhaps you’re a startup, and you haven’t even had the chance to pay for your business licenses yet. Or on a tight non-profit budget trying to refresh your overall look to attract funders. We get it.
Every dollar you spend, you want it to go far — you need it to go far.
Many of our past clients found it tempting to save money on a fast-and-cheap logo, purchase a stock website, and rush through developing their brand identity early on. Chances are you’ll be more frustrated, you’ll lose more money, and ultimately end up coming to us to help turn their luck around.
Investing in building and defining your brand’s core before anything else is crucial to your brand’s success. Fully developing the foundations of your brand are the secret to perfectly designing your dream logo.
Brand Identity Is More Than Logos and Taglines.
The development of a brand is all about knowing the ins and outs of your business. Knowing the story you want to tell, and all the ways you want to share it. Brand identity is about understanding why you made those choices beyond it was “pretty” or “nice” and how to best express those choices.
Brand development is your secret to a perfect logo, better market positioning, engaging social media strategy, and much more — having an informed understanding of your brand foundations should always be your first step.
Understanding your brand core
Vision, mission, values, and purpose are at the core of your brand identity, each one empowering your brand to remain consistent and flexible over time.
What do you do?
How do you do it?
Why are you doing it?
Where do you want to take it?
Know these answers. Feel them in your heart, and commit them to memory. They serve as the lens through which you will know how to make good decisions and how to stay “on-brand.”
Consistency and flexibility
When we say consistency and flexibility in this context, we don’t mean making sure your logo appears consistently and is adaptable enough to be displayed anywhere.
Instead, let’s take a couple of steps back.
If the whole core of your brand can remain consistent and adaptable, everything else will follow. Know your standards and know when to adapt them.
After delving deeper into your brand core, you’ll know if it’s more important to change your “recipe for success” to appeal to wider audiences or deepen the connection with your current audiences. You’ll know what matters, why it matters, and how much it matters to you and your customers.
Having this baseline in effect helps tremendously in the logo design process. You’ll be open to concepts that look different than what you may already imagine, you’ll know the hardline parameters that you want your developer to work within, and you’ll know why the final design resonates with you. This makes the process go faster, the decisions more sound, and each round of revisions more productive.
Sure, you could ask these questions yourself. You could set the guidelines to ensure consistency and flexibility. However, having an extra guiding hand during this process helps keep you from redoing your brand every five years.
Having a third-party voice is helpful.
Sometimes we don’t realize the limits we put on ourselves and our potential. Sometimes we need someone else to help open our eyes.
Having a third-party branding professional participate and guide you through this process may help broaden your horizons. They can provide insight into awareness strategies, creative brand placements, and differentiated designs. They may see how your brand could capitalize on a niche you might have overlooked. You pay them for their time, but also their perspectives and knowledge.
A development workshop with a professional can help build a timeless foundation for your brand. Brand identity is where you want to invest your first dollar.
Word to the wise: you often get what you pay for — so invest wisely.
Now What?
Fully developing your brand identity is the secret to having a perfect logo for your business. Vision, mission, values, and purpose are at the core of your brand identity, each one empowering your brand to remain consistent and flexible over time. Having this baseline in effect helps tremendously in the logo design process and contributes to your overall success.
Here at Henderson-West and Company, we are full of brand curators and storytellers. We help contextualize and empower diverse stories so that their tellers(you, dear reader) may learn to actualize development and defy the impossible.
Don’t dilly dally.
