Four important elements your brand might be missing
Is your brand working for you? Or is missing something? Discover four important elements your brand needs.
A brand is not a homogenous entity; it’s a puzzle made up of lots of distinct pieces. When you put them together correctly, the final result should seem cohesive to prospective customers, and act as the element that hooks their interest and ultimately earns their loyalty.
Like a puzzle, it’s also possible for a brand to be missing something vital, and yet still seem roughly intact to the untrained eye.
If you feel like there’s a piece of your brand you’re struggling to find, we’ve put together a list of key facets that could have gone walkabouts and will need reinstating.
1) A consistent and suitable tone
The cornerstone of your brand personality is the tone you use in any customer-facing content. This should be appropriate for the market you’re targeting, as well as consistent across all the platforms and contexts in which your brand might be encountered.
The tone itself can be whatever makes the most sense for your brand; think warm and approachable for a B2C brand, and professional and knowledgeable for a B2B brand. However, you choose to pitch it, keeping the tone consistent in everything from email marketing and social media posts to ad copy and landing page content is crucial.
2) A clear and compelling brand story
As explained in this certified guide from StorySells, you can convey your brand message more successfully if it is structured as part of a broader narrative.
This is a good way to bring simplicity to the table, even if the products and services you offer are undeniably technical or complicated.
Aside from the advantage of communicating your brand identity to customers more easily, creating a clear and compelling brand story will also help with things like sales team training and even employee onboarding.
If the story of your brand is unambiguously laid out, then lots of other aspects of its personality and ethos will fall into place.
3) A distinctive logo
Every brand needs a logo to act as its calling card. But if you take a look around, you might notice that while some businesses have the benefit of an iconic or impactful logo, others either fade into the background by being too generic, or simply aren’t a good fit for the brand they’re intended to represent.
If you don’t have an in-house design team at your disposal, it’s worth working with outside experts to review, tweak and even replace your logo if necessary.
Checking up on what logos are used by close competitors is also helpful, and staying on top of design trends, if only so you can avoid following the crowd, should also be a priority.
4) A meaningful tagline
Some brands have managed to master the art of choosing a tagline or slogan that really clicks with customers, and effectively becomes interchangeable with the business name, logo and other definitive elements along the way.
You might not be able to join the upper echelons in this regard, but it’s still sensible to take a stab at coming up with a tagline that isn’t just catchy for the sake of it, but actually has meaning in the wider context of your brand’s identity.
The most oft-cited example of a killer tagline is Nike’s seminal ‘Just do it’ phrase, which emerged in the late 80s and helped the brand rise to greater global dominance.
Like the other elements covered above, the tagline for your brand has to suit your business and your industry, or else it can feel forced or inauthentic. In short, put in the time and effort needed to complete the puzzle of your brand, and the results could be game-changing.
Photo by Monica Silva
