Build Out From the Brand
Squarespace web design expert and PixelHaze Studio founder, Elwyn Davies, discusses the critical role that branding plays in promoting and growing your business.
Building a brand is essential for growing a business. But how do you go about building a brand and how much is it going to set you back?
What's the difference between the brand and the logo?
Your brand is more than your logo, much more in fact. Where your logo is a motif or emblem that represents your business or company, the brand is the expansion of that. So your brand often encompasses your logo as well.
For example, if I was to use my brand colours at PixelHaze - navy, electric blue and yellow, they may or may not be colours that are used in my logo, (often they are) and then you build a colour palette from that which becomes your brand or part of your brand.
It's important to have a colour palette that we use consistently throughout our material and advertisement because that then gives us a certain look and feel, that ties in with the brand. It's the same for fonts as well, at PixelHaze we use Hallis as our font, in order to keep consistency throughout the brand, we use that wherever we can. So the logo is at the centre point of your company brand, and it includes your brand colours, fonts and visual ‘hooks’ or themes. Once you have these nailed down, you can build outwards from there.
I often like to think of a brand as the emotional sledgehammer that you get to whack your potential customers with. Important things to think about with your brand are questions like:
How does it feel? │How does it look?│Even how does it taste?
A great example is Nando's logo. Once I see the logo, I start salivating because I can taste it as soon as I can see the brand.
So I've got that clear connection between the brand and the way it makes me feel. The look of the brand is the easiest bit to cover: it's about being consistent and having that image that is instantly recognizable.
Other things are also important to consider, for example, the texture of a brand. One of the best examples of this is packaging for Apple products. Apple as a brand put so much care and attention into the packaging that the experience from the moment, a customer opens the box of their new Apple product, it's manufactured so carefully that you get that kind of 'suction' as you open it. The feel of the customer experience, particularly the tactile aspect of that then becomes key to their brand. This comes from the days where Steve Jobs was heavily influential in product development at Apple, where he would painstakingly look at the things that you don't see, which is still part of the brand. In fact, if you were to open up an iPhone, you would see that everything in there is immaculately placed.
This emphasises the importance of just because you don't see it, it doesn't mean to say that they take care of it as a company. I believe it's something he had instilled in him from his stepfather who was a carpenter, the viewpoint of, just because the customer doesn't see it doesn't mean to say that you can cut corners. That's taking it to an extreme obviously, but that's just an idea of how branding when done properly, regardless of how you feel about Apple products can have a profound impact on the brand.
What do you mean by 'Build out from the Brand'?
I often say to build out from the brand is where you use you at the centre point of your solar system and add to that your logo or emblem, which often encompasses your font selection, your colour palette, and usually some sort of element or hook that ties into multiple threads.
If you can then keep that communication consistent as you move into digital marketing, through websites, mass email mailshots, or you start looking down the routes of advertisement, even Google Ads, where there is no image uploaded, you can still have a very heavily branded advert through the language you use.
You need a strong logo or at least one that you live and breathe and feel completely at home with so that you can sell it! Even though your brand isn't for you and your marketing isn't for you, your website isn’t for you, but if you're not fully comfortable with it, you're not going to sell it to your target audience.
So if I was bringing this closer to home, we like to say that we aspire to be like the Lego of our industry. I've been heavily influenced by Lego, and so has the majority of our team, and you could say it's a coincidence, but I don't think so. I think it's more of with time in the case of it being like minds where we don't take ourselves too seriously but take our work extremely seriously.
We are quite colourful, I believe we are very playful, very inquisitive. In fact, I would go, as far as if I were to put a selection of Lego on the same desk as any of our team members, they wouldn't be able to help themselves: they'd be picking it up and start playing with it (sometimes at a detriment to project work, so it's about getting the balance!)
But it's that problem-solving approach of building things up one building block at a time is crucial to how the culture of our business is carried through and then, therefore, is heavily linked to our brand. So the culture of our business influences our brand and our brand reinforces the culture of our business.
“Your brand is an emotional sledgehammer that you get to whack someone with. How does it feel? How does it look? Can you taste it?”
Why is branding so important?
Because it's the communication tool. If we simplify it, I believe that marketing, for example, is about communicating the message as clearly as possible to a select target audience.
You can never appeal to every single audience and if you do, you're probably creating something that's too generic to get the best results. So it's a case of zoning in on who you are speaking to.
This is what I meant when I said that your brand or your website or your marketing material isn't for you, it's for your audience. If you get it right, it's for your audience, but something that you will love yourself because it's much easier to sell to an audience who are already on the same wavelength as you. Then when it comes to recruiting staff, you try and recruit staff based on a culture where they share the same core values as you, so that then makes branding easier but all the more important.
If, for example, you have a highly energetic and problem-solving culture in your business and your brand looks like it was designed in the 1990s, it might still be professional, but it's a little bit dated and stuck in a rut, then you are losing a massive edge that you could obtain for your business. So branding is about communication and setting the right level of promises and setting and managing expectations, so when someone sees your brand, you want a certain section and the size of that audience varies depending on the industry and your brand and your culture. But if you can resonate with your target audience, the next step then is just making sure you reach enough of them. So that's why we put a lot of work into branding, not just because we create brands, but also because we fully believe that they are the silver bullet to reaching your audience.
How much does it cost to create a brand?
Good question. It's a case of how long is a piece of string? I've created and worked on projects upwards of £20,000 for great brands, for larger organizations.
At the other end of the spectrum, I've created a very effective logo that's been developed by our client into a brand in a 15-minute project. Now I wouldn't recommend the 15-minute project as that's probably leaving it a little bit too tight, but we create a number of branding projects in timescales between half and one day.
Can you create an established, mature brand in that time? Of course not. We've worked with various clients where we've created a logo that becomes the core of the brand, the centre point, and then we've worked with them over a longer period of time, or we've trained them in brand management so that they can effectively build on their brand over a longer period of time.
I think in terms of the designing aspect, it's probably only a tenth of the actual thought processes that needs to go into creating a brand for it. We certainly don't spend three days a week creating artwork that develops our brand, but we spend an awful lot of time thinking about our brand. We constantly think about questions like:
Is our message getting across clearly?
Are people responding to it?
Have we evolved beyond our current brand?
How will we and do we need to expand on it?
Constantly thinking about these questions is important because they go hand in hand with business development and marketing and other aspects as well. It really depends on how important branding is to your business because obviously for a visual brand, for example, a logo is more important for some industries than others. If you're a sole trader who relies solely on word of mouth, then the visual look of your logo is less important. But I would always say, try and put a serious budget aside for branding because it has a knock-on effect on everything else and that serious budget can be proportional based on your income and where you are as a business.
