“What’s your best friend like?”
“Oh, he’s great. He’s about six-foot-one, short brown hair, usually wears brightly colored polos and jeans. And he wears the dumbest pair of sunglasses you’ve ever seen.”
“I meant, what’s his personality like? What kind of guy is he? Does he show up for his friends, does he plan your fishing trips thoughtfully?”
The man with the best friend stuttered as his mind raced through every fact it held about his Best Friend. Tall, bearded, wears Timbs, nine toes – he realized, with a confusion that was new to him, that none of these were answers to the question.
What most marketers think Brand Identity is
Spend enough time with an organization’s marketing team and you’ll see a guide for their brand visuals, providing standards to anyone creating graphic design. These are truly helpful documents. They tell you exactly what colors to use for the brand, how to use and protect the logo, what fonts to use for headings, and many other useful things regarding how the brand presents itself visually across all mediums. Together, all these are the brand visuals.
These guides often have guidelines for how to write for the brand. They outline at least a handful of adjectives and descriptors of written tone that should be adhered to for consistency in writing. Notes on terminology to use, to avoid, sentence styles, reading level, and many other factors can be included. Together, these are the brand voice.
Most people use the term “brand identity” when they mean “brand visuals,” but there’s a better way to use these terms. In marketing, we must use language with the intent of being understood by our target audience, and “brand identity” has been hijacked for visuals.
What is an identity? Is it the clothes you wear, your makeup or grooming routine, and your haircut? Or is it something more – something having to do with your likes, dislikes, character, choices, roles, emotions, and thoughts?
Is your company fully represented by the colors in your logo? Does the font used on your website capture everything accomplished for clients? Or is your company’s identity – the brand identity – in the individual and aggregate stories of people served, how they feel about your company, and what people expect when they interact?
The meaning of brand identity, and other phrases
These words that make up branding jargon are unstandardized and often simply not agreed upon. Many agencies use “brand identity” to refer to the visual standards of a brand, and use “the brand” as both the entity itself and the set of perceptions people have about the brand.
A number of agencies lean into the trend of using marketing jargon to create the “wow they’re so smart” effect. Rooster High has found that the most success is found when your language is selected to maximize understanding with your audience, so in the case of these brand terms, we want to use plain language that is easy to understand.
In short, an identity should be who or what something is; the visuals should be what is seen; and the voice should be what is read or heard.
According to that thinking, here are the definitions.
The Brand
An entity (product, person, or organization) being perceived for the purposes of transaction.
Brand Identity
The aggregate expectations, thoughts, and feelings about a brand by its audience.
Brand Visuals
The set of standards which create consistency in a brand’s visual presentation, usually consisting of colors, fonts, graphic styles, motion graphics, and photography/videography styles, and others.
Brand Voice
The set of standards which create consistency in a brand’s written or spoken presentation, consisting of tone, word choice, sentence style, punctuation choices, and others.
Brand identity is in the heart and mind of the audience
The deepest, truest meaning of brand identity is the aggregate thoughts, feelings, and attitudes people have about the entity. That entity can be a celebrity, a product, a non-profit, a solopreneur, a megacorp – pretty much anything.
The identity of this brand is created through how it interacts with people. Here in the southeast, Chic-fil-A is famous for this on every level that matters for a fast-food restaurant; the chicken sandwich is delicious and consistent, the waffle fries fun (and delicious), and staff members replying with “My pleasure!” is so consistent it’s basically a meme – and it feels like spotting a unicorn when one of them forgets to say it (which, in my long career as a Chic-fil-A consumer, has happened maybe twice).
Large brands are easy to reference to create an understanding of what this brand identity is. As an exercise, pick one of these brands that your colleagues or friends are familiar with and ask them to write down a handful of phrases that come to mind: Facebook, Whole Foods, Apple, Sesame Street. You’ll start to see patterns among their answers. Some variations, yes, but ask enough people (get to the double-digits if you’re persistent) and repeat answers are guaranteed.
When a brand has a huge presence (especially a consumer brand, like Chic-fil-A, Lowe’s, or Facebook) it’s easier to discern a few things about their brand identity right off the bat. But every brand that’s been in public operation for some time – usually, at least one year – has enough relationship data stored in the hearts and minds of its audience to discern what their brand identity really is.
That is the meaning of brand identity: the aggregate expectations, thoughts, and feelings about a brand by its audience.
Four colors and five adjectives aren’t enough
Many organizations spend money on a ‘brand guide’ document where zero work is done to discern the shape of the brand in the hearts and minds of the audience. They list colors, font selections, some graphics assets or styles, and a handful of adjectives to describe the writing.
Don’t get me wrong: standardizing all of these elements is necessary, and worth it to pay for if your team isn’t 100% confident in how to create them and deploy what’s inside. At a certain size, your brand is expected to be coherent and consistent and will simply look sloppy and unprofessional with high variation in your visuals.
But a Brand Guide based on existing visuals and filled in via agency vibes is like buying a car that’s already travelling downhill. When you get to the bottom, you learn there’s no engine.
The momentum fooled you into thinking the brand – really, the relationship between the brand and the audience – was operating like it should.
It’s one reason the archetype of the executive who hates agencies exists. It’s because they’re no-nonsense people who have witnessed a large amount of agency nonsense.
True stories make the best marketing. There’s a true story about every brand – whether it’s a large business creating a product, a professional services firm, a non-profit organization with four distinct audiences to tell a single story to, or a solopreneur. The hardest work is seeing the forest for the trees and summing up said forest in a clear, concrete, punchy way.
Finding an organization’s Brand Identity
If you’ve read this far, you’ve earned the right to a secret which could be an unprofitable one for me.
If your brand has any of the following in this example list, you already have the key ingredients to discerning your brand identity:
- A volume of reviews and testimonials
- Other gathered feedback, including notes on how people introduce your company
- Customer emails
- A board willing to give feedback
- Partners (community partners, vendors, etc.) willing to give feedback
Across this wealth of information lies patterns. Even Rooster High, in operation since 2022 run by a solopreneur, has customer feedback and recurring themes in introductions that shape our brand identity (“Rooster High makes it easy”; “Zach is the storyteller”, to name a few that have occurred multiple times).
If your team has anyone with the power of synthesis, a few weeks spent in analysis of interview transcripts, marketing materials, customer feedback, and other items can result in finding exactly what that brand identity is. For more information on exactly what the end of that process looks like, read about our Messaging Development work through the services page and this case study when we did the work for a non-profit.
What to do if your Brand Identity has problems
Sometimes during the process of researching your brand’s identity, you unearth some difficult perceptions.
What to do with this difficult perceptions is nuances, but there are generally two categories:
- Misconceptions – where your audience has perceptions that are incorrect. This is usually because of a failure of brand voice or visuals, or assumptions held by the audience that were not challenged.
- Real Problems – if you don’t have procedures in place to identify difficulties ahead of time, the brand identity research process sometimes uncovers problems occurring for your audience, whether that’s vendors, stakeholders, or clients.
Misconceptions can be handled by deploying new messaging targeted at education on the topic through your awareness campaign(s).
Real problems are for your leadership and management to address, through whatever your processes are for review and improvement.
Using Your Brand Identity
Once your brand’s identity is clear, concrete, and articulated well – it’s time to jump into a whole lot of marketing work.
Audit your entire web presence – all social media accounts (even inactive ones), your website, lead forms, chatbots, literally all of it. Implement the messaging that lines up with the brand identity across all of these channels. This is a large project for any marketing team of any size.
The goal here is consistency in delivering powerful words that reinforce the brand experience (not creating one out of thin air). If you sell a product and every says it’s “worth every penny and is a constant companion,” you want to be selling it to new customers as such. In this product example, it’s often appropriate to lead with reviews or testimonials that represent the brand identity well.
You can pull taglines from this brand identity work; headlines; introductions to annual letters or board reports; you can seek out testimonials, reviews, and stories that align with what you found.
Remember, true stories make the best marketing. So find those true stories, and market them.
That’s what brand identity is: the true story of your organization. No matter what, truth will always be the most powerful ingredient in any marketing effort, big or small.
Interested in working with Rooster High on brand identity? Reach out.
Read more about brand messaging – the work that discerns what your brand identity is and writes it down – here.
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