What is the difference between a Brand and a Logo?
A Brand and a Logo are often confused as being the same thing but they are not the same thing!
It is important to understand the difference between your Brand and your Logo, especially if you are selling products or services and need to be a visible outward facing business,
This post helps to explain - what is a brand and what is a logo?
What is a Brand?
Your brand is everything that represents your company, how you come across and how you are perceived by your customers.
Within your market which are you - a leader, an innovator, a non conformist?
Or are you - trusted, experienced and reliable?
It's very hard to be both.
You should know your customers well, understand them and what they need. Focus your Brand Values on what your customers need and expect. If you don't communicate in a way that they can relate to, why would they do business with you? Make the decision making process, and therefore the sales process, approachable, relatable and accessible.
What are the Components of A Brand?
Verbal and Non-Verbal messages
Typography
Colour Palette
Ethos
Images & Graphical elements
Logo and/or Wordmark
These components of your core Brand.
Getting this wrong can be very costly, it's very difficult to change how you are perceived once you're out in the open market. Spend some time to define your brand, be comfortable with who you are and what you are selling, know your market and selling will be much easier for you and a nicer experience for your customers.
5 questions to help you define your brand
What are the unique features or benefits of your products or services?
Where do you fit within your market - high end, commodity, value.
Who are your your ideal customer/s - profile them.
What qualities do you want your business to be associated with?
What is your company mission?
Your brand is more of an emotion than a single tangible thing!
Colour can be defining part of any brand, we have written a post about the Psychology of Colour which covers how different colours can evoke different emotions
What is a Logo?
Your logo identifies you, it is one visual representation of your your business. If you have premises, literature, a website, packaging, a social media presence - your logo should consistently identify you across any visual medium and contribute to those all important first impressions.
And then there is recall. Recall is often a subconscious thing, it can happen when we see a familiar logo, which in turn helps us to know we have found that familiar business, we are in the right place!
Recall helps returning customers identify you from the competition - who doesn’t want that?!
A logo doesn’t have to communicate all of your brand values or even communicate all of what your company does. But being able to verbally communicate your brand values and clearly define your target market will only serve to help your logo designer (if you choose to use a professional). This will enable them to create a logo design that identifies you and represents you in an appropriate way for your target market.
If your target market are the parents of 5-10 year olds, you will need a very different approach than if your target market is the 60+ retired generation.
What is the best way of developing my brand?
Isoblue advocate the use of a design brief for most aspects of design work. The design brief can be as simple as a single page of information that helps guide the work and helps everyone align their work towards the brand. We cover creating a good design brief in this post
Conducting a Fact Find can help consolidate all of the work previously done and can help your team internally or help when briefing external designers. More on Fact Finds here
Conclusion
Identify your ideal target market. Know your customer.
Define your brand values - the emotions that represent your business. Ask - how do I want to be perceived?
Use a design brief to define and align Read more
Only then can you think about your logo and the other visually supporting elements of your brand such as colour, typography, tangible materials such as packaging.
Isoblue are a small team of designers and marketers. We design logos as part of helping clients develop branding and brand strategy. It costs less than you think to get it right (and could cost everything if you get it wrong! ). Email the design team