What principles do the best branding agencies apply while designing a brand identity

What principles do best branding agencies apply while designing a brand identity?

First let’s understand what brand identity is.

What is a brand?

A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.

What is an identity?

The visual components used to represent the firm’s philosophies, beliefs and vision form the identity of the company.

There are certain fundamental principles that branding agencies adhere to while creating the visual and style guidelines of a brand. There are as follows:

1. Research, Vision and Design Brief

What are the seven fundamental questions to help you towards a killer design brief?

How is the brand perceived against competitors?

What is the positioning statement of the brand?

What is the heritage of your product type and the origins of its ingredients and fabrication?

Who is your audience? Where will the company have contact with them?

What values and beliefs should the brand have about the business and it’s mission in the world?

What benefits do you want customers to associate with your brand?

Once agencies have the answers to these questions they proceed from the research phase to the theoretical phase, which includes the following points:

Who is the target audience?

What are the messaging objectives?

What are the values of the brand?

What are the brand’s offerings?

The best branding companies also ensure to understand the external factors such as:

Budget for building the brand identity

The timelines and schedule of the project

The compatible formats and color schemes

Other practical needs

2. Logo, Identity & Guidelines

Once the brand consultant is clear with the findings from the research, he or she will work with the designer to establish the logo and other important identity.

The logo is the central, identifiable visual element that helps customers discover, share and remember a company’s brand.

Many designers start by sketching out dozens, even hundreds of iterations on paper. The best branding agencies ensure that they have a rough sketch before proceeding with the final design outputs.

The graphic designer will use the rough sketches to create an identity system for the brand. The purpose of this system is to create a functional visual language around the logo, including a family of flexible elements that will help to design future design assets.

Once the identity system is created, the designer will proceed to create the style guidelines. The style guidelines is a visual document that prescribes the logo usage rules, typeface system, color palette, layout guidelines and more.

3. Monitoring and Rebranding

Brand identity is a living, breathing thing that might need to evolve as it interacts with consumers.

The challenge with rebranding is to maintain familiarity and consistency so that your customers remember you.

These are some of the fundamental principles that top branding agencies apply while designing and visualizing the brand identity of a company. There are more than 10 popular tools in the market that can guide a brand manager with respect to color schemes, font options and basic design templates.

Companies in progressive cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Delhi give huge importance to branding as it is an important part of their sales strategy. Thus most of the popular agencies in these cities are able to attract the best talent pool to apply for creative jobs and lucrative design based careers. It is of no surprise that people want to work only for the best branding agencies, but it is also notices that people may apply to lesser known agencies who have a reasonable clientele. The list of branding agencies across India is rapidly growing and clients have a larger agency to pool to choose from, which has created a huge price rift in the market. The overall situation in the world is hard to predict because art is subjective and an observation in one country cannot be applied in totality.