Whether your service has a long-established brand identity, or you’re looking to build a new one from scratch – it’s important to understand the role a brand plays in your company journey, and how to make sure it’s set up for success.
In this lesson, we’ll try to dissect the elements that build a strong brand, and the route to achieving that for your service.
What is a brand identity?
A strong brand identity is a brand that has been thought through, lives and breathes the culture of the company it portrays, and is consistent in application across platforms to appeal to the target audience the service is trying to attract.
Defining your brand purpose
How do you do the research that backs-up your design decisions when building a brand identity? What do you focus on, and who should be involved? This piece of work will help you define your key messaging that you return to again and again, established to best communicate your offering to your target audience. This will play a key role in brand design process, as well as your longterm marketing and advertising efforts. Done right, it will also help you shape your internal strategies, making sure you continue to focus on what has been identified as a core aspect to your service.
Developing a visual brand identity
This covers your logo, your font choices, the imagery you use to support your messaging, and colour palette. This should enable you to link your digital and physical presence, for example by making sure your on-site branding is consistent with the branding members see when visiting your website or app.
In today’s lesson we’ll be looking at the first of these two areas; defining your brand purpose.
Who should be involved in building the brand identity?
While it’s easy to think that a brand build can be a standalone Marketing project, the strongest brands get buy-in from across the business at an early stage. At the end of the day, the brand should be lived and breathed by everyone in the team, from reception to coaches to senior management.
In order for a brand to resonate with everyone, we need to make sure their thoughts are heard and considered. Remember that all members of your team will have their unique perspective, and may bring ideas to the table that would have otherwise been overlooked. If members of the team are feeling under represented or ignored in the project, resentment towards the new brand project can take root, leaving you on the backfoot from day one. You want the day of the brand launch to be a day of excitement, not disgruntled acceptance.
That being said, you want to avoid a ‘too many cooks’ scenario, so we usually recommend that representatives from each service division alongside the key decision makers are involved in the workshops to gather ideas, and the refinement of those ideas is left to a key project team of maximum 5 people.
While it’s easy to think that a brand build can be a standalone Marketing project, the strongest brands get buy-in from across the business at an early stage. At the end of the day, the brand should be lived and breathed by everyone in the team, from reception to coaches to senior management.
Defining your brand purpose
The 5 P’s of your brand: Purpose, Positioning, Personality, Perception, and Promotion
Before we start tinkering with shapes and colours, we need to define a direction of travel. By using the 5P method, we work with our clients to define and outline of what the brand should achieve, which provides us with clear boundaries and direction during the design process, as well as a strong backbone for the design reasoning.
Defining your Purpose, Positioning and Personality
These 3 P’s help us build the values of the brand, which will help inform the visual identity. We help our clients define these three P’s by asking 8 questions.
- Why are we here?
- What makes us different?
- What do we do, and how do we do it?
- Who are we here for?
- What do we value the most?
- What is our personality?
- Ultimately, what is our ambition?
- What do you think your branding should be like?
We recommend holding workshops with stakeholders from across the business to help answer these questions. Often key themes start to emerge, like a desire to focus on the community aspect of the service, or how the operator is pivoting towards a more specific purpose like combatting loneliness in rural areas. Perhaps there are historical associations with the brand that need to be considered, or the fact that the value the service offers is truly unmatched in the local area. All of these will help inform the values as well as the physical design of the brand.
If you have the capacity to do so, we also highly recommend asking your customers about how they perceive your service. This again can provide valuable insight that might be lost to those immersed in the company day-in-day-out.
At this stage, we also recommend doing a scan of the local competition to see where the benchmark is, and how you want to stand out from the crowd.
Building your values
The values play a key role in the build of a brand identity. Not only will they serve as a cheat-sheet during the design process, but they should also play a core role during recruitment and onboarding of new staff and become key pillars to your overarching strategy. That’s why we recommend filtering out key themes, phrases, or even single words from the above discussions and hone it down to a maximum of 6 key values.
Some examples of values we come across for the public sector are:
- Trust
- Investing in the community
- Accountability
- Personal Service
- Be active
Keep in mind that some values can have multiple meanings. For example ‘be active’ can refer to both physical activity, as well as being active within the community, helping to socialise or connect individuals to groups for support. If you’re struggling to cut the potential values down to less than 6, using these multi-faceted keywords can help capture multiple themes in one.
These values should stand as pillars in your company handbook, repeatedly referenced in internal meetings, even plastered across your office walls, so that everyone within the service knows them off by heart.
What’s in a name?
Defining the name of a service, if required, is one of the trickiest bits to get right. Words are extremely ambiguous and many of us have subconscious associations with words that might rule out a crowd favourite.
We have honed down that most operators in the public leisure sector would like to see name options across a spectrum, from ‘safe and familiar’ to ‘completely abstract’. Chat GPT is a great place to start gathering ideas these days, and the refinement of the most popular options can be done by committee.
It is worth pointing out that the name should be chosen before you begin working on the visual identity, because it has huge impact on the visual routes that open up. For example, the names ‘Active Living’ and ‘HyperFit’ bring different mental images to mind. The name should of course also sit in line with the values identified previously.
Due diligence
There’s the obligatory ‘has it been used before’ check, where you’ll want to consider all versions of URL’s and competing industry services with a similar name. Choosing a name that’s too similar to another in your industry will likely cause trouble with your search rankings down the line, and cause needless confusion to members, so it’s worth keeping in mind.
Also think about what customers will likely refer to your service as, and how you feel about that. For example, if you settle on the name ‘Local Leisure Limited’, people will likely call you ‘Local Leisure’ or ‘LL’, maybe even ‘LoLe’. Also consider whether, if you’re going for a long or descriptive name, you’d be happy to use the abbreviation or acronym in your branding.
Finally, consider whether the name itself or any of its acronyms could be considered offensive in your own, or other languages.
Working on your Perception (Brand Message)
The brand message is different from your values. While your values describe who you are to your internal team, the brand message is the outward facing statement that encapsulates your values and shapes how your audience perceives you. This should be a short tagline that is unique to you, and can be used in marketing campaigns, merchandise, and lots of other places. Sometimes this tagline is used within the logo design itself, but not always.
Think of ‘Just do it’ or ‘It’s finger lickin’ good’. They’re not the name of the brand, nor do they appear within Nike and KFC’s official logo, but they are synonymous with the services they represent, and each hold a core of that that product stands for.
During your workshops, the chances are that specific words or phrases have come up repeatedly when describing your service. Start there and brainstorm ways of making it catchy or more meaningful. To make sure it’s flexible and memorable, you want to aim for short and punchy.
The brand message will likely reflect your brand tone of voice, so is it personal, ambitious, or maybe challenging? How does it roll off the tongue when you say it out loud, or when you combine it with the name of your service? How does it look written down? These are all things to consider when defining your core brand message.
e.g. “Healthier, Happier, You” for Active South Ayrshire communicates their focus on both the physical and mental wellbeing with a personal connection to their local community.
Considering Promotion
The last of the P’s is Promotion; who are we speaking to and how are we reaching them. This is a more general marketing question but should be highly influential in all your branding choices.
By knowing who we’re speaking to and what platforms we’re most likely to use, we can make sure our visual identity is suitable to that audience and platform.
For example, if you know you’re serving a young audience, your visual identity choices may lead to a younger looking brand, taking a few more risks, and with designs in mind that work for animations on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. You may want to consider a standout font that looks good on still graphics as action statements.
If, however, you’re dealing with an ageing population, perhaps clarity and legibility take precedence, making sure your brand stands out in printed materials and leaves room for explanatory text, as they may want more context and proof of concept before deciding to sign up to your service.
If you really want to do your homework, you can commission a Mosaic Profile to be done on your local demographic or existing membership base to give you hard proof of who your customers may be, and how to best connect with them.
Embracing the challenge
Developing a new brand identity can be a hugely rewarding experience, with an impact across all your business areas. Hopefully, the guidance provided in this course will provide some anchor points to help navigate this journey.
If you are embarking on a branding journey, whether that’s building a brand-new brand identity, or refreshing an existing one, make sure you take the time to do it right, and don’t shy away from enlisting the help of professionals as and when required.