Creating a great brand or brand identity is key in a successful marketing campaign. It’s not as simple as thinking of a catchy name or gimmicky slogan. Most experts believe a successful successful brand is built on a foundation of positive core beliefs.

One of the most recognized brands in the world is Coca-Cola. They’ve put a lot of thought into who they are, what they believe, and what they are providing for the world. Read Coca-Cola’s Mission and Vision Statement. This document lays the groundwork for who they want to be as a brand.

Brand: A concept about who you are (as a company), what you promise and what benefits you deliver.  This message is communicated whenever people come in contact with any facet of your business.

Brand Identity: The images connected with your brand and the perceptions or beliefs people associate with it.

Branding: The process of building a positive collection of perceptions about your company or product.

The best brand makers begin with a set of core beliefs about their company or product and work from there.  Great brands have strong, clear, simple core beliefs.

Part 1: Your Brand Background

Create a brand based on things you like, things you’re good at, or information from your Interest Inventory. You will be creating a brand for a product or service that you come up with. It can be a take on an existing product, or it can be something made-up that you’ve always thought was a good idea.

A well developed brand communicates who you are and what you believe as a company.  Great brands develop simple, clear messages about who they are and what they do.  Once a message is defined, the branding begins in the form of a company or product name, a logo and a tagline.

Your job is to create a brand.  Start with a product or service you’re interested in.  Brain storm ideas.  List some adjectives that would describe the very best company/product or brand in your brand’s industry.  Next, write 3 – 5 belief statements about your company or product.  Put together a detailed paragraph about the message you want your brand to send.

Example

Product: I want to create a company that brings maple syrup (remove syrup – bad connotations for candy) candy to the masses.

Adjectives: Creamy, rich, environmentally friendly, fun, natural, premium

Belief Statements:

Our candy will be high quality and delicious

Our candy will be made in an old-fashioned way

Our company will be environmentally friendly

Our company will be fair in all we do.

Company Message: We want to send the message that our candy is the ultimate, exclusive, pinnacle of maple flavored candy.  We will communicate that it is rich and decadent.  We will make sure all our company practices are environmentally friendly and will communicate this to our customers.  We want to be seen as “close to the earth” but not dirty. The concepts “close to the earth” and “environmentally friendly” can be communicated by making our product organic.

Part 2: Brand Elements

Now you’re ready to craft a brand that is unique and fits all the characteristics you want to communicate about your product and company.  There are three essential elements to a brand:

• the company name,
• the tagline (or slogan) and
• the logo

The Visual Capitalist logo types and color psychology

Fullstop360 logo color explanation

The Company Name The name should be catchy and fit the product well. Here are a couple resources that go in depth about how to craft the perfect name for your company/product. Part of the trick of creating a great product/company name is finding one that isn’t already taken. Before you commit to a specific name, you have to make sure it’s not already taken. If it is, you may need to get creative to make the name your own. Use Google, and more specifically Google Domains to check your name idea’s availability.

Tips for a great product name (from AYTM)

How to Name a Product (from Fabrikbrands)

In summary, great company/product names:

• are easy to pronounce;
• are short, preferably three or fewer syllables;
• are well-balanced where vowels and consonants alternate evenly throughout;
• resonate and whether achieved through alliteration, haplology or poetics, when a great name sounds right, you just know it; and
• often imply speed and dominance; so when naming a business, keep in mind that some of the greatest brands (Barbie, Pepsi, Boeing, Procter & Gamble) begin with one of seven all-powerful consonants — B, C, D, G, K, P or T.

The Tagline (or company slogan)

Tips for a Remarkable Tagline (from inc.com)

51 Best Taglines of All Time (from Trebrand.com

The Company Logo

Designer Chuck Green’s  detailed process for logo design.

Here’s a batch of creative logos from professional designers Here are some more. Consider these designs when crafting your own. Six Revisions: Logo Design Tutorials is a very thorough page of sites, galleries and tutorials to help guide you through the logo design process.

My Thought Process for Creating the Mapréme brand

When considering a name for my product, my first thought was “Maple Creme”, but then I thought it sounded too clunky and generic.  I then can up with a word-combination name – Mapreme.  It combines Maple, creme and supreme or premium.  I purposefully used the French spelling for creme and decided to include the accent on top of the e.

Regarding color of the Mapreme brand, my first thought is brown because chocolate is brown. My second thought is tan because the candy itself, upon further definition is tan, like maple sugar candy. I also like the idea of purple because of the royalty connotations (my brand is premium) and green because of the earthy connotations.

Based on reading what emotions colors convey, I landed on using orange or yellow as the primary color, and then brown as the secondary color.

When kicking around ideas for Mapréme, I decided I didn’t want a maple leaf associated with the product.  Maple leaves are for trees and Canadians.  I may use the bucket on a hook image (how they get maple tree sap).

A brand that I want to emulate is Black & Green’s Organic Chocolate.   Their packaging and branding are sililar to what I want for Mapréme. I’m not so sure about their tagline, “Live in the &”. 

I kicked around some ideas involving nature, earth, sweet, etc. I finally landed on what I think is the perfeect tagline. I especially like it because it can be taken 2 ways. My Mapreme slogan is “Nature’s Sweet”.

Part 3: Defining Your Target Market

You have developed a product and a brand. Your next step is to clearly think through and define who you want to sell your product to. Who the target audience for your product?

The crucial next step in putting together a good marketing campaign is to understand your target audience. Successful marketers do a lot of market research. Their primary objective is to get into the minds of the people they want to target. Marketers need to know how to make people want their product. They get there by working to understand the people they want to sell to. Market researchers collect all kinds of data on their potential target markets including:

• Demographic information — Includes age, gender, nationality (if necessary), etc.
• Psychographic information — Includes lifestyle data like hobbies, interests, opinions, etc.
• Geographic information — Includes information about where the subject lives and where he or she purchases products and services. This can be as broad as the country or state in which they live, or as narrow as the county, city and neighborhood.
• Behavioral information — Includes information about how the subject uses products or services.
• Benefit information — Includes information about the perceived benefits the subject receives from products and services.

You need to have a clear idea of who you’re selling to, however, you don’t have a representative sample of your target market to collect information from. You’ll have to make it up. Think through and write up a 150 word market profile for the group you want to sell to. Think through the following questions and write up a target market profile.

Demographics
age?
gender?
income level?
education?
family make-up?

Lifestyle
Do they spend more time indoors or outdoors?
Are they spenders or savers?
How do they spend their free time?
Do they live in an urban, suburban or rural area?
How many family members are typically in your customers’ households?
What hobbies and/or sports do your customers enjoy?
What types of entertainment do they like? (movies, theater, opera, etc.)
What publications do they subscribe to?
How else do they enjoy spending their free time?
Are there any other lifestyle things to know about them?

Psychographic Attitudes

Which of the following categories fit the psychographic profile of your customers?

Conservative?
Liberal?
Conformist?
Environment-friendly ?
Socially conscious?
Power-wielding?
Fun-loving?
Cutting-edge?
Trend follower?
Fashion-forward?
Family-oriented?

Rank the order of importance of the following criteria to your target market: