When you hear the term “branding,” what comes to mind? Many people associate their brand identity with key visual assets, such as their logo or preferred font. That’s certainly part of it, but branding goes beyond visuals — and a visual identity entails more than a brand’s look-and-feel.
If you conceive your brand identity as a set of visual characteristics, you’re missing out on other essential branding elements. More importantly, your organization’s visuals need to do more than establish recognizability or reputation, which are the main goals of branding. Visuals are a powerful means of communication, from attracting attention to persuading your audience to creating trust and loyalty.
Let’s explore the differences between visual identity and brand identity, and how both complement each other to help you best connect with your audience — both internal and external to your organization.
What is a Brand Identity?
To truly understand the purpose and characteristics of a brand identity, we must first define branding. Some business owners equate branding with the unique visuals that symbolize their enterprise: their logo, colors, typefaces, etc. As we’ll discuss in a moment, those are aspects of a brand’s visual tone, but they are only a small part of a brand identity.
“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.”
So, branding is the art of cultivating those experiences.
Good branding builds awareness and creates recognizability, then expresses your organization’s distinctive offerings and the overall promise you make to your audience. Obviously, that all requires much more than a fancy logo or slick tagline!
To effectively connect with your customers or clients (as well as your internal team and stakeholders), you must place your brand at the foundation of all your communication efforts. A brand identity can help guide you, no matter the format you’re using.
A typical brand identity includes:
Mission, Vision, and Values
This triad of core ideas underpins all other parts of your brand identity, including your visuals.
Your mission is a concise explanation of what your organization offers and why you offer it, whom you serve, and how your endeavors are distinct from your competitors.
Your vision declares your aspirations and goals in your industry, for your audience, and in terms of your own growth.
Your values are the essential beliefs and philosophies that shape all your endeavors.
Brand Personality
In the world of marketing, the axiom “know, like, and trust” describes your ideal goal for gaining customers. It reflects the popular awareness–consideration–decision paradigm that describes the marketing funnel, but focuses on your enterprise in terms of your customer relationships.
In other words, what if your enterprise was a person? You would have a distinctive personality that helps your friends know, like, and trust you. That’s the idea of a brand personality.
How do you interact with your customers, clients, stakeholders, and team members? What are your mannerisms and speech patterns? What motivates you in your daily life?
All those characteristics feed into your brand personality. A good brand identity includes a cohesive description of how you relate to your audience. For example, are you the authoritative parental figure with sage wisdom to share? Or a supportive buddy who tries to persuade your friends to do their best? Or an intuitive guide who poses thoughtful questions to elicit new insights among your audience?
There is no right or wrong answer. Your brand personality is unique to your company — and it lays the foundation for your visual and verbal presence.
Verbal Tone
Your brand’s verbal tone is a key part of your personality. How do you speak to your audience? What kind of language do you use?
Language is vital to communication, and even slight variations can completely alter how someone perceives your brand. Consider the difference between the following two popular taglines:
“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there” – State Farm
“You’re in good hands” – Allstate
Both are insurance providers that emphasize customizable, compassionate support for their customers. But notice the difference in verbal tone. State Farm is authoritative and declarative, phrased in the third person with a compound sentence. By contrast, Allstate’s tagline is more personable and conversational, phrased in the second person with a simple, comforting statement.
How you structure your sentences, the words you use, and the overall tone all affect your communication. State Farm customers likely respond to an authority figure and want to feel their insurer takes care of them, while Allstate customers prefer a partner who can help them tackle problems.
By defining your verbal tone, you can make your written content consistent and compelling across channels. Inconsistent copywriting can impair your communication efforts.
That said, you’re free to adjust your verbal tone for each of your audience segments. For example, your prospective clients may appreciate a more casual tone, while potential investors will respond to an authoritative approach. Varying your tone is okay as long as your overall language is consistent and appropriate for your audience.
Visual Tone
If your brand were a person, your verbal tone would be how you speak, so your visual tone might be how you dress and express yourself. What do you wear? What aesthetic do you prefer?
In a brand identity kit, the visual tone typically includes the basic characteristics of your graphics, such as:
Brand colors (HEX or RGB values)
Brand typefaces and font preferences
Your logo, its variations, and how to properly display the logo
Stylistic elements, such as filters, gradients, borders, etc.
However, these are primarily technical details. While they help create recognizability, they are only a small part of your branding, let alone your organization’s overall communication efforts. Consider them the nuts and bolts of your visual identity.
That said, let’s explore what composes the rest of your visual identity.
Your Visual Identity
A visual identity is the overall set of colors, typefaces, photography preferences, graphic assets, and layouts that shape your audience’s overall visual experience. While these characteristics may seem like superficial branding elements, they actually perform a powerful communicative role.
For example, certain colors evoke specific emotions or mental states. Even across cultures, yellow connotes happiness, purple connotes luxury, and so on. Therefore, your brand colors help shape your audience’s experience. They can enhance or soften your denotative content, such as your persuasive copy.
Let’s say you take a highly inquisitive, didactic verbal tone in your copy. When combined with bright red or orange, your overall message is quite assertive, potentially aggressive. But when paired with a pink or yellow hue, your tone may seem more compassionate, educational, and inspirational.
Similarly, an elegant serif typeface with tight kerning connotes formality and rigidity. Paired with an authoritative tone and blue or grey hues, this font will give your brand a classic, professional feel. However, simply swapping the serif for a sans-serif could make it seem more innovative and friendly.
As you see, your complete set of visual and verbal cues creates a cohesive experience for your audience. A visual identity, then, describes how you communicate visually in various formats. While a general visual branding kit mostly describes your awareness-building and recognizability, a visual identity shapes all your communications:
Persuasive presentations for prospective clients and investors
Training and onboarding documents for employees, contractors, and distributors
Community engagement and content-generation prompts for customers and fans
Internal communiques for team members and leaders
Promotional content for potential customers
Continual engagement for existing and loyal customers and clients
While each of these content pieces should be phrased and positioned differently, you want them all to share a consistent visual identity. The key is to variably implement that identity to support your goal. In some cases, brighter hues are more appropriate, while in others, pastel colors may nurture the relationship.
It’s more than colors and typefaces, of course. The overall visual composition also affects how your audience perceives your communications. While humans recall images more efficiently than text, they’re also susceptible to “processing fatigue,” in which they only absorb the most obvious message in a design. This is more likely in dense compositions in which the noise outweighs the signal.
A complex design isn’t necessarily bad, but it will affect how people interact with your content. A highly sophisticated enterprise that’s speaking to bottom-of-funnel prospects is more likely to get away with multi-column layouts and tight margins than a casual brand trying to attract new leads. In the latter, simple layouts with lots of white space are ideal.
In conclusion, you must understand how visual representation psychologically and intellectually impacts your audience. Your visual identity underpins your communication efforts, depending on the channel and language you use, as well as what you want to achieve.
“When you’re developing your visual identity, always drive what you’re doing back to your mission to keep your brand on track.”
Wrapping Up
As you see, visual branding, verbal tone, and visual identity all work together to support your goals. Visuals are ultimately a form of communication, while branding is the groundwork you perform to expand awareness around your brand. Considering how much more efficiently humans respond to visuals, it’s well worth your time to refine your visual identity. Strong, compelling visual presentations can make the difference between noise and an irresistible signal.
