P.R.A.G.M.A.T.I.C. Branding Overview
A proven 13-Step Framework for building strategic brands that take companies to 7 figures and beyond.
The year was 2016, I was just coming off of a very successful holiday season in the business that enabled me to drop out of school and pursue full-time entrepreneurship. I felt like a hot shot and was ready to start something new.
I had all the skills. I knew everything I needed to know about building websites, running ads, and selling products. I had someone on Fiverr design a fresh new logo for me, and I was off to the races setting up my new business and marketing my new products.
My products were amazing. My marketing strategy was tight. My website was beautiful, and my social media pages were flawlessly designed. The designs I created for both the products and our marketing collateral were so sharp, we even attracted some press trying to learn more about what the business was about.
So many people told me it was awesome what I was doing, and that I was sure to be successful. All the data was pointing towards this business doing much better than my previous endeavor.
So when the business failed, the only variable there was to blame was that people just didn’t care enough. It just wasn’t a good product-market fit. Or at least that’s what I believed at the time…
It wasn’t until after years of study and experience that I really understood what had happened.
I had made a fatal error in my branding (without even knowing enough about branding to have known that there was more to it than a good logo and some cool colors). This silent mistake would eventually kill my company, and it’s a silent killer that claims the lives of millions of small businesses each year.
When I talk about branding, most people’s minds go exactly to the same place mine did 6 years ago: logos, colors, appearances, etc. Some would also include things like catchy slogans or jingles.
These things are just the most superficial layer of branding, and have little to do with the real substance.
I’m definitely NOT saying they are unimportant, in fact, the last 4 or 5 pieces in this framework are all about those things, but a building is only as good as its foundation.
Branding is an interesting thing to study, and a difficult thing to define. It’s a bit of an overloaded term.
Branding isn’t just the consistent use of colors, fonts, or logos, but the best branding utilizes all of those.
Branding isn’t the same as marketing, but the two are inseparable. You can’t market without branding and you can’t brand without marketing.
Branding is always happening whether you’re intending it to or not. The part that is left for you to decide is whether you will leave it to chance or build a strategy around it.
Your brand is the residual impact and influence you leave in a person’s mind as a result of doing business with them. Customers, Partners, Contractors, and Employees are all consuming your brand. Building a brand strategy is nothing more than deciding who you want to be and how you want to influence people.
Good branding is good business, and I hope that this guide will prove to you that this is the case and show you how to create good branding. Implemented properly, I believe that the principles discussed in this guide will influence every aspect of your business for the better.
The world is changing, The economy is shifting. People no longer do business solely with the closest option, nor are they most interested in spending hours researching who the least-expensive provider is.
Customers want brands that they can love wholeheartedly and connect with on a level that is deeper than just a transaction.
Customers want brands that stand for something.
P.R.A.G.M.A.T.I.C. Branding is a strategic approach to purpose-driven branding. It is a framework which relies upon a proven and repeatable process to create a brand with heart and soul which will dramatically increase your revenue and will maximize your ability to influence the world for the better.
Business isn't about just taking money and handing out goods. This framework will help you increase revenue and profitability while standing up for your values and making the world a better place.
Purpose driven-branding has three major benefits. 1) It will improve the effectiveness of your team by improving your company culture. 2) It will supercharge your marketing by helping people both remember and love your brand. 3) It will help you feel more conviction and less hesitation about the work you are doing because we will be taking the time to line up your business’s path to success with your desire for a better world.
One of the biggest challenges facing most businesses is building the right team. Finding high-quality team members is expensive, and training them is even more expensive. Worse still is the cost of hiring the WRONG person.
When I began implementing our P.R.A.G.M.A.T.I.C. branding system, I worked with a team that had two employees who were really frustrating the owner/manager. The owner could never prove it, but he was quite convinced that they were lying about their hours and finding ways to maximize their payment while minimizing their output (a common complaint of employers).
Within two weeks of implementing our branding system, he reported that both employees were working hard and actively making offers to work off the clock to help the small growing company thrive.
Imagine how much easier it is to hire good employees when they love their job so much they would do it for free.
If you're advertising without proper branding in place, you literally might as well just write a check to your competitors.
Seriously.
There are 5 stages of awareness a prospect passes through on their way to becoming your customer.
1) Unaware: They don't even know they have a problem (These are usually the hardest to market to).
2) Problem/Pain Aware: They know they have a problem, but they don't know that a solution exists for them.
3) Solution aware: They know that their problem can be fixed, but they haven't selected a solution and don't know about your product yet.
4) Product aware: They know about your solution, but aren't convinced it's the right fit for them.
5) Most aware: They know a lot about your product; they just need a little nudge or one last piece of information before they buy.
Unless your targeting is extremely well tuned (meaning you ONLY show your ads to people who already want your services), you're going to be reaching people in the first two stages.
If your advertising is good, you're going to help people move from phase one to phase two or from phase two to phase three, but the likelihood of them buying right away is very low.
If you have great branding in place, this isn't really a big deal.
When they come to your site or your social media pages, they will have already made a basic emotional connection with you, and they will remember who you are.
They'll keep coming back, consuming your content, and watching your company until they are in stage 5 and ready to buy.
But if you don't?
They'll forget the name of your business, but remember the problem you told them about.
They'll start googling.
They'll land on your competitor's website ready to buy, thanks to all the time and money you put into the process.
You might keep a small percentage of the customers you advertise to but send the rest to your competitors.
What do you do about it?
You could stop paying for ads and just start mailing checks to your competitors. They can advertise about the problem too, and you'll likely get some scraps from their table…
Or…
You can take a step back.
Look at your foundation.
Start with developing a solid brand that sticks in people's minds. Then use your messaging to make an emotional connection.
THEN do all of the things that most business owners start with (website, social media, paid ads, etc).
The world is yours for the taking, but sometimes you have to go back to the beginning before you can move forward.
This one is not an exact science, nor is it easy to measure.
This is certainly more of a hypothesis than a proven fact, but I think you’ll agree with my assertions.
Business is emotionally draining, but I believe it’s less emotionally draining when you know that you are doing something that is good.
If you’re among the legions of business owners who are burying their beliefs or convictions to avoid offending anyone or to appeal to everyone you possibly can, you’re spending emotional energy on things that I believe are actually detrimental to your business in the long run.
Integrity comes from the Latin word "Integer" which means "whole and intact" or "without fraction or partition".
If you have strong beliefs about an issue, you can't just check those at the door because "it's just business".
Don't ever let anyone tell you that you should:
1) Separate religion from politics.
2) Separate business from religion.
3) Separate politics from business.
Doing so is, by definition, sacrificing your integrity.
This concept is pretty simple: if you build your business around convictions you deeply hold, you’ll experience a lot more motivation and a lot less personal resistance.
Some Statistics To Ponder:
A 2022 study featured by Berkshire Hathaway's Business Wire showed that 82% of consumers stated that they consider a brand's greater mission/purpose when making purchase decisions.
A Global study conducted by Zeno Group showed that consumers were 4 times more likely to purchase from a purpose-driven brand, and 6x more likely to defend a purpose-driven brand.
For each step in our 13-step branding process, I've attempted to answer three questions: 1) What the step is and what it’s about 2) Why it will benefit your business if you take the time to implement and 3) exactly how to implement it and make it work for your business.
So, without further ado, I present the 13 steps to create and irresistible and unforgettable brand.
A study of the history of modern business and branding will clearly demonstrate that all of the most effective brands have one thing in common: a sense of purpose.
A lot of the clients we work with struggle with seeing the benefit here until we implement, but it is transformative and incredibly powerful.
A brand’s purpose should be a cause or belief that drives and directs everything the brand does. It should be the measuring stick against which every decision is measured.
An effective brand purpose is something that the organization believes in wholeheartedly, that their ideal customers also share.
For Apple, this was the idea of being a rebel, thinking differently, and challenging the status quo.
For Dove, this is about promoting a healthy concept of beauty.
Behind all of the fastest growing brands, there has been a focus on promoting beliefs and ideals over promoting a specific product or price-tag.
In marketing, you should always remember that: Beliefs > Benefits > Features > Prices
Purpose is a critical branding component for three reasons:
1) It will guide all of your other decisions and eliminate decision fatigue
2) It will help you know when to stay-the-course and when to pivot
3) This will almost single handedly determine who your most loyal followers and fans are.
A lot of businesses, when I tell them about purpose-driven branding, tell me that their purpose is to make money and they don’t think they have or want to have any sort of deeper purpose.
This is a common concern we get from the businesses we work with, but when we take the time to dig in, it generally resolves itself pretty quickly.
First of all, if money is really the most important thing to you, then you’ll find something else to care about, because having a strong sense of purpose will help your bottom line.
Businesses seeking profit reach ceilings. Businesses seeking impact reach stars.
Second, nobody cares about money for money’s sake. If you take the time to really consider what is important to you, you’ll find that there are ideals you are trying to advance and problems you are trying to solve. We only want money for the way it allows us to influence the world and our environment.
For instance:
Q: Why do I do what I do and why does it matter?
A: I help businesses win online so they don’t have to figure things out on their own like I did.
Q: Why does that matter?
A: If they don’t have to figure it out on their own they can build healthy and thriving businesses faster.
Q: Why does that matter?
A: The faster they can build their business, the more people they can serve, and those people will in turn be able to improve the lives of others, and it creates a ripple effect.
Q: Why does that matter?
A: Humanity is innately good and deserves to thrive.
Q: Why?
A: It just is.
Eventually you’ll reach a core belief that can’t be defined in words anymore, and your purpose is generally in that dialog somewhere. For Ducimus, we have a strong belief that humanity is good and deserves to thrive, and therefore any honest business that is genuinely serving humanity is a genuinely good thing and deserves to succeed.
This drives our core belief that every honest business deserves to thrive. Our purpose has become to help the good and honest businesses of the world thrive so that they can in turn help the human family.
Our team has a worksheet available to help our clients walk through this process and it is available here: 1) Purpose - P.R.A.G.M.A.T.I.C. Branding Worksheets.docx
Customers want to be INSPIRED by the brands they interact with. Your brand needs to have a clear vision of the world you are fighting for.
Your vision is your north star. It should be something BIGGER than you. It should be something that you stand no chance of accomplishing on your own. It shouldn't have anything to do with your company or the size of anything you do. It should be about what an ideal world looks like to your brand.
Like the north star, it isn't something you expect to reach anytime soon, but it is something that your brand will use for direction and navigation forever.
There is an ever growing percentage of people who understand the idea of ‘voting with their dollars’ and are vigilantly looking to support companies that they believe in and agree with. Again, NOBODY cares about money for money’s sake. We care about money for what it can do and how it can influence the world around us. As a whole, humanity is looking to improve the world around us, and we will therefore spend our money where we believe it will do the most to influence the world or our environment in the direction we want it to go.
Your vision is the most powerful tool in your arsenal for helping people identify if they are on your side or not. If you nail your vision, people with similar beliefs will promote and defend your brand adamantly. If you nail your vision, people will work for you with their blood, sweat, and tears rather than just sliding by for their next paycheck.
Ask yourself the following questions and record your responses.
Boil your answers down to one core concept or idea that can be easily expressed.
Now that we know the world we’re fighting for, we need to know your spot on the battlefield. If your vision is the north star, your mission is the mountain top you’re hiking towards. A mission can take the form of a commitment you make every day that will help you accomplish your vision, or it can be a milestone somewhere along the path towards your vision.
A mission is a goal for the business which can reasonably be accomplished by your business, but it should also be inspiring.
Many business owners struggle with understanding how their goals can be inspiring for customers. While there is a lot that can be said here, a great start is not using business terms like market share or gross revenue (these goals are great to have too, just not going to help our branding!).
Your brand mission is a concrete and measurable bit of proof or guarantee that you really believe what you say you believe. A mission should be the measuring stick your stakeholders can use to determine if you are really working towards the ideal world you declared in your vision and the ideals you defined in your purpose. If you aren’t really working towards these things, or if you aren’t actually effective in your work towards them, your audience will start to look for other organizations to support.
Use your mission to demonstrate that you are worth supporting.
Honestly pretty straightforward here. What things can you do that will show the world that you really believe what you say you do? How will you contribute to making the world a better place? What goals does your brand have that bring the world closer to your vision?
As with your vision, once you’ve answered these questions, just boil it down to a single idea.
All of the worst marketing mistakes of history have been done by marketers who didn’t understand their brand’s values. Our favorite example of this is Robinhood: (Click here for the story.)
They lost BILLIONS of dollars because they didn’t follow the values that they had expressed and that their customers inferred from their other communications.
If these values were set in stone, Robinhood would likely be worth $2-5 Billion more than they are today.
Most of our clients who think about having values come in with classic corporate branding in mind. They think we want them to put a few fancy buzzwords up on the wall of their corporate office. Integrity. Loyalty. Customer Service.
Bleh.
We encourage our clients to create actionable phrases that represent their values.
Instead of ‘Honesty’, a brand might use “Tell all of the truth, all of the time”. Instead of ‘Customer Service’, a brand could use “Treat every customer like they are family”.
This helps make the values more clear and easier for team members to follow . It also makes them come across as much more authentic to outside eyes.
If you intend to run a 1-man show indefinitely, there is really no point in crafting brand values, but if you’ve ever considered working with an outside marketing team or hiring employees, this is undoubtedly worth your time.
It will help you attract the right talent, help the talent you attract have a much clearer idea of how to act in order to please you and the company, and will protect your marketing team from making costly branding mistakes.
Brainstorm:
You may find yourself with a list of single adjective values like you might expect on the wall of a big corporate office. If you end up with a list like this, take each value and rephrase it into an action statement.
An audience avatar is one of the most influential (and misunderstood) documents in all of marketing. In its simplest form, an audience avatar is just a detailed description of your target audience.
Most marketing classes put an emphasis on target market demographics (ages, genders, locations, etc), but we have found a much greater degree of success from focusing on IDEAL customer Psychographics.
Shift the focus from what most people interested in your product/service have in common to what the people you most want to work with have in common. The vast majority of businesses need only a microscopic portion of their market to have a healthy and thriving business, so stop trying to do business with everyone.
Your audience avatar should contain a snapshot of your ideal customer’s emotional profile. What do they want? What do they love? What do they hate? What frustrates them? What inspires them? What embarrasses them?
You’ll also want to record the ideas that they have that are false or limiting, and the things they are doing to contribute to their own problems.
I love a good apple fritter about as much as any sane person can love an inanimate object…
But I hate putting things into my body that I know are slowly killing me.
So you can imagine my excitement when I ride my bike past an old bakery with a sign in their window that reads "Freshly baked Apple fritters. Made from home grown apples with absolutely NO artificial additives or processed sugars"
To me, it's like the company read my mind and knew EXACTLY what I wanted…
In reality, the owner just loved real food, so he set up shop in an area where he knew a lot of health conscious bikers would ride by every day.
This is what good marketing looks like.
It's not about reading minds. It's not about having a huge open market or having something to offer to everyone.
It's about 1) knowing who you are and how you can help people 2) saying the things that the people who most need your help will resonate with, and then 3) putting yourself in places where they will hear you talking.
Do this, and you'll reach more of the right people and less of the wrong ones with your advertising.
Your audience avatar is the foundation for that.
This will be a living document. It will evolve as you gain insight into the thoughts and feelings of your customers. Keep an organized document that has space for a lot of thoughts. Keep each emotion separate, but describe the things that contribute to that emotion. Then answer this question: What is the biggest problem I can solve for these people?
We have a very unhealthy mindset towards competition and our competitors. We like to think that our competitors are people in the same area/industry/market. What we fail to realize, is that that is rarely the case.
Who are your competitors? This is a question that I ask my clients all the time, but they rarely give me a satisfactory answer.
If you are thinking about businesses similar to yours as your competitors, or businesses in the same area/industry, then you probably have a narrow view of your ACTUAL competition.
You need to be thinking about this from the viewpoint of your customer.
The last time you were traveling, you probably spent more time deciding whether or not to fly at all than you did deciding which airline you would take.
When a customer eats out in their hometown, the bigger decision is most likely whether to eat out, grab something fast from the grocery store, or just make something quick at home.
Finding the real competitors is something we have coached our clients through for over a year now, and I can’t overstate the value.
Who are your REAL competitors? You need to know this in order to make better product decisions.
I recently finished a book by Clay Christensen called “Competing Against Luck”. It was a great read from one of the 21st century's most brilliant and innovative business thinkers. I gained some valuable insights and ideas, but I think the greatest thing I gained was confidence in our process, because this is something we’ve been doing with our clients for a very long time.
In this book, he tells the story of a study he conducted while working at Harvard’s business college. In this study, he and his team stood outside McDonalds for an entire day and asked everyone who came out with a milkshake: “What job in your life did you hire this milkshake to do for you?”
The answers they got were somewhat varied, but they found a few common themes:
In the mornings(before 9am) they found a sizable number of people who bought a milkshake. Almost all of these people gave answers that were virtually the same: they wanted something they could eat with one hand that would keep their morning commute interesting. They ate it before they were hungry, but it helped them stave off mid-morning hunger. They didn’t want to eat something like fruit because it was too plain, but they didn’t want to eat something like a snickers bar either because they felt guilty eating candy for breakfast. The milkshake was the closest thing they could get.
In the afternoons they noticed another common theme: many milkshake customers were parents who wanted a simple treat they could give to their children. They had been saying ‘no’ to their children all day or all week, and needed something they could say yes to to help them feel like good parents.
Both of these themes are particularly interesting, because it really has nothing to do with milkshakes. All of these customers stated that they often hired completely different products to do the same job. For a one-handed morning brunch, it would often be a granola bar or a protein shake. For a simple treat for kids, it could just as well be a candy bar.
If you have a narrow view of your competition, you’ll likely be tempted to one-up them (bigger, faster, more options, etc), or simply implement for yourself all of the things that make them successful.
In the case of both examples above, making the milkshake bigger would actually make it harder for someone to drink on their way to work or give to their kids without feeling guilty. These product “improvements” would likely decrease sales.
If you just look at what other ice cream shops are doing, it will likely lead you to try to just do what you do better. (bigger milkshakes, more flavors, etc), but if you look at your competition from your customer’s perspective, it will lead you to make product decisions that actually help your product improve your customer’s lives.
Start with a really firm grasp of what the problem your ideal customers are hiring you or your products to solve in their lives (should be part of your audience avatar).
From there, take a look at every option they might consider as a solution to that problem (this should include options like just dealing with it, or trying to DIY a solution). These are your “competitors”.
For each competitor, look at what people love about their solution and what people hate about their solution.
For each good thing people say about one of your competitors, determine if that is something you offer or not. If it is something you offer, record the best way to express that. If it is something that you can’t or won’t offer, record a rebuttal for why your product is still a good choice despite not having that specific feature.
For each negative thing people say about your competitors, determine if it is something you can do better or not. If it is something that you can do better, record your explanation for why your product is a better option. If it is something you cannot or will not improve upon, explain why your product or service is still a good option despite the perceived drawback.
“What does your company do?”
More business is lost when responding to this question than perhaps any other single phrase.
“Well, it’s complicated”
Or
“A lot of different things”
Or some iteration of these are extremely common, and, are about the fastest way to kill interest.
Your company needs a short and compact 1-liner that they can give in response to this question.
Your positioning statement should be a pre-packaged 1 sentence description of what your company does and who you aim to help.
What's your most valuable marketing asset?
I'll give you a hint:
It's not your website.
It's not your Social Media.
It isn't your SEO or your Google My Business.
When people hire me, they are usually looking for help with their website or social media... so it often comes as a surprise to them when one of the first things we work on is company culture and brand values.
Business owners don't realize this, but your team can actually be your highest ROI marketing channel.
Better than Facebook Ads.
Better than PPC.
Better than billboards or radio.
Does your team know and believe in what your company is all about?
Do they come to work inspired and excited to be a part of something bigger than themselves?
When someone asks them what their company does, how do they respond?
If you don't have a plan to turn your employees into customer acquiring machines, then there is a hole in your marketing strategy.
Your positioning statement is a central element in this, and critical to turning your team into a valuable marketing asset.
If you’ve been following along with this guide, most of the work here is already done.
Write a one-sentence phrase that explains simply and succinctly who you help, how you help them, and how you’re different from your competition.
Example: We sell used trucks to busy professionals without pushy sales people.
Example: We use A.I. to help website owners build sites that don’t suck.
When I say brand story, most people think brand history.
This has nothing to do with the story of your brand or business, and everything to do with turning your marketing messages into a story.
The human brain is hardwired to remember stories.
There are certain communication patterns that we have evolved to use in storytelling and that our brains have evolved to remember until the day we die.
Turns out, you can use these same patterns to make marketing messages that will be embedded into your customer’s brains until they’re lying in a casket.
The basic concept of story branding involves making your marketing message compatible with the hero’s journey. The ultimate goal is to generate a message that is super simple, easy to understand, and focuses on your customer’s needs/wants and not on the business.
There are SOOO many ads all around us today. Consumers are inundated with them. A brand story will help you cut through the noise by crafting a message that is about them, NOT you.
Once your ads have cut through the noise and the consumer realizes what your brand should mean to them, it will be all the more effective when those ads are easily recallable by them the next time they experience the problem you can solve for them.
Your customer should be the hero of your story. Use the concepts from your audience avatar to make a compelling description of your hero. Who are they? What do they feel before they work with you? What problems do they have?
You want to characterize the problem or challenge they have. This can be like the mucus guy on the mucinex commercials, or it can be a simple metaphor/simile.
Basically if you can take an aspect of the problem you solve, turn it into a character, and then use “is like a” to connect the two.
If the problem you help people with is Insomnia, the villain might be nagging thoughts in their head that are like a toddler who won’t shut up.
If the problem you solve is boredom, you might introduce your villain by saying that your hero’s boredom is like a gray-skinned accountant named Norm who follows you around in a gray suit with a briefcase and tells you that you can’t afford anything fun.
Too many businesses want to put themselves in the spotlight. Don’t put yourself in the spotlight! The brand should be Yoda, the customer is Luke Skywalker. That said, you need to be able to show the hero how you can help and why they should trust you. List the guarantees you can offer your customers and the credentials you can boast. Most importantly, show them why you care or empathize with them.
What will their lives be like after they use your product or service? There was a moment or a situation that made them realize they had a major problem and needed help. How does the scene change when they are placed in the same situation but they now know about your product/service?
I.e. They used to dread cleaning the house and felt like the dirt and dust were like a vicious bully whose only goal in life was to embarrass and frustrate them. They used to stress out and spend an entire day cleaning before friends came over. But now? They confidently clean their house in only a few minutes because now they’ve got your brand’s nifty cleaning appliance.
Once you plan out all of these elements, you can use them to tell a huge number of stories that turn prospects into customers.
There isn’t really a right or wrong answer here, but the personality of your brand should be consistent.
One of my favorite examples of this is Wendy’s vs Chipotle.
Both are food brands, and both VERY successful with their online marketing.
Wendy’s has adopted the personality of a fiery redhead full of sass and fire.
Chipotle has adopted a super laid-back new age skater-boy personality.
Both are extremely effective, and they both serve very similar audiences for very similar problems.
It really doesn’t matter too much what kind of personality you adopt, but you should adopt one and stick to it.
Develop your brand’s own feel and personality and measure every message sent against that personality.
If you don’t plan a brand personality, it is up to every individual employee who helps with marketing to determine the personality of the messages they contribute to or produce. The end all of branding is consistency. If your brand is different from day to day, you don’t have a brand at all. Controlling your brand’s voice will help you scale your brand.
This can be a very tricky thing. You want to build some vocabulary that your brand would use, and take some common ideas and express them in your brand’s voice. Build a character out if it is helpful, or write down some guidelines for how marketers or employees could communicate in your voice.
30% of brand recognition is determined by the colors that you use. You need a very solid plan for how to use colors, because using different colors from day to day is one of the easiest ways to generate brand confusion without knowing it.
Ideally, the color palette will include all of the colors you will use for your website, company logo, social media profiles, business cards, and any merchandise you’d like to distribute. Using the same colors for all of these things will help you develop brand recognition, and brand recognition will help your business succeed.
A good color palette will dramatically boost brand recognition, give a consistent feel to your designs, and shave HOURS off of your design process for every marketing asset you build from here on out.
Whenever something is designed, the designer has to determine the color of a dozen different things, each element, each piece of text, every background, etc etc. Having a palette that makes many of these decisions before the design work ever starts will dramatically streamline your design process.
Your brand color palette should consist of 1-5 colors excluding black and white. There are a lot of factors to consider, and I’ve written extensively about these in the past, but for the sake of this guide I’m just going to give a few simple points to consider as you decide on your colors:
To make most any design work, you’re going to need some good contrast. That can be accomplished by using almost any single color alongside white or black, but if you want to have multiple colors in your palette, you should consider how they look next to and on top of each other.
Many brands take a single color and use a variety of shades of that color, this is called a monochromatic color palette and it can work really well, but it does rely on a lot of white and black (which can make for some awesome designs, just something to keep in mind).
One step beyond a monochromatic palette is an analogous palette, which just means that you have very similar colors that aren’t the same but are adjacent on the color wheel. This has many of the same qualities of a monochromatic palette, and can also make for some really slick effects.
On the opposite side of the spectrum from monochromatic is the palette that has an overwhelming variety.
As a general rule, the more colors you include, the harder it will be to get consistent designs from a variety of artists, but there is a bit of a balancing act, because it’s much easier to have unique designs with a variety of colors than it is with only a single color.
There are some trade-offs to consider but that doesn’t make one option really any better than the other, just don’t go creating a palette with 10 different colors.
There are a lot of competing ideologies in the world of color. There is the color harmony approach that involves the mathematical or geometrical relation between the colors you pick as determined by their placement on the color wheel. There is also the emotional impact school of thought that involves considering cultural and societal perceptions of colors as well as their effects on psychology.
Honestly, the jury is still out on both schools of thought, and while there is certainly merit to both sides of the debate, no honest and well-studied person is going to tell you there isn’t a valid debate.
The solution: consider both sides and then pick something you like and stick with it.
Color Harmony:
To follow this school of thought, I’d use a tool like Adobe’s color picker (color.adobe.com) which will help you pick palettes that follow the various harmonic color patterns (Monochromatic, analogous, complimentary, tradic, or split-complimentary being the most common).
Emotional Impact:
To follow this school of thought, you’ll want to take some time reading into the various effects of different colors and the psychological effects behind each one. From a marketing standpoint, it is a really good idea to have at least one warm color (red, orange, yellow, etc) in your palette to invite action.
Typography is an often overlooked detail in branding and design. The fonts that you use are very influential in the overall look of your design work, and they are very important to brand recognition.
You should have solid guidelines for when to use what font, but these are typically pretty simple. We recommend one serif font for headings, and one sans-serif font for body text.
Occasionally we’ll also add in an accent font. A decorative script font or something similar that will be used sparingly.
Seriously, you just do. All of the same reasons for the color palette apply here. Brand recognition and design speed cannot be understated.
It will give a huge pop and edge to your designs that you wouldn’t even believe until you start using it regularly. Over time, you’ll immediately recognize if something isn’t in your brand fonts.
You need one Serif font and one sans-serif font.
For those of you unfamiliar with the typography world, serifs are the little accent marks on the ends and corners of letter strokes.They are relics of a time when we wrote with quills and inkwells, because it was very difficult to finish a letter stroke without a little mark at the end. Overtime, large serifs became a part of very ornate writing.
Sans means without, so a sans serif font just means a font without serifs.
You want to pick two fonts that have high readability, and you do want to match the feel of the fonts to the feel of your brand. A lighter more feminine brand is going to want a font with lighter strokes. An old-time rough and gritty brand is going to want more bold or black fonts.
Use your serif font for headings and your sans font for any large blocks of text.
There’s way more that can be said for a good logo than I will ever fit in this eBook. The logo is the capstone of your branding. It is a single image or mark that is supposed to be the single representation of everything your brand is and stands for.
When branding is done properly, your logo should become a tool used to express everything your company is about, and it should be firmly fixed in your customers’ minds to represent that.
Your logo itself typically has very little, if any, meaning. This functions like a blank canvas in the minds of your customers and potential customers so you can paint the picture you want them to see, one stroke at a time.
This is one point that I've never had to convince business owners on. Everyone wants a logo, and it is typically one of the first things new entrepreneurs do when they are starting a new company.
A logo will do nothing without the rest of your branding, but you should definitely get one.
This is somewhere that it’s really worth hiring a good artist unless design is really your forte. That said, this is the only place I’m really not going to tell you how to do this.
Some rules to hold your designer to:
This is no place for busy or detailed. ALL of the most successful logos are incredibly simple. Simple enough that they are recognizable even without color.
The entire purpose here is to be an embodiment of your brand. That doesn’t work if it isn’t distinct enough that people can recognize it easily. It needs to be different. It needs to be unique.
It may seem a bit paradoxical, but the path to consistency in your logo is actually to have several different logos (or rather several different formats to your logo). The reason for this is because it needs to look good atop black, atop white, or atop whatever colors in your palette that you might place it over.
It also needs to look good centered, tucked in a corner, or placed in any other place you might stick it.
You want it as an icon (logomark only) and you’ll likely want just the text from it as well (typemark only).
Lots of times we’ll hire an amatuer or less experienced artist to get some ideas rolling for us, and then have our in-house designer finish them up and reformat them, because it can be a very difficult thing to get right, but it is absolutely worthwhile to get it right. A quick checklist of the formats you’re looking for (keep in mind you may need a couple others depending on your design, and you may not need one or two of these depending on your design).
The term ‘branding’ is used today to imply the lasting influence a business builds up in the mind of a consumer, but the origin of the term comes from the centuries old practice of branding livestock.
The practice of branding livestock involves taking a unique and recognizable piece of metal, heating it up until it’s red hot, and then searing the brand into the hide of the animal. This practice leaves a small black scar on the animal in the shape of the unique and recognizable mark.
Now, everyone who sees the animal knows who it belongs to.
Imagine for a minute what the effect would be if a rancher used a different brand on every animal? No one would know who the mark belonged to and the entire practice would be pointless.
So it is with branding in the business arena, except you’re not just branding a consumer once, you’re interacting with consumers day after day, and your iron is always hot.
If a rancher were branding the same animal year after year with a brand new mark, it would end with an indistinguishable blob of scar tissue and would be entirely useless.
Consistency is the end-all of branding.
If you are going to change your mark day-by-day or decision-by-decision, you have done worse than if you never attempted branding to begin with.
A brand bible is your tool to ensure every iron is as close to the others as possible.
It’s amazing to me how much time you can save by standardizing your decisions.
Looking back, I wasted countless hours trying to keep branding standardized and even still not accomplishing consistency. Every time I sponsored an event or partnered with someone who wanted to display my logo, every time I hired a graphic designer, every time I worked with a new print shop… I was scrambling to make sure they got all of my files and didn’t make it look horrible.
Now, we create a simple brand bible that is hosted on every site we create. I can give anyone who is working with my brand a single url and they have access to a quick and skimmable guide that gives them all the guidelines, all the files, and all the tools necessary to ensure my iron maintains its form.
A study sponsored in Forbes a couple of years back showed that enforcing a consistent brand image (logo usage, colors, fonts, etc) led businesses across the board to increase top-line revenue by 24% on average. Their study included a control group and examined SME (businesses with less than 500 full-time employees) of all shapes and sizes.
If just standardizing the most superficial part of your branding can increase revenue by an average of 24%, what do you think the results would be of implementing consistency in all of your brand’s purpose, positioning, and messaging?
I had a client who dropped off their corporation’s brand guide when I first started working with them. When he tossed the 40 page binder on my lap, I couldn’t help but giggle.
It was way too complicated and way too dense to ever be worthwhile.
Your brand bible has to be three things:
Everything that has to do with design should easily fit on a single page. Everything else should be condensed into no more than two pages, and only reference (typically with hyperlinks) all of the other documents that we created. If it takes more than 30 seconds to find what you need, you won’t get compliance, and you’ve wasted all of the speed advantage that comes from standardizing decisions.
This guide should be simple. Like, stupid simple. It shouldn’t be laden with caveats or rules that apply in different situations, it should be clear with easy to understand and follow rules that can be universally applied. If it takes more than 30 seconds for an artist or marketer to understand the rules, it won’t be something your consumers will subconsciously pick up on.
It should be extremely easy to find and access. We leave all of ours on publicly facing URLs that don’t even require a login. Certainly not the way everyone needs to do it, but we have no problem with anyone in the world knowing everything about our branding.
We definitely recommend that it is kept in a place that is effortless to reach for anyone inside of your organization and for any contractors or partners who may work with or alongside your brand.
With these three things in mind, all there is left to do to create your brand bible is to collect each of the previous 12 steps we’ve created and compile them. This should only take a few minutes and will be some of the most productive time you will ever spend.
The year was 2021, I had started many successful businesses over the last 6 years, and had been a diligent student of purpose-driven strategic branding. Just as I had 6 years prior, I had an opportunity to start a brand new business.
This time I wouldn’t make the same mistake.
I dug into branding right away. I had a firm vision of what this business was going to accomplish, who it would serve, and how I wanted them to remember us.
So many people we talked to told us they didn’t think our market could support us, and all the data was stacked against us…
So when the business thrived, we knew the variable to credit was a good brand.
Within just a few short months we were open for business, and it was immediately clear that this business would be a success.
We were at a 6-figure run-rate the first month we opened (on a very tiny start-up cost) and we had employees who shared the brand’s vision who kept it running without needing my attention.
We started getting people who applied to work for us because they loved what we were about, and we had customers cheering for us because they loved our cause.
Everything we believed and everything we wanted was the same as it would have been without this branding framework, we would have had similar goals, similar ideals, similar values… We would have used the same marketing strategies and followed similar timeframes… but this branding framework put these things at the forefront of all of our efforts and became the driving influence behind our success.
My biggest hope is that you’ll find similar results for yourself.