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The relationship between branding and design

Branding and design are essential elements of any successful business. It’s not just about having a catchy logo or a great website, it’s about creating a unique identity that resonates with your target audience and communicates your brand values.

Your brand is your reputation and how your audience views and interacts with you. It’s one of the most important parts of your business and requires time and dedication to get it right.

With the right branding strategy, you can effectively differentiate yourself from the competition and make sure that customers remember you for all the right reasons. Design is also key when it comes to creating visual elements that will help to communicate your brand message in an impactful way.

“Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room”. This is a quote from Jeff Bezos who, let's be honest, has built a pretty successful brand…What people think of your brand doesn’t tend to be conscious, it’s the gut feeling people get when they engage with you and the meaning they attach to you. If they perceive you as slapdash or untrustworthy, you can’t expect them to use your services when needed. ‘Branding’ then, is the art of managing that feeling and meaning, trying to align everything and ensure the right meaning is given to the right people. It helps to ensure all customer touch points are consistent and singing from the same hymn sheet!
Dan Spencer
Head of Creative Design

What is branding?

Branding is a powerful tool to communicate your message to the world.  It’s about creating an entire experience that your target audience can relate to and that helps you stand out from the competition.

Successful branding requires you to communicate your brand message clearly and consistently across all channels. Through the written content on your website, the way you and your employees behave and interact on social media and how you’re perceived by others, branding is key for businesses to attract more customers and achieve their goals.

What is design?

Without great design, your brand will never reach its full potential. Design is all about creating visual elements such as logos, colours, typography, and imagery to create a unique identity that sets you apart from the rest.

It also plays a key role in developing a successful branding strategy. It helps you define who you are as a company, how you want to be perceived by your customers, and what message you want to communicate about your brand.

How branding and design complement each other

Good branding and design are about more than your logo and visual identity. They’re about how you make people feel when they engage with your business.

Branding for me is the look and feel of a company and how it's perceived by an end user to make a real-world choice. A company may brand itself to convey a certain price point, whether it’s eco friendly, or how they’re reaching out to a certain demographic, but a company must have some sort of customer focus in its vision to succeed at this. Design for branding isn’t just the logo, a pattern or selecting a great colour palette, it’s more than that. It’s deep-rooted from the very beginning and has to stay pin point accurate and consistent across every single message, whether it be a blog post, social media graphic or any printed material. With your company image having so much attention these days, it’s never been so important to ensure that you keep on-brand and repeat the ethos behind your company.
Gary White
Creative Designer

The importance of brand guidelines

Brand guidelines are created not only to define a businesses visual identity, but also put in place to ensure any branding and design used in marketing activity is consistent across all channels.

It’s like having a rulebook for your brand that everyone should follow. Whether it’s product packaging, leaflets, sales presentations or your digital assets and website design, it should all be in line with the brand guidelines. 

Brand guidelines help you maintain the integrity of your brand by making sure everyone knows what it stands for and how they should represent it. 

Four benefits of brand guidelines

Personality

Humanising your brand is how you’re going to stand out from competitors. Consumers need to feel like they know your business and can relate to it. By setting brand guidelines in place, you’ll know that whatever marketing material or content you share, it will all be presented with the same tone of voice and feel that reflects who you are as a brand.

Consistency

To build up a strong customer base, consistency is key. Following a rulebook that means your colour palette is consistent and you’re using the same logo, and ensuring any content follows the same or similar style is paramount to turning your customers from one-time buyers to loyal regular customers.

Recognition

If your brand constantly changes its logo, uses different language and images or doesn’t adhere to any sort of guidelines, it simply won’t be recognised. If you don’t have a strong and recognisable brand identity, you’ll find it difficult to build a community of loyal customers.

Loyalty

For any customer to return to a brand, there needs to be some form of loyalty. Without brand guidelines, customers won’t feel as connected to our brand and will therefore look elsewhere for the same products or services.

Branding is about the way you connect and engage with your audience and the people you do business with. Your customers need to know that you understand their problems and are on their side. 

QBD can help you create that connection with branding and design that builds trust, communicates value, creates impact and inspires loyalty. 

Get in touch today to start your branding journey.

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