Branding Elements: Making an Excellent First Impression Within Seven Seconds

Branding
Branding Elements: Making an Excellent First Impression Within Seven Seconds
Article by Jelena Relić
Last Updated: January 27, 2023

Every entrepreneur is well aware that first impressions are important. You may only have a limited amount of time to make a good one. Research shows that it only takes people seven seconds to form an opinion about who you are.

This is where branding comes in. Knowing the different brand elements and how to choose them will help you build a strong brand identity.

Your brand identity helps your business look cohesive and build trust among your audience. Everything from how you communicate and engage with customers to what font and color scheme you use in your website will affect your brand identity.

In this article, we’re going to show you the many elements of branding, the importance of knowing them, and finally, how to choose them properly to make sure you stand out from the competition and make your mark on your target audience.

 

Receive proposals from top Branding firms. It’s free.
GET PROPOSALS
Agency description goes here
Agency description goes here
Agency description goes here

What Are Branding Elements?

Brand elements are aspects of your brand that make it unique, recognizable, and cohesive. It starts from the images of your business to every content you create. What are the elements of branding? This includes your business’s logo, tone of voice, color schemes, and more.

The Positive Impact of Choosing Appropriate Elements of Branding

Your brand elements create a distinct and memorable identity for your brand to stand out from the competition and increase brand recognition. They tell a story of who you are as a brand and what values you stand for. This will then help customers decide whether or not they want to do business with you.

Not only that, but when you choose the right elements to represent your brand, this increases your brand’s trust rating. According to a 2022 survey, 46% of consumers are willing to pay more to purchase from brands they trust.

Your branding elements serve as a guide when creating robust marketing campaigns. Based on who you are as a brand, you can weave stories that evoke emotions from your target audience, which positively affects sales. A Nielsen survey showed that ads that generate above-average emotional responses from their audiences cause a 23% increase in sales.

What Are the Six Key Elements of Branding?

Every successful branding agency knows that brand elements go together in perfect harmony to form a differentiated brand strategy that captures attention and induces a positive response among the target audience. Let’s look at the key components one by one.

1. Brand Identity

This refers to the visual components of a brand, including logo, typography, color schemes, and graphics. Humans are visual creatures, which is why this aspect of the elements of branding is the most widely recognized.

For example, your company logo is an opportunity to sear your brand’s image into a person’s memory. Your visual presentation on social media and your company website affects how consumers perceive your brand. Other physical aspects, such as product packaging, have to be considered as well.

Although it extends beyond this, your brand identity is the first step to ensuring that your brand is recognized and trusted.

2. Brand Substance

The substance is the essence of your brand—your purpose, mission, vision, values, and everything else your brand stands for. Beyond generating revenue, what are the reasons the brand exists? How does it hope to impact society and the world we live in?

Eighty-two percent of shoppers purchase from brands whose values align with their own. This shows the importance of genuinely defining your brand’s substance. In addition to increasing sales and profit, these branding elements serve as an internal compass for leaders in the company when making critical business decisions.

3. Brand Personality

This comprises a set of human characteristics that can be applied to a brand; for example, its tone of voice, language, and archetype. The best brands know how to tug at their audience’s heartstrings, appeal to the core of their humanity, and exude the characteristics that they’re drawn to.

Moreover, a brand’s language is a significant tool in reaching the intended audience. For example, using formal language to the wrong audience can create a disconnection; meanwhile, informal language aimed at the improper audience can be perceived as unprofessionalism.

Simply put, a brand’s personality helps in connecting with consumers on a human level.

4. Brand Targeting

This branding element entails determining which market segment you want to reach. Before knowing what messages you want to send, you need to first identify what characteristics your target audience is going to have.

There are several components to this element, including age, location, income, and personality traits. What are their purchasing habits? Why do they want to buy the product or service you’re offering? Knowing this information will help you send a stronger message to attract the right customers, thereby increasing response rates and brand loyalty.

5. Brand Positioning

Your positioning as a brand represents the main reason why consumers would choose your brand over another. It essentially showcases what makes you different and where you can get creative with your branding ideas.

To build a strong brand positioning, companies should understand who their audience is, what options are there in the market, and how they can provide their customers with a different outcome or experience. It means cultivating your brand voice to ensure it resonates with your audience in a busy marketplace with too many options.

Tesla is one company with strong brand positioning. Although it may be commonly seen as an automaker, it has also established itself as an environmentally-beneficial company with a futuristic outlook.

6. Brand Communication

As important as it is to identify your brand’s personality and positioning, it’s equally as important to develop an effective communication strategy. What are the key elements of branding in this area? This includes your brand name, tagline, and storytelling framework.

Statistics show that storytelling increases conversion rates by 30%. That’s probably why 62% of B2B marketers consider it an effective content marketing strategy. When creating a storytelling framework, keep in mind that the hero of the story should be the consumer, not the brand.

Aligning with everything else we’ve said so far, brand communication is effective when it’s memorable and relatable.

Get connected with the right Branding agency for your project.
GET STARTED

How to Choose Branding Elements That Genuinely Represent Your Brand

Your branding strategy doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg. Cost-effective branding ideas can still make the biggest impact on your brand. However, there are some things you have to consider when choosing the elements for your brand.

Meaningfulness

Having a meaningful story behind the elements of your brand helps to keep it grounded. When your branding elements resonate with your audience, you become more trustworthy.

Take Twitter’s bird logo, for example. This logo was created for the famous basketball player, Larry Bird. However, it could also represent the platform’s goal of aiming for a champion status in the tech industry each year.

Memorability

Aside from being meaningful, a brand element should also be easy to recognize and remember so that it stays in the consumer’s subconscious.

Think of Nike’s logo: the Swoosh. It’s one of the simplest yet most recognizable logos worldwide. Even their slogan exudes simplicity: ‘Just Do It.’ Simple yet iconic.

Adaptability

When choosing your brand elements, you need to consider longevity. They need to remain adaptable and relevant because they might continue to represent your brand for as long as its lifespan.

For example, Coca-Cola’s iconic font was first created in 1885, but it was until 1950 that its color was changed from black to red. They may have changed the color scheme, but the original font is still there, and it remains to be one of the most memorable branding elements to this day.

Likeability

Although you aim for your brand to be memorable, you’d want it to be remembered for the right reasons. With that, your branding elements have to be well-liked by the intended audience.

If you’re designing a logo for a children’s clothing line, for example, you won’t want to add any horrific elements to it. You should also avoid any brand elements that audiences might find offensive.

Transferability

This attribute should be kept in mind if you have plans on extending your brand in the future. The elements should be easily transferable across extension lines while remaining recognizable as part of your brand. You can achieve this by creating a one-worded name or having a consistent color scheme across all extensions of the brand.

As an example, we’ll look at the Apple brand name and logo. As elements, they don’t restrict the brand’s product extensions. They can release multiple gadgets that bear the same name and logo while maintaining relevance and recognizability.

Final Words: What Are the Elements of Branding?

The mark of an excellent branding strategy is branding elements that come together to form a cohesive, relevant, and relatable identity. However, keep in mind that even without these branding elements, you define the identity of your brand with each business interaction you have with your customers and how you gain their trust. That said, it’s just as important to uphold your brand identity as much as it is to build it.

 

Subscribe to Spotlight Newsletter
Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest industry news