Design Thinking
Implementing Design Thinking to Build Your Brand Identity
Have you ever wondered how certain brands thrive in the fiercely competitive world of the market? It all comes down to identifying the right target audience and addressing their problems. Design thinking is the key to achieving this.
What comes to mind when you hear the term “Brand Identity”? A brand’s visuals? A logo? Yes, those are all correct, but in this era of tough market competition, merely sticking an attractive logo to a product won’t ensure your brand’s success. You require a strategic approach for your brand to thrive, and the traditional marketing methods of yesteryears have become outdated. It’s now the era where design thinking becomes invaluable.
As a brand owner, it is essential to understand your market, your brand’s position relative to competitors, and the various touchpoints with your customers. By employing the design thinking method, your brand will not only look aesthetically pleasing but also become strategic and relevant. Let’s explore how you can implement design thinking to build your brand identity.
Research to Empathise
In the design thinking process, there’s the “Empathising” stage. This is where we begin to get to know the audience through research and gain insights about them. This step involves gaining a deep understanding of their needs and desires. This step serves as the foundation and direction for building brand value, goals, and communication strategy.
Activities: Research the existing products or services similar to what you’re offering, understand the target market and its behaviour, and then gather insights.
Define What You’re Able to Solve
It’s important to be specific about what your product or service can address, taking into account the skills and resources you have. It’s always better to master one area than to be a jack-of-all-trades when offering a service to people, as people trust specialists. Defining your focus also helps your brand to niche down, rather than being overly broad, which can be quite unsustainable for the business in the long run.
Activities: Define your problem statement, create personas based on the gathered insights, and build a customer journey to define touchpoints.
Ideate and Build the Visual
After understanding everything about your competitors, your target audience, and the defined problem, it’s time to translate this knowledge into a visual representation. By examining your competitors’ styles of communication, logos, and overall identities, you can begin to create your own identity, either by blending elements from several competitors to forge something new or by taking a completely different approach. This visual identity must also align with your target audience. For example, if you are developing a brand identity for a SaaS company, it’s advisable not to make it overly playful but to convey a unique identity distinct from other SaaS brands.
Activities: Collaborate with stakeholders to create the intended visual representation of your brand. This can involve mood boarding, assigning a designer with the right direction, or if you’re doing it yourself, start aligning the strategy with the suitable visuals using the design tools you have.
Prototype Using Mockups
Prototyping is essential to ensure that your brand is ready to launch and that the visual elements, including the logo, mark, and pattern, can be fully utilised for various applications such as packaging, merchandise, and collateral. By prototyping with mockups, you can determine the minimum size at which your logo remains recognisable and how to implement your logo in a range of mediums.
Activities: Incorporate your logo and other visual elements associated with your brand into a variety of mockups where you want your logo to be displayed, such as packaging, banners, shop windows, etc., to ensure its proper placement.
Test and Observe How People Respond to It
You can start A/B testing on one of your touchpoints, such as creating two social media ads test with the same goal but presented differently, and then observe how people respond to each of them. If you can gather feedback, it will be used in the iteration stage, where you refine your visuals or communication tone to align with what your audience is seeking.
Activities: Print two types of packaging and determine which one performs better, or alternatively, conduct A/B testing on social media for the ads you create.
This is a new era where people have more options to choose which brand they want to be loyal to, so make sure your brand stands out by presenting a clear value to the relevant audience. By resonating with your customers, there’s no doubt that your brand will be enduring, rather than just becoming another logo in a crowded market.
