How to find your signature brand style

Creating an amazing brand that epitomises your company’s values and leads to more awareness, recognition and trust amongst your customers is essential if you want to generate real revenue and become a successful business.
There’s so much that goes in to creating your ultimate branding, but finding your signature style and sticking to it is the first step.

Why is it important to know your brand’s style?
Every company should have a solid brand style, and every employee should have an understanding of it. 

Whether it’s marketing, sales or customer services – there are many reasons why each department should know your brand’s style and understand what they can do to utilise it.

Here’s some of the big ones:

Avoid misunderstandings

A great way to prevent any uncomfortable interactions or miscommunication between your company and your customers is to make sure that you and all the staff in your business understand what your key messages and values are. 

If your marketing team is pushing out one message, but your customer service team are contradicting it, your customers may start to feel confused or even betrayed. 

By creating a signature brand that is reflected in every aspect of the business, you can ensure there are no misunderstandings. This, in turn, helps you build trust with customers and also makes you more memorable.

Stay consistent

Once you have a signature brand style in place, you must stick with it. From your adverts on television and billboards in city centres, to your website, social media and even internal paperwork – make sure your branding is up to date and on-message across the board. 

By knowing and understanding your brand, you can stay consistent, which will help to emphasise your values and goals in everything your business does. It also helps to build long and lasting relationships with the right customers.

Become recognisable

Building a noticeable branding style takes time and work, but all recognisable brands have one thing in common – they stay on-message. They know who their audience is and their communications stay relatable to them. 

With full knowledge of your branding style, you can help to set yourself apart from the competition, and become a recognisable company who people turn to time and time again. 

Create brand ambassadors

If your employees all have a strong understanding of your branding style, your values and your key messages, they can become ambassadors for your company without even really trying.

From Sally in IT to Dave in Catering, every member of your staff will no doubt talk about your company to friends, relatives, or even strangers online once in a while. Equip them with the right messages, and you could end up with some free word-of-mouth advertising.

How do you find your signature brand style?

Now you know why it’s important to have a signature branding style and shout about it – how will you find yours? 

We suggest following a few steps that will help to give you a bigger picture about what kind of style will best reflect your company.

First things first:

Define your brand values

What makes your company unique? No matter what your business does, it’s likely that you’ll have some competition in your industry. So what sets yours apart?

Your values, mission, goals and benefits all contribute to the success of your business, and they should be at the heart of your signature branding style. By defining what these are from the start, you’ll be able to develop a brand that truly reflects them.

Establish your target market

If your branding doesn’t resonate with your target audience, it won’t lead to the awareness and recognition that we talked about earlier. 

So before you decide what your signature style will look like, it’s important to do your research and really begin to understand who your ideal customer is. 

It’s likely that you’ve already done some target market research when developing your product or service – so now is the time to take another good look. Once you really know who you’r branding is speaking to, it will be easier to consider what it should look like.

Find your brand voice

Of course branding style isn’t just about looks. Finding your brand voice is equally important for ensuring you stay consistent and on-message at all times. 

From social media captions and blog posts, to advertising campaigns and even the way your sales representatives speak – having a familiar and recognisable brand voice is another great way to grow your business and gain trust from customers.   

It could be as simple as a list of words you do and don’t use, or it could be full editorial guidelines. Either way, finding your voice will be important in finding your signature style. 

Create your visual assets

Once you know what your values are, who your audience is, and how you think you should look and sound – it’s time to start creating some visuals! 

Your signature branding style will include everything from your logo, colour palette, fonts, and imagery, to your taglines, editorial voice and more. It will feature everywhere in your customer’s journey, from advertisement and marketing, to the storefront and employees, to the carrier bag and receipt they take home with them.

Creating the visual assets is where the fun really starts, and you can start to experiment with different ideas that look and feel right to your company. 

Once your signature branding elements have been chosen, it’s so important to build a set of brand guidelines which will govern the use of your branding. This will go a long way to helping out with our very first point – ensuring everyone knows what your signature style is and how to use it properly.

Get in touch!

As you’ve probably realised by now, finding your signature branding style is a really important step for your business.

At Wildish & Co, we’ve worked with some of the world’s most trusted businesses over the past 10 years to develop strong branding concepts and strategies.

If you’re looking for some help finding your signature branding style, and you like the sound of us, we’d love to hear from you.