When branding is considered, many light up over choosing colours, designing logos, stationery and the likes.

However, when we ask questions like 'who is the brand for' and 'why will they buy from you instead of your competition', the excitement quickly fades away; sometimes, to a point where it becomes “oga, all these questions, are you designing or we should take our business elsewhere?”

Quick question.
Does anyone buy anything from someone only because they have a big, shiny logo and business card? No? So do we suddenly feel someone else will do so just because we own the business?

What is a brand?
A brand is PEOPLE'S IMPRESSION of something. It could be of a person, product, service, business, etcetera.

What is branding?
I like to define this as the act of shaping your desired impression in the mind of people.

Design alone will not achieve this and design that does not tie into the process of achieving this is just fine-art.

Successful brands are strategically rooted around a good cause, people and emotions.

The following among others, form the strategy that makes a brand successful;

- A clear purpose of existence centered on a good cause for humanity. [Nike: bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world. *if you have a body, you are an athlete.]

- Expression of benefits offered and how it addresses the concerns of the target audience, not just product features.

- Defined target audience; their pychographics (values, lifestyle, interests, concerns, etc), communities where they exist, defined sales process and loyalty programs to keep them coming back.

- Differentiation from leading competitors.

Now, communicate all of it with outstanding verbal and visual [graphic design] identity design as well as systematic brand communications, then you are building a brand.

But this is all English right?
To create a better (less boring) picture that businesses can easily adopt, I executed the brand development process and created a guide manual for Air Peace on my Instagram page last year. Based on reviews and demand, to serve as guide, I am executing from scratch, the brand development for the fictitious product attached here.

I will share the rest of the project in the future but if you are interested in following the progress as I move along, it's all on my Instagram @thisisyox | www.instagram.com/thisisyox


#ThisIsYox

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