Identity Is Not Image
Brand identity is essential for distinguishing yourself from the competition, and reaching out to your target audience by crafting your brand identity distinctively using certain elements from your brand such as the logo, tagline, tone, or colours communicate a set of values that your brand represents to your audience.
It should not be confused with brand image as the two differ in the sense that brand identity is how you want your audience to perceive your brand or products while brand image is how they view it.
Brand identity is active and dynamic which means it can be projected and its effectiveness can be determined. This allows for changes and refinement on brand strategy to improve results. Successful brands manage to project a positive and coherent image into the minds of their consumers. All this has the purpose of strengthening the brand, and making it more recognisable and memorable, which will, in turn, result in creating a consistent, long-lasting impression of your name.
A powerful brand will have a positive brand image, and this will significantly affect its perceived quality, without which it would be virtually impossible to build customer loyalty and trust where they are seven times more likely to forgive brands if there is a mistake.
Since fostering customer loyalty is pivotal in growing your business, it is clear that you need to master this and work on establishing your brand identity accurately, build equity, acquire new customers, and keep your existing ones.
Brand Identity in a Hexagon
As branding is a complex and layered process, knowing and understanding the critical elements of a brand is a must to build a successful brand identity. During the mid-nineties, a professor of marketing strategy at HEC Paris named Jean-Noel Kapferer developed an idea of representing brand identity as a hexagonal shape with six facets examines the notion of brand identity that helps businesses build strong, enduring brand identities.
It’s about creatively adapting to a different playbook to fuel growth as the economy recovers. How much a brand invests in maintaining the relationship with its customers during the crisis defines its long-term success.
Physique
This brings out the underlying physical characteristics of your brand and its role is to define how ideas and values behind your name will be visually personified from something abstract into something representational. This helps consumers associate the company with a set of visual details and elements.
Personality
Through its tone of voice, design and copywriting, this will determine how your brand expresses and communicates with your consumers.
Culture
The value system and the principles on which a brand bases its behaviour on its root of origins and its demographics.
Relationship
The relationship between your brand and your consumers and it is up to you how your brand connects with them and what human trait you would give to that relationship.
Self-image
Self-image is about how consumers of a brand see themselves where they buy brands to achieve the best version of themselves, and brands can benefit from incorporating this self-image into their identity.
Reflection
There is a subtle but substantial difference between self-image and reflection. Reflection might be described as a set of stereotypical notions of a brand’s customer base, used for promotional purposes, and highlighted in ads and commercials. It could be said that brand reflection represents the typical user of a brand.
