How To Use Branding To Reach Your Customer

So you know branding is important, but do you know how it can be used to directly affect the type of customer your business attracts and ultimately the money you bring in?

Creating Intentional Brands

Branding is more than a set of graphics, is all encompassing client experience. It is a means of communication between your business and your audience. Every design decision from fonts to colors to icons is made with the goal of reaching a specific customer. When done intentionally, it can be one of your business’s most powerful tools.

How do I create intentional brands? I do extensive research into my client’s target audience. I consider things like their values, their goals, how they talk, where they shop, what they do for a living, their yearly income, where they live and how they spend their free time. I use this research to determine key words that give me a foundation to make design decisions their ideal audience will resonate with and create a visual language that makes likeminded people feel seen and understood.

Case Study

Dawn, owner of Le Dreis, reached out to me because she didn’t feel like her current branding represented her values or her customers.

Dawn’s goal for Le Dreis was to create quality fashion for all women to help them feel like the best version of themselves. She wanted to make her customer feel valued and empowered to express themselves in their own unique way. Through further research and strategy (this is where the magic happens) we determined that her brand would need to feel – versatile, confident, luxurious, timeless and feminine. She was right, her branding at the time didn’t do a great job of representing that.

Here are just a few of the design decisions I made using those 5 key words to create a brand identity that felt truly aligned:

1. The top of the “L” and the “I” as well as the top inside of the “E”s point upward to express confidence.
2. Simplified letterforms with pointed serifs throughout give off a high end, luxury feel.
3. Varying line weights represent versatility and individuality and uniqueness.
4. The brand initials “L” and “D” uniquely come together to create an abstract shape that is not only fashion forward and versatile but resembles an empty hourglass. The empty hourglass represents timelessness, femininity and luxury.

I bet you didn’t realize how much happens behind the scenes of some of your favorite “simple” logos. If you want to see more examples of strategic branding, check out my portfolio or reach out and we can discuss ways that I can help you reach your target audience through branding!