What is Your Brand Essence? A Guide to Your Visual Identity
Brand essence is a challenge for many small business owners and entrepreneurs to identify. It takes time to truly understand and align with the heart and soul of your business.
What would you say if someone asked you to describe your brand in a few words?
It’s hard, isn’t it? To be honest, I couldn’t describe my brand essence in a few words even though I could describe it in a short sentence. It took a long time to get in touch with the core of my design business.
Brand essence is not a mission statement, vision, or tagline. It’s intangible and doesn’t follow specific rules, but it’s essential to differentiate your business from your competitors. Your brand essence also helps in the creation of your visual brand identity.
So, what exactly is it?
Let me explain more about what your brand essence is.
You can think of your brand essence as your guide – your North Star — that guides you through many of the crucial branding decisions you will make. It’s similar to a compass in that it always lets you know if you’re heading in the right direction.
Why is brand essence important?
Connect with your audience emotionally
When you’re clear on your core principles and you know what sets you apart from your competition, you’ll be able to connect with your audience on an emotional level. And that emotional connection is what creates trust and loyalty with your customers.
Your brand essence will help guide your marketing decisions to make that emotional connection with your audience. If your brand essence is safety, for example, then all of your marketing efforts will focus on making your potential customers feel safe. This message will resonate with your ideal clients, people who value safety.
Create brand consistency
While your vision statement, mission statement, and brand promise play a key role in forming your brand identity, it’s your brand essence that’s going to keep your brand consistent. As you come up with new product ideas or ways to promote your small business, you’ll find that your brand essence stays the same and will help to determine if it’s the right move for your business.
Increase your brand awareness
Perhaps your brand essence is most helpful when developing your visual identity. It’s only a few words, but we can describe it in many ways. If people see it identified in your brand, they will instantly understand what your business does. Eventually, this will increase brand awareness.
For example, Walt Disney World’s brand essence is ‘magical’.
As a designer, this word helps guide me as to which visual elements I should use and create.
I wouldn’t use feminine or luxury fonts for Disney, but rather bold and quirky fonts.
Visual elements created with the guidance of your brand essence will boost your brand awareness.
How to find your brand essence
Brand essence is the heart and soul of your brand. It’s a 1-3 word statement that describes who you are at your core; it also describes how you want your customers to feel when they experience your brand.
To define your brand essence, you can start by answering the following questions:
What are your core values? What do you believe?
Who do you want to help? Or who do you think you can help?
What do you provide for them?
How do you help them?
What benefits do they receive?
How do they feel? Or how do you want them to feel?
Once you answer these questions, you can start to create a narrative about your business. You’ll see certain words and ideas that come up repeatedly. That is the core of your business; that’s your brand essence.
Don’t worry if you can’t find it at first. When you take more time and work on these, step by step, you will find your brand essence:
Here are a few steps that will help you define your brand essence:
1. Define your brand core ( mission, purpose, vision, and core values )
2. Define your brand positioning ( unique values, benefits, audience )
3. Define your brand personality ( brand voice and tone )
Tip: Sometimes it’s hard to do this by yourself. You can ask your team, clients, or friends to come up with a few words to describe your business.
Here are a few examples from some companies that you may already know:
FedEx - Safe
Hallmark - Caring Shared
Walt Disney World - Magical
Starbucks - Rewarding Everyday Moments
Volvo - Safety
Visa - Everywhere
Harley Davidson - Freedom
You’ll notice that brand essence is described in a few written words; however, it isn’t a slogan or tagline. Neither is it your mission or vision statement. It is simply a few powerful words that encapsulate the core of who you are.
I do want to emphasize that your brand essence has to be authentic. Your brand essence communicates to people what they can expect from you.
As I mentioned at the beginning, it takes time to define a brand essence that truly aligns with the heart and soul of your small business.
I found mine but it took me a while to figure it out.
My brand essence is “simple beauty”. It is my North Star. It guides everything I do for my business, clients, visuals, and messaging.
For example, I don’t use decorative design style, but rather a simple and clean style.
My brand message is to be clear and easy to understand. Trying to avoid big words and terms.
Your brand essence guides the creation of your visual identity:
When you create logos
When you choose fonts
When you create typography
When you select colors
When you choose imagery
Look to your North Star – your brand essence. When you start feeling lost, look back to your brand essence; it will guide you in the right direction.
Conclusion
I hope this article helped you to learn about brand essence, why it’s important, and how you can define it for your small business.
When I work on a custom brand visual identity with a client, we first define their brand essence. The brand essence helps to guide the creation of the brand visual elements, such as selecting colors, fonts, typography, and imagery; this ensures that my client and I are on the same page.
What’s your brand essence? Please share it below.