In ‘Why You Shouldn’t Let Your Own Personal Taste Drive Your Brand Design’, published on Entrepreneur (a magazine and website that covers news about entrepreneurship, small business management, and business), Taja Dockendorf explains exactly why it’s important to separate the personal and the professional when it comes to branding.
Dockendorf is the founder and creative director of Pulp+Wire, a female-founded and run CPG strategic brand, packaging, and digital launch agency in the US. She writes:
While your company should be tied to your passion and dreams, the company brand doesn’t have to be an exact extension of you. It doesn’t need to (and sometimes really shouldn’t) reflect your own style or your personal brand.
Rather than being a reflection of yourself, your brand should speak to your customers. According to Dockendorf, the best way to do this is to ‘follow the research’:
Research is the essential first step in impactful branding; it helps you truly understand your customer, giving you a vital foundation to design from. Research might lead you to a brand that reflects your own tastes, or it might not. But with it, what you’ll have is the groundwork for creative, effective magic.
At Novagram, we have long believed that understanding our clients’ clients is the key to designing for success. Here are some questions that Dockendorf recommends asking during the research phase:
- Who is your consumer audience?
- What other brands are they buying?
- What does their lifestyle look like?
- What brands will be next to your product on the shelf?
- What area of the aisle will feature your product in a store?
- What are other brands who have invested heavily in the same space doing well?
- What consumer challenges are you solving?
- What makes your brand unique?
- Why should people care?
- And (sometimes most importantly) why do YOU as an owner care? What is your brand’s reason for existing?
These questions will help to inform the brief you set for the designer or agency (that’s us!) that will work on your branding project with you. One of the many benefits of working with an agency is, as Dockendorf notes, the exposure to multiple viewpoints. We also agree with Dockendorf that a research-based approach is more likely to yield the best results.
This research-driven process builds a road map and foundation for branding that may or may not reflect your own creative preferences. But what it absolutely can do is help build a brand that grows and remains profitable — and has the impact on the world you intend it to. And for most of us, that’s ultimately the most aligned and deeply desired outcome.
At Novagram, we are committed to helping you realise the full potential of your brand, and delivering results that introduce your brand to its target audience in the best possible way. If you think you could benefit from our branding, design, or digital development services, feel free to check out our work, or get in touch today.
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