Marketplace eCommerce

What Makes a Brand Successful for Your Company in 2024

Updated  |  6 min read

Determine Your Brand Identity Elements

To make a successful brand for your company, consider the following questions:

  • What does your company stand for?
  • What feelings or ideas does your company want to convey?
Deciding brand identity elements.

Answering these questions will help you determine your brand identity and design elements. A successful brand represents these core principles that make the company what it is, including what makes your company unique and what’s most important to your company.

Focus Your Brand Message and Purpose

In many situations, it’s a matter of saying “no” to all the noise, and picking out a few isolated values that make a brand successful.

Focus your brand message on the feelings and ideas you want your brand to convey. Then choose the correct brand design elements to display those ideas.

What Feelings Do You Want Your Brand to Convey?

For example, when you look at a high-end brand, such as Gucci, Rolls Royce, or Bentley, there’s this distinguished feel, perhaps a subconscious sense of quality.

With these high-end brands, throughout everything they do, there is an intense focus on quality or integrity, and being at the cutting edge of the finest delivery.

Creating brand design.

On the other hand, Southwest Airlines focuses on simplicity, friendliness, and affordability.

This makes it inviting for travelers who want to participate in air travel, but don’t necessarily have a lot of resources to spend.

Choosing Brand Design Elements for Your Brand Message

To present your brand in a way that conveys the feelings and messaging you desire, you must carefully consider the colors and other brand design elements you use.

Certain colors convey a sense of warmth or ease, or a sense of elegance and high-end quality, for example. There may be a sense of the style and culture as well, perhaps from having colors that clash, or having colors that aren’t necessarily standard. The color scheme, logo design, and overall style may give an industrial or commercial feel, or have B2B- or B2C-type energy and visualizations.

Different colors, typographies, shapes, lines, and other design elements convey certain feelings and ideas, so it’s important to choose ones that align with the brand message you want to convey.

A Successful Brand Has Boundaries to Keep Things in Line

Generally, a brand design that is successful is prescriptive in the areas where it’s going to make sense. A brand isn’t just the design elements; it’s also about the company’s voice, mission, and values.

Branding design definition and boundaries.

It’s helpful to have boundaries on what you want to convey with your brand message. This goes with the idea that many artists do their best creative work when they have some constraints.

Constraints, or boundaries, help keep your brand elements focused, so the message doesn’t get lost amidst all the noise. To make a brand successful, think of the constraints or boundaries you’ll have on the brand’s imagery, presentation styles, typography, and other brand elements.

As an example of how constraints are useful for a design, think of Apple’s brand. Apple has a strong brand because they are so opinionated and restrictive. Apple is very creative with their imagery and presentation, and they way they interact with technology. The Apple brand is clean, crisp, and visually engaging.

To be successful with a brand message and design, you have to a take stance and be willing to get fully behind that stance. Then let the brand speak for what those values are, and what the business is bringing to the market. This develops naturally from the brand elements, including the design and messaging.

Have Guidelines for Presenting Your Brand

Another component of making a successful brand design is having the right structures and formats for the different mediums the brand will be presented in.

Most likely, if you’re running an eCommerce or eMarketplace business, your brand will be displayed in websites and applications on various devices, as well as in white papers, documentation, resources, PDFs, emails, newsletters, etc. Usually there may be advertising and different partner usage of the branding and the design as well.

You’ll want to make sure you’re reasonably prescriptive and have firm guidelines for how the brand will be preserved and respected across these different mediums.

Without brand design guidelines, the brand may become diluted, and then the principles, values, and ethos of that company won’t exist.

Brand presentation guidelines.

Therefore, in order to be successful with a brand design, you need to have these principles conveyed in a tactical way and have constraints on how partners, advertising agencies, and your own team members present your brand throughout different mediums, channels, and devices.

In your brand design element guidelines, provide examples showing what’s acceptable for fonts, font spacing, and color palette, among other design elements. Also show what are acceptable changes for calls-to-action, banners, newsletters, logo variations, and so on.

There may also need to be acceptable proportionality or sizing guidelines that clearly indicate that the logo needs to always be in a vector format so it’s not diluted or pixelated, stretched, etc., even on different devices and screen sizes.

Brand design across differently sized devices.

For any partner or third party that’s using the logo and tagline or other brand elements, your guidelines should state what needs to be kept intact. Maybe there’s an important tag line that represents the company, or an important aspect of the logo needs to stay intact.

Without these guidelines, oftentimes different partners or third parties will take free reign with the logo or some of the colors, and change these brand design elements.

Therefore, this may be something that you’ll want to implement in your legal documentation, so that you can reach out to anyone who infringes on the copyright and misrepresents the logo, and politely inform them that that’s not okay, and they need to cease that.

These types of guidelines and legal standards are what help keep the brand elements at a high level of quality.

Making Changes to Your Brand

While some of you may be creating a brand from scratch, what about changing a brand that already exists? Here’s what you need to do when making changes to your brand.

Piecing together brand design changes.

Engage with Your Users

If you plan on changing your existing brand elements, it’s important to notify your users about the upcoming changes to your brand.

Your users may be vendors, partners, customers, and/or internal team members, but everyone should know that changes are coming, when they’re almost here, and when the changes are complete.

In the announcement, you could include a preview and ask users for their feedback, or have design contests among different representative groups. These are good ways to engage with your users and see what their expectations are, and get some ideas for your brand design changes.

Engaging with users.

Make the Brand Update Motivating

Let users know why you’re making these changes, and what this new brand design represents. Once you explain, people will often feel that it makes sense and many will even feel excited about the upcoming changes.

For example, your company might change the brand design after dedicating a percentage of its revenue to a nonprofit organization or some cause for good.

This will be motivating for your users and can serve as a call to action. More people may want to be involved with your company, and this can also improve customer loyalty.

Upgrading website and branding.

Represent Changes with Your Brand

Ultimately, the brand should represent the different groups or users of the organization, and this should be brought together seamlessly into the general ethos of who you are as a company and what you stand for.

Changing brand design elements alters the brand messaging, which affects what ideas and feelings (ethos) the brand conveys. This means that changing brand elements is also essential to communicating changes about your company’s core values.

Having a successful brand is critical for a business, so the brand design elements need to align with your brand messaging. Your brand messaging sets the tone for what level your organization is going to operate at, and what your organization stands for.

In other words, your brand messaging encapsulates your company’s mission, core values, and purpose. Your brand tells a story about your company’s unique characteristics, all at a glance. It does this through the various brand design elements that create its message.

Consider what characteristics make your company unique, and how you want to convey those to the market. Then work with an expert to make your organization stand out for the better.

Company brand representation.

Make Your Brand Successful

We’re happy to help you with this process if you and your team are looking to update your brand or incorporate your brand design into your upcoming projects. Our team of experts will be happy to provide you with a complimentary review of your upcoming brand and design project, no strings attached.

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Autumn Spriggle is a Content Writer at Clarity Ventures who stays up to date on the latest trends in eCommerce, software development, and related topics to provide readers with the latest and greatest. She strives to help people like you realize the full potential for their eCommerce business.