Week 3 Part B: Developing a Brand

Building a brand is an extremely important part of any business, it could lead to the success of the business if created correctly, but it could be detrimental to the business if created poorly. When I think of brands, I usually head straight to the larger companies such as Apple, Disney, Nike, Coca Cola etc but it is important to understand that any size company needs a brand, and they need to protect it.

As Robert states in his article ‘How to build your Business in 5 steps’, that whether you’re a large corporation or a freelancer, the same five steps go into brand creation. I have outlined them below:

1. Conduct research – You need to understand your market, from competitors to customers, so that you create a brand that stands out.

2. Define the brand – Its time to add the elements that comprise what your organization stands for, specifically, your company mission, values, and personality.

3. Develop the brand’s components - Here’s where you crystalize the concepts defined in the previous step into a visual representation of your brand.

4. Build a brand strategy - This involves deciding where and how your brand is presented to consumers in order to achieve specific goals.

5. Analyze and refine the brand - By analyzing results, you are able to make improvements based on your findings. Doing so ensures the brand is delivering on its promise of representing what the business stands for.

I don’t currently have a business, but I did have a travel agency business for a few years before Covid struck. I remember as clear as anything being extremely excited to put together a brand image for my company, Kates Travel World. I know there are a lot of travel agency’s out there, but I knew I could offer something special compared to a generic agency. I wanted to be personal, I wanted to know all of my customers and provide them with my own knowledge and opinion, not just something that the corporate office wanted us to sell. It

was important to me that I enabled my customers to have a trip of a lifetime without it costing them their whole life savings and I wanted them to feel like they could trust me, and I was not going to run off with their money or send them to a crappy resort. I toyed around with a few logo designs, but ultimately, I wanted something that represented me and my personality, after all, the customers needed to get to know me to trust me.

I created a logo for my company, and I loved it, as you can see, it was pink, it was girlie and to me felt very personal. The colours were calming, and I felt like it let people know that they are in safe hands. In all honesty I wasn’t too impressed with the name, but when I first started the company, it was something I wanted to do because I enjoyed it so much. Once I created the logo, the name seemed to blend and again, I felt like it let people know that I was able to provide a service that not many large corporations could. 

The logo:

Once I had decided on the logo, the font, the colours and my USP, I really enjoyed building the social media platforms, website and branded documentation to fit the brand. I had an Instagram account with the logo as the profile picture, every picture I posted of travels I made sure my logo was in the bottom corner. I created a website with the logo and branding on every page. I created invoice documents and travel itineraries to match up with my website and social media accounts. To me it was really important that everything tied in and my company wasn’t a mis match. 

Below is the image which ran across my travel itineraries:

Instagram post:

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I also had business cards printed with my logo on and I made sure all the font was the same on each document, or website, or social media account or even my email signature. I really wanted it to all be ‘branded’. When I sometimes look at my logo and brand image, I do wonder if it is too ‘pretty’ and whether it affected the professionalism of the brand, however, I reminded myself of the personal services I was offering and how that is my USP. All of my customers were deeply satisfied with their products/services and every customer I had always returned to book more. I never had the dream of turning it into a big corporation and I think that’s ok. It doesn’t need to be big to be successful.