Brand matters. It matters to you and it matters to your customers, what you stand for, and how you stand for those things really does matter, but how do you create a brand that really stands out? That’s why in today’s show, I’ll give you a great brand identity template for B2B.
This week we’re going to take a look at brand and specifically through the lens of brand identity template. We’ll look at 50 brand identity templates and synthesize them, and then explain why they fundamentally, all of them collectively and individually miss the mark, completely miss the mark. Why between them, they will fail to help you create a brand, and then we’ll take a look at what a B2B brand needs, and we’ll create a brand identity template for B2B. I did whatever a good marketer would do, jump to Google and typed in brand identity template. I came out with 4 and I want to talk about those 4. It turns out I don’t need to speak about each of them separately that much because they’re all pretty much the same thing. First one from Ashlee Harrell, a fantastic roundup of free templates. There are 40-something in all, and a really good synthesis of brand identity templates, take a look at them. They’re all for Photoshop and their beautiful ways to present your brand. So that you can see them all in their used cases, really nice job synthesizing these free templates. Nice work, Ashlee.
Next we’re going to take a look at DesignBeep. We don’t know who the person is here. It’s a corporate perspective if you like, no named author. It’s another roundup of 23 free templates. I’ve got an unnamed person from Freepik with one template, and then I find another unnamed person at 365 Web Resources for 15 more. All up we’re getting right about 80 free templates. I set up the intro as 50, it turns out I can’t even match it, but 80 free templates for brand identity resources.
What is a brand? It’s not an emotion or a feeling. A brand is a promise. What would I expect from, name the brand? What would I expect from you in the future? Whether it’s product A or product B, decade A or decade B, country A or country B, what would I expect from you? That’s your brand. It’s different from position. Position is when I think of, name the category, books, PCs, PC software, name your category, when I think of category, I think of who comes in that list, that’s position, not brand. Brand is what you stand for, what I expect from you or your products. Position is when I think of the category, who do I think of, and of those who I do think of, what do I think of? How do I differentiate one from the other, that’s positioning.
Today we’re talking about brand, not positioning, and they’re not the same thing. Don’t please ever say brand positioning, it’s just a completely confusing term. Brand or its position, different things by its importance. Back on brand, if brand is what you stand for, in B2B it’s made by a raft of things, most of them pretty uncool like your sales people. They are a big, big, big part of your brand. Your products are a big part of your brand. Your service people are a big part of your brand. Really it’s not the logo. What we really need for B2B is a template that helps guide us to identify the things that will matter to affect your brand and to work on how to affect those, and that’s what I’ll show you now.
The first step is to get super clear on what the value promise your brand makes or should be making, get really, really clear on that. Step two, get super clear on how your buyers will most likely form their impressions about your brand, and consider things like outbound phone calls, inbound phone calls, dialogues with a sales person, the tools that a sales person uses to have that dialogue, follow-up e-mails after the meetings, your proposals, your service personnel and everything that you do sell or send. It’s probably the case that your logo is the last thing on that list in terms of creating a strong brand, the last thing. Step three, get busy designing the tactics, and when I say designing because most of them won’t be visual, designing those tactics. They make this promise concretely, persuasively, consistently, and then and only then do the pretty stuff.
If you haven’t already subscribed, can I invite you to do that? If you go to align.me/blog or youtube.com/alignmeb2b, either of those, you’ll be able to subscribe. Now if you have already have but you got a colleague who you think could value out of this, please invite them to subscribe also. I’d be so grateful if you could do that. It helps us to share the love, if you like. Thank you for that. Next week, loads more. Until then, may your funnel be full and always flowing.
