What Is 360 Brand Identity and How Does It Help Brand Recognition?

Discover how to integrate your company or brand’s visual resources to improve your brand’s image

If you own a business, at some point, you will have thought about ways to improve how you communicate. Embracing a brand identity is the best way to make coherent and effective decisions.

A brand identity is defined by a set of graphic and visual elements and guidelines that communicate the story behind your brand: its values and how it interacts with the public. These elements will become easily recognizable once you have created a compelling brand identity.

In a world full of stimuli, having a strong brand identity is becoming increasingly important. Today, businesses should consider it an utmost priority.

Thinking about communication in 360°–in other words: creating a global strategy–isn’t a trend, it’s a management philosophy that is recommended by experts. They claim that this approach helps to better integrate the human elements of your project, ranging from external to internal communication.

To build and define this identity, we must explore the intangible elements, such as the emotions we stir up and the values we defend when establishing an emotional connection, as well as the tangible elements, i.e. the solid attributes of a product.

If this definition seems very abstract to you, you might find it helpful to carry out the exercise of dissecting the different elements that together express your brand identity. Here is a list of those elements:

The logo

The logo is a symbol made up of images and/or letters used to identify your brand and everything related to it. Logos usually consist of typography accompanied by a symbol. A logo must be legible, adaptable, easy to reproduce, and original.

Typographies

All brands use text, so it is important to define what font and weight you will use. To do so, create a hierarchy of information according to importance and which formats you will use to present the information. Ideally, you should choose one main or corporate typography and a secondary typography.

The color palette

To find the right colors for your brand, think about the emotional responses different palettes generate. Shades can represent values that the brand wants to project or contradict them! The selected palette must be respected when making decisions regarding everything from communication to decoration.

Iconography and other elements

You can evolve your brand universe by developing souvenirs, packaging details, and web iconography. If your brand generates a lot of information or is in full expansion, you might be more likely to consider this.

Image guidelines

The type of framing, angle, color treatment, and lighting you use are all taken into consideration when building a careful and sophisticated brand identity. This is especially important now that brands have to generate content for social media and need a high volume of photos.

A coherent and consistent tone

While the visual side is essential, when talking about brand identity, it is very important to focus on what you want to say and how. Without this, you won’t be able to build your visuals because there won’t be any foundations to build upon. For this reason, even if your focus is on images, you need to get to grips with this first. If your brand were a person, who would it be? How would it speak? How would it treat people? This is the point where you can carry out exercises that will help you to find the voice of your company, the voice from which all of the other elements will emerge.

The roadmap

Alongside building your brand identity, ideally, you should develop a manual that lays out all of the elements that work well and that you would like to sustain over time. A graphic identity manual serves this purpose and should contain descriptions of every last detail. This way, whenever you or a new team member need to know how to write and present some text for the brand, you will have all the info you need, such as Pantone codes and fonts. This manual can be a long and very elaborate document or a file made up of just a few pages. The format doesn’t matter, as long as it exists.

If you are interested in learning more about 360 visual identities, don't hesitate to sign up for the course, Brand Design for the Restaurant Industry, taught by the branding and strategy studio, VVORKROOM.

English version by @eloiseedgington.

You may also like:

–What Is Graphic Identity and What Does a Branding Professional Need to Know About It?
–The Story of Logos I: Learn About the First-ever Logo
–The Story of Logos II: From Coca-Cola to MTV