DIY Or Custom Branding: How Can I Be Sure?
There is a powerful quote on branding by David Brier that sums up why it’s a cornerstone to your business’s identity, ‘If you don’t give the market the story to talk about, they’ll define your brand’s story for you’. But you don’t need one more blog piece telling you just how important branding is. You’re targeted by countless brands in a day, you know which ones you’d pick over others and how much the brand identity also influences this decision, regardless of the price tag. You want to capture that same alluring essence and staple it onto the business you’re building. Branding allows you to create and clamp down on a unique identity for your business, regardless of whether you run a muti-national chain or a mom-and-pop shop.
You know you need more than just a logo; there is a whole array of components that make up your brand. But you’re at a crossroads, can you do it yourself or do you hire a professional?
The object of this blog piece isn’t to persuade you into hiring a professional to develop your brand. Instead, I want this piece to help you avoid some of the decision fatigue that comes with choosing the best course of constructing your brand. So let’s dive in!
DIY works if…
YOU’RE JUST STARTING OUT
Your current audience is a close knit circle of friends and family. You’re using their feedback and suggestions to structure and improve your business model or product. At this stage, you don’t need a custom brand identity to find your footing—your product or service should be doing that. Investing a lot of effort on your brand first before your product or service is improved is like having a pretty shell with no substantial yolk of value. Branding helps leverage the product’s value and vice versa but your offering needs to be perfected before you’ve finalized on your brand identity.
YOU DON’T HAVE ENOUGH CAPITAL
Capital is finite and sometimes, it needs to be stretched across essential building blocks when initializing your business plans. Branding is one of those building blocks, but it isn’t the most inexpensive one. While it is an investment that pays you back by way of leads and conversion, be honest with yourself: if you don’t have the money currently to invest in branding, you simply don’t. And it’s not a negative factor, you can use the time you have to finalize your brand identity and enhance other components of your business. You wouldn’t want to fixate on and create a brand identity that could change further down the line.
YOU CAN PRODUCE THE QUALITY YOU WANT
Maybe you’re fairly adept with a design software, or one of your strengths lightly touches upon putting together a brand kit. There is nothing wrong in single-handedly crafting your brand identity.
If you can confidently design a logo, choose a colour palette, construct a look and feel, and are okay with this being the permanent face of the brand, go for it. While the task won’t qualify you as an expert, you’ll feel a great burst of contentment when you build your visual identity from scratch.
Custom branding works if...
YOU WANT A PROFESSIONAL PERSPECTIVE
Designers have a deep understanding of colours, layouts, fonts and immerse themselves in how the arrangement of these visuals influences customer psychology. When working with a professional designer, you will be provided colour formats and files that print on any printer while staying true to the original colour and not disintegrating into pixels. Professional designers can sculpt a consistent look, and would have done their research on the industry, your competition, and give you the gift of options. Since the designer will be creating the brand from the ground up and not off a template, you get a brand identity that stands out, and is unique to you.
YOU NEED TO SAVE TIME
An entrepreneur like you really understands the saying ‘Time is money’. it quite literally is when you’re running a business and every hour spent on it could be bringing in some income. Your specialization is honing your business, while a designer’s is creating brand identities. Collaborating with a designer does mean sinking some time into giving them a true idea of what your business does, what your intent and ideas are. But this is a small margin of time compared to how much time you’d take to create a brand identity on your own.
THE DESIGNER IS INTENTIONAL, AND NOT JUST IMPRESSIVE
Hiring a brand designer isn’t as transactional as buying a product like a spatula. The designer needs to get into the skin of your business intention. Ensure that the designer you choose listens to your needs and executes them in a way best suited to your vision. Every designer will have a niche or style they are adept in, and may stick to a specific aesthetic on all their projects. From the first meeting with the designer, evaluate if you’re being heard, and not having a bunch of appealing ideas thrown back at you. Some designers are phenomenal at their work, but it doesn’t mean they will be the best fit for your brand vision.
At the end of the day, a functional product or service is the beating heart of your business, and branding is the personality around it that draws in more people. It can feel uneasy to invest in things you can’t feel or touch like a branding colour palette, a logo, a UX experience, but every penny spent in branding is directly proportional to profit. The more you invest in the details of this personality, the more customers will get behind your brand in a heartbeat.
