4 key components for creating your ethical brand
When you’re starting up a new business, creating your brand is the first step. Think of your brand as the identity of your business. It’s how customers will perceive and engage with what you’re trying to do. But where to start?
At its most basic, creating your brand is thinking about 1) What you’re trying to achieve, and 2) How you’re going to communicate that and get people on board.
For ethical businesses, creating a brand can come more easily. You don’t have to think up a purpose and mission statement – it’s the driving force behind why you’re starting up your business in the first place. It’s all about clarifying that message and thinking how to represent it in words and visuals.
Here are four key areas you need to think about when starting to formulate your brand.
1. Mission statement
A mission statement is a couple of sentences summarising your brand’s aims and mission. It should be a concise statement that tells your potential customers, business partners and investors what your brand seeks to achieve and how. As mentioned, if you’re starting up an ethical business, identifying your mission should be fairly easy, as it likely came before any other part of your business plan. However, it’s still worth spending the time crafting a mission statement that distils this mission and communicates it effectively, so you can get people on board with your message right away. You can include your mission statement on your website for your customers to see, in pitches to investors so they understand what you’re trying to achieve and in communications with suppliers and creatives you work with so they can align with your vision.
2. Brand values
Your brand values are a continuation of your mission and are 3-5 core values that dictate what your brand stands for. They get into the nitty gritty of what your brand does and how it acts and communicates. As well as informing how you treat your workers and suppliers, they’ll also dictate how you communicate with your customers and present yourself within marketing materials. Establishing your brand values from the start gives you a great blueprint for everything you do in your business and in your marketing. For example, if one of your brand values is to empower women through education, this could feed into setting up a fund to help provide access to education for women and girls and creating educational and empowering content for your female audience on social media.
3. Visual identity
A brand’s visual identity is what lots of people think of when they think branding – colours, fonts, logos etc. And of course, visual branding is a key component that helps to create and communicate your brand’s personality. A graphic designer will help you come up with a colour palette, brand fonts and visual assets that embody your brand mission and values. Using this visual branding across all your marketing materials and throughout your online presence helps make your brand instantly recognisable.
4. Brand voice
It’s not just important how your brand looks, but also how it sounds! Your brand voice is all about how your brand talks and how it makes your customers feel. It’s made up of grammar choices, tonal values and the words you use, on your website, in marketing materials and in communications. A copywriter can create a set of brand voice guidelines for you, describing how your brand voice will sound and how to achieve that through your word choices, phrasing and syntax. They’ll include concrete examples to illustrate this. Once you have this, then anyone who writes copy for your business can use it as a guide, ensuring your brand voice is uniform wherever it shows up.
Want some help?
If you’re looking to create an ethical brand, I can help you out with all things word-based, from your mission statement and brand values to a complete brand copy guide. If you want to know more about what this involves, pop me a message and I’ll send you my template which explains exactly what’s included and how it can help your brand.
I’m also happy to work based off any visual branding work you’ve already had done, or I can work with my graphic design partners to help you create your whole brand with both visual and tonal elements. Give me a shout and let’s chat!