What Is Brand Identity? (Beginner's Guide)
The beginner's difference between brand identity, brand image and the brand, the parts an identity is made of, and the research on why familiar marks help.
Answer to the question
What is brand identity?
What is brand identity? It is everything a business deliberately puts out to represent itself: name, logo, colours, type, pictures, voice and packaging. Brand image is what people think of it, and the brand is the sum of the two. Research on familiarity and awareness shows why a recognisable identity helps.
Key takeaways
- Brand identity is what a business puts out, brand image is what people think of it, and the brand is the sum of the two.
- William Kunst-Wilson and Robert Zajonc reported in 1980 that preferences for objects made familiar by repeated exposure can develop even when the exposures are so degraded that recognition is precluded.
- Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwarz and Piotr Winkielman proposed in 2004 that the more easily something is taken in, the more pleasant the experience, and that the pleasure is credited to the object.
- Wayne Hoyer and Steven Brown found in a controlled experiment in 1990 that brand awareness acted as a dominant heuristic in consumer choice.
People can come to prefer a shape they have seen before without being able to say that they have seen it. William Kunst-Wilson and Robert Zajonc reported in the journal Science that preferences for objects made familiar by repeated exposure can develop even when the exposures are so degraded that recognition is precluded. The short answer to what is brand identity follows from that evidence: it is the part of a brand designed to be met again and again in the same form, which gives familiarity something fixed to attach to. Most beginners meet the term as another word for a logo, which is a fair first guess and a partial one.
What Is Brand Identity, Really?
Three terms are often used as one. What is brand identity in plain terms? It is what a business puts out: its name, marks, colours, type, pictures and manner of speaking. Brand image is what people think when they meet it, the picture that forms in the mind of a customer, a neighbour or a stranger. The brand is the sum of the two, the identity as shown plus the image as held. The business writes the first and the public writes the second, which is why one identity can sit behind different images in different minds.
| Term | What it is | Who shapes it | Where it shows |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand identity | What the business puts out | The business | Signs, packs, screens and the way staff speak |
| Brand image | What people think of it | Each person who meets it | Memory, and what people say when asked |
| Brand | The sum of the two | Both, over time | Wherever the identity and the image meet |
David Ogilvy's Ogilvy on Advertising describes the same division in the vocabulary of his trade. He wrote about brand image as something an advertiser builds with every piece of work, and he argued, as practice and opinion drawn from his own career, that consistency over many years serves a product better than a run of clever one-offs. On that view, and it is a view, the identity is the steady material and the image is what the steady material builds up to. The memory view of the brand itself, as a body of knowledge held by buyers, is set out in What Is Branding The Psychology Behind Strong Brands.
What Is Brand Identity Built From?
In practice the identity is a list of the things a person can see, hear or read. The name comes first, since it is used in every channel, spoken ones included. The logo is the mark that stands for the name, often with a shorter form for small spaces. Colour, typeface and shape give the brand a consistent look. Pictures, whether photographs or drawings, set a style for how the brand shows the world.
A voice covers the words, from the register used to the phrases a business prefers. Some brands add a sound, and nearly all add packaging or signage, where the other parts meet the customer. Take a corner café as an illustration, not a real case: a name over the door, a colour on the cups, a typeface on the menu board and a way of greeting regulars. Each is small, and together they let a stranger place the café the second time they pass it.
No part is the identity alone. A logo by itself is a single piece, and it does its work as one member of a set that repeats. A small business can begin with a name, one colour and one typeface used the same way each time, and add the rest as the need appears. The way the parts are fixed into rules is the subject of How to Build a Brand Identity System, and the aim here is only to name them.
What Is Brand Identity For? Why Familiar Marks Feel Easier
Beauty, in one influential account, is a report on the viewer's own processing. Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwarz and Piotr Winkielman proposed in 2004 that the more easily something is taken in, the more pleasant the experience of taking it in, and that this pleasure is credited to the object. They point to features long known to make things appealing, among them symmetry, contrast between figure and ground, repetition and typicality, and argue that each of them makes an object easier to process, a quality now called processing fluency. They also report that manipulations unrelated to the object itself, such as having recently seen something similar, raise how attractive it is judged to be.
Recognition is a lighter task than recall. To recognise is to know a thing when it is in front of you, and to recall is to produce it from memory with no cue at all. A customer who could not list a brand unprompted may still know it at once on a shelf or a screen, and a mark that looks the same on each occasion is the easiest thing to know.
The Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc report goes a step past ordinary recognition, since the preference appeared when recognition itself was precluded. Reading these papers across to a logo is an interpretation, since they concern general stimuli. For a beginner, this research suggests one use for an identity: it gives familiarity something steady to work on.
Does Awareness Steer Early Choice?
A name and a look that are known make a choice quicker, and there is experimental work on exactly that. In a controlled experiment on a common, repeat-purchase product, Wayne Hoyer and Steven Brown found that brand awareness acted as a dominant heuristic in consumer choice. Participants who lacked awareness of a brand sampled more brands and more often chose the higher-quality ones, which the authors read as a cost in time and effort that consumers may accept when quality differs. They suggest that building brand awareness is a viable advertising strategy for raising the chance that a brand is chosen.
Awareness is one result of an identity doing its job: a name and a look met often enough that picking them takes little thought.
Image stays outside the business's hands. Identity can make a brand easy to recognise and consistent to meet, and what people come to think of it also rests on the product, the service and the people they deal with. Seen from the business, what is brand identity? It is the side of the brand that the business writes, since the other side is earned through the product, the service and each encounter a customer has, which is why identity is best treated as a steady base and image as something that accumulates slowly in other people's minds as those encounters add up over the years.
Common questions
What is brand identity?
What is brand identity in one line? It is everything a business deliberately puts out to represent itself: the name, logo, colours, type, pictures, voice and packaging. It is the visible and audible side of the brand, and the business controls it directly.
What is the difference between brand identity and brand image?
What is brand identity next to image? Identity is what the business puts out and image is what people think of it. The business writes the first, each person forms the second, and the brand is the sum of the two.
Is a logo the same as brand identity?
No, and that is the usual gap in what is brand identity for a beginner. A logo is one part of brand identity, alongside the name, colours, type, pictures and voice. It works best as one member of a set used the same way each time.
What are the main parts of a brand identity?
The answer to what is brand identity in parts is the name, the logo, colour, typeface, shape, pictures, voice and packaging or signage. Some brands add a sound. A small business can start with a name, one colour and one typeface, used the same way each time, and then add the pictures, the voice and the packaging as the need appears and as it learns which of its channels customers meet first.
Sources
Ogilvy, D. Ogilvy on Advertising. Seed book; vault hub Books/Ogilvy on Advertising.
Kunst-Wilson, W. R., & Zajonc, R. B. (1980). “Affective discrimination of stimuli that cannot be recognized.” Science, 207(4430). doi:10.1126/science.7352271 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7352271
Reber, R., Schwarz, N., & Winkielman, P. (2004). “Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver's processing experience?” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4). doi:10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3
Hoyer, W. D., & Brown, S. P. (1990). “Effects of brand awareness on choice for a common, repeat-purchase product.” Journal of Consumer Research, 17(2). doi:10.1086/208544 https://doi.org/10.1086/208544