Brand Identity
Brand identity is what a business deliberately puts out to represent itself: its name, marks, colours, type, pictures, voice and packaging. It is the side of a brand the business writes directly, as distinct from brand image, which is what people think of it.
What it is
Brand identity is what a business deliberately puts out to represent itself: its name, marks, colours, type, pictures, voice and packaging. It is the side of a brand the business writes directly, as distinct from brand image, which is what people think of it.
The brand itself is the sum of the two. The term is used here as a working definition and not as a finding from a single study.
In effect
A small corner cafe, used as an invented illustration, shows the split. The cafe chooses a name, a logo, a colour for its cups and a tone for its signs, and that is its identity. What customers come to believe about the cafe from those choices, and from everything else they notice, is its image.
What it does not say
Brand identity is a working definition and not a research finding, so there is no effect size to quote. It does not say that a business controls what people think of it: it controls only what it puts out.
Sources
- Used as a working definition by The Why We Project; not traced to a single originator.