Each brand has a vision or goal for themselves—whether it’s hitting a certain number of yearly sales, winning high caliber awards, expanding franchise opportunities, or simply improving its customers’ lives. To improve and work toward achieving your brand’s goals, it’s incredibly important to have a cohesive brand identity. This identity allows customers, and competition, to recognize your products or services, understand your company values, and see its authority in the marketplace. 

New or old, fresh or overdone, annoying or hilarious, branding aligns your company with a label based on public perception. To get your brand the label you want and achieve your goals, cohesive branding is key.

Brand Story & Core Values

Determining your brand’s core values and story is the perfect starting point for creating cohesion among locations, franchises, and mediums. 

• What are your goals as a brand? 
• How does your history and conception as a brand qualify you to produce this product or provide this service? 
• What do you want your brand to represent to the consumer? 

By answering these questions, you can build out the framework for your brand marketing and have a basis for your brand voice and visual identity.

This story and these values are the foundation of your branding and can help you appeal to your target audience while remaining authentic. With a consistent brand story and values, you can build brand authority, awareness, and consumer trust. 

Visual Identity

Your brand’s visual identity helps consumers recognize your products and services, build up trust in your brand, communicate your values, and help create an emotional connection to your brand. Utilizing a color palette with specific combinations and shades, like warm toned pastel shades of pink and red, makes your brand look cohesive and trustworthy. You can make brand merchandise, create a logo, package your products, and more using the same colors. Combine these elements with a specific font, or two, that all of your printed and digital content use (logos, advertisements, merchandise, etc.) to put together a visual identity. 

By remaining consistent with your visual identity, you create recognition among consumers so even if they see a different location for your business, they still have that trust and knowledge of your brand. This is specifically important for franchise marketing because it allows the corporate brand to help individual locations to have a positive image and reputation from the start. One way to achieve this without a heavy lift for individual franchise owners is to begin on the corporate level with a marketing plan or vendor. 

For a digital marketing agency like LSM, our team works to create or enhance brands’ visual identities to align with their business goals, values, and advertising. This could be in the form of creating a new or more cohesive website design with web developers, adjusting the visuals for ad campaigns, or crafting posts for multiple social media platforms. 

For a franchise business specifically, it could mean using the same or slight variations of social content posts and ad campaigns with adjustments for your location or slightly different product and service offerings. 

Brand Voice

Another vital piece of creating a cohesive brand identity is your brand voice. Finding the right style of writing, lingo, tone, and formatting to compliment your visuals. Looking to other brands in your industry can help you gauge what is appropriate and what does or does not work with your target audience. Brand voice also plays into how your brand communicates. For example, if you’re looking to expand your Gen-Z customers, doing a social media campaign may yield better results than running TV commercials. 

Consider these questions:

• What style of writing will build your brand and present it in the way you want?
  
  • Funny? Dark? High-brow? Simple? Sophisticated? Gen-Z? 
• Who is your target audience? What tone will they understand and accept?
  
  • What style do they gravitate toward already? How can you do that in your own way?
  • Is there a tone that will cost you part of your audience? Is there a less intense or affronting version that would work better? 

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Finding the right brand voice is the binding of the book (the brand book if you will). It encompasses the vibe, values, and identity into a communicative form that consumers and competitors alike will digest. Your brand book lets you show your franchises and marketers how your brand should be. 

What’s The Point Of Making A Cohesive Brand Identity?

Clients trust you. Consumers recognize you. Competitors reference you. Having a cohesive brand identity allows you to grow and expand your brand while keeping it consistent and authoritative in its market. Ready to become a franchise business? Potential owners can see and trust your corporate brand because they know it already and see the potential in joining. 

Dive into your values, story, visuals, and more to cultivate your business’s brand identity and see how you can grow. 

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