How To Use A Brand Identity Prism For Your Business

What is a Brand Identity Prism?

Millions of businesses have been created with the hopes of providing a value to their customers. And all these businesses are battling hard for customers to recognize them and choose them over their competitors. One of the most effective ways of beating competition is to differentiate your business by defining your own brand identity.

A brand identity is not just coming up with a name and a logo. It's the personality of your brand, who you are as a business and the message you're trying to communicate.

Jean-Noël Kapferer, a brand strategist, understood that when a brand identity is not defined clearly, it can reduce customer recognition and lower your business's chance of success. He developed what is known as Kapferer's Brand Identity Prism to tackle this problem.

Brand Identity Prism is a model that visualizes the 6 facets of what makes up your brand identity. This model is a strong tool that businesses can come back and refer, to maintain brand consistency throughout their advertising strategies and brand touch-points. The brand identity prism encompasses the core values of your brand in a visual form. This makes it very easy to look at and understood on its most basic level.

How important is it for your business?

Creating a strong brand identity is a key step in your business growth process. More and more customers now care about more than just the product they purchase. They want to see who's behind the product they buy, their values, and their story. Customers are constantly seeking out businesses that they can connect with at an emotional level. By creating a brand that your customers can strongly connect with, you ensure that your brand will be clearly positioned in their minds.

The 6 facets of the brand identity prism are designed to work in collaboration with each other to give a collective brand experience to the customer. This model can help your brand to become distinct and memorable.

In this blog, let's break down the 6 facets of the brand identity and how your ethical business can create a brand identity based on your most prominent strengths and features.

Physique

Physique is the most tangible aspect of your brand identity. This includes the logo, the color palette, iconography, typography, packaging, and even things like the website user interface, and social media posts. Any and all visual elements that strongly represent your brand can be included here.

Patagonia's physical brand identity, for example, is focused strongly on outdoor visuals. Their logo famously features the skyline of the Cerro Fitz Roy mountain. Similarly, their imagery, in both website and social media, is focused on outdoor photography. This includes various shots of people engaging in outdoor activities like mountain biking, rock climbing, surfing, trekking, etc. Even their product photography is shots of models in action. The colorful, very casual, and nature-based imagery really sets Patagonia apart from other outdoor clothing brands.

The physique of a brand identity is one of the first aspects of your business that is introduced to customers. Because of this, you must make a great first impression the first chance you get. Like Patagonia, by establishing a strong visual linkage between your brand purpose and your visuals, you can confidently share your message to your customers.

Personality

The personality is how your business communicates. This includes the business's tone and voice, characteristics, and personality traits. The voice of your business is the best outlet for showing your brand personality, but other elements, such as fonts and communication mediums also matter. The best way to develop your brand personality is to imagine your business as a person. Think of their demographics and psychographics to get a well-rounded idea.

The best example for this would be Who Gives A Crap, an environmentally friendly toilet paper brand. Their personality is fun-loving and humorous. Their tagline is "good for your bum and great for the world". Their voice is casual and their social media content includes a fair few amount of potty jokes. The best thing about Who Gives A Crap is how their casual tone does not diminish the purposeful work they're doing.

Relationship

This facet deals with your business's relationship with your customer. Especially as an ethical business, your relationship with your customer is much more than just a simple transaction. This goes beyond the experience your customers might have with your product. The relationship can include a great social media engagement, strong after-sales services, good in-store assistance, and much more. Building a strong, emotional relationship with your customers, is a great way to build your brand loyalty too.

IKEA is a great example of this. Going beyond the products they sell, IKEA has created a "People and Planet Positive" initiative where they encourage their customers to live sustainably through their products. Their "Sustainable Everyday" concept educates customers on using their affordable and recyclable products while creating and living sustainable everyday lives. They focus on showing how sustainable their products are while being stylish. This reduces the strain on potential customers who are undecided between choosing good products and ethical brands.

Culture

For an ethical business, the culture represents your internal values, ethics, and core principles. It includes your belief system and how you are planning to solve social and environmental problems while providing a product or a service. Your business's purpose and mission can be the best place to start when developing your culture.

Culture is more than simply describing a set of attributes about your business. Culture is the rule book your business lives by every day in order to complete your mission. The culture should be a core part of your employees and stakeholders, and they should be able to connect with your culture on a deep level.

TOMS is a great example to understand how a business can create a wonderful company culture. TOMS' brand story is a story that touches the hearts of every single person who hears it. TOMS is a footwear brand that donates a pair of shoes to those in need for every single pair sold. TOMS' founder, Blake Mycoskie, describes that TOMS brand is about keeping an uninterrupted supply of shoes for those who don't have them. And their sales are simply a means of achieving that brand promise. Their entire purpose is to continuously donate shoes, and their purpose is so ingrained in the culture that employees and workers at TOMS are passionate about their work and strongly believe in their business promise. In fact, year-long employees at TOMS get the opportunity to participate physically in a "shoe drop" where shoes are donated. This further helps to magnify the impact of their company culture and values.

Reflection

Reflection shows who your ideal customer should be. What does your target audience look like? How do they behave? What are their values and beliefs? The more specific, the better. Your business should have an ideal customer persona created. This persona should show the characteristics and attributes of a customer who has strong brand loyalty towards you and will eventually become a brand ambassador for your business. This is the persona that you should create your touch-points for. Your marketing materials should reach out for this persona, with the voice and tone to attract them, and great, relatable visuals to grab their attention.

As ethical businesses, your customers tend to be conscious and selective of their choices. They are more informed than other demographics. Your customers care deeply about what businesses they associate with. You must keep these in mind when drafting the perfect target persona for your business. Once you have the target persona, you can use your completed brand identity to attract them.

Self-Image

Self-image is how your customers see their ideal selves. This is the vision of your customers, while or after using your products. What are the goals they are hoping to achieve, and what is the outcome? What are their aspirations? Understanding the underlying vision of your customers can greatly help your brand identity. Finding out where the customers want to be, and striving to help them achieve those aspirations can help you connect to your customers and get their loyalty. Customers will feel like your business is an ally that will help them reach their goals.

Customers of ethical businesses love to see a better world, and they love to be responsible for these positive changes through their choices. Understand their core goals and motivations for purchasing from you, and build upon how you can help them achieve their goals further.

A great example of this would be Beyond Meat's target customers. Statistically, vegetarians and vegans are perceived by society as unhealthy and weak. However, Beyond Meat, a brand that sells plant-based burgers, included flexible meat-eaters as well in their target persona and marketing. They aimed to attract the attention of both vegetarians and meat-eaters, and focus on their need for burgers that taste great, with plenty of protein.

Facets of the Prism

The brand identity prism includes the 6 facets that we discussed: physique, personality, relationship, culture, reflection, and self-image. The way these are grouped in the brand identity prism in different layers so that it's much more meaningful.

Picture of sender: This shows that physique and personality are the closest facets to the sender. They are the direct representations of the brand.

Picture of receiver: This shows that reflection and self-image are the facets that describe the receiver (aka customer). This is who you should be targeting.

The externalization category shows the facets of your brand that are visible to the customers. This includes the logo, packaging, marketing materials, advertising, and PR. Internalization category shows the facets that are internal to your business and brand, such as the values, policies, and culture.

How You Can Use It

Brand identity prism is a great model to work on while you are creating or improving your brand identity. While you move through each facet, you'll ask yourself important questions regarding your business, its purpose, values, vision, and mission. Answering these questions and completing the brand identity will take you through a journey of self-understanding regarding your business. You'll have a distinct image of your brand in mind at the end of it.

You should remember that consistency is important in maintaining your brand identity. You should keep facets interrelated and consistent. At the same time, you shouldn't have ambiguous or contradictory statements in between facets.

Once you have a completed the brand identity model, you can keep it close by as a reference guide for everything your brand identity is called for, from designing your logos and marketing material to developing advertising strategies to daily communications. When business goals and values change, it's important to update the brand identity prism as well.

Conclusion…

Brand identity prism is a great model to work on while you are creating or improving your brand identity. While you move through each facet, you'll ask yourself important questions regarding your business, its purpose, values, vision, and mission. Answering these questions and completing the brand identity will take you through a journey of self-understanding regarding your business. You'll have a distinct image of your brand in mind at the end of it.

You should remember that consistency is important in maintaining your brand identity. You should keep facets interrelated and consistent. At the same time, you shouldn't have ambiguous or contradictory statements in between facets.

Once you have a completed the brand identity model, you can keep it close by as a reference guide for everything your brand identity is called for, from designing your logos and marketing material to developing advertising strategies to daily communications. When business goals and values change, it's important to update the brand identity prism as well.