Brand, Branding, Brand Identity, Brand Strategy: What’s the Difference?

When people start a business, they often dive straight into “getting a logo” or “making a website”. Perfectly understandable. But branding isn’t one single task you tick off — it’s a sequence of decisions, thinking and design work that leads you to a brand people actually recognise and trust.

To make sense of it, let’s strip down the jargon and look at what’s really happening.

Brand and branding

You’ll eventually end up with a brand, but you don’t start with one. You start with the process of branding.

Branding has countless definitions floating around, some overly academic, some written purely for other designers to understand. I prefer something more useful. So as the owner of The Identity Bureau (a naming and branding agency), I came up with my own definition that attempts to explain the word “branding” straightforwardly:

“The act of branding is to go through the thought process of how you want your company to be perceived, and then taking the steps to create that perception.”

The key words in this statement to remember are:

• thought process (the thinking part)

• perceived (how your audience will understand you)

• taking the steps (the doing part)

So, understanding that the act of branding is a process to undertake, we then split this into two distinct activities.

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Activity 1: Brand strategy

Brand strategy is where the thinking happens before you make anything visual. It’s where you ask questions like:

• Why does the business exist at all?

• What’s the long-term ambition?

• Who are we talking to?

• Why would they choose us and not someone else?

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Here’s the way I describe it when working with clients:

"Brand strategy is the questions, conversations and the thought process you have to plan your brand and decide how you want people to feel about it. This is where you look at your competitors and your customers, and work out what makes your brand different and why people should buy from you.”

Strategy can sound intimidating, but it doesn’t need to be. I think of it as a brand plan, a practical way to answer a set of essential questions, rather than a theoretical exercise.

A useful brand plan will help you define:

• Why you’re starting the business

• What makes your offer different in your market

• Who your customer actually is

• Why they should care about what you do

• Who else they might choose instead

• How you want to appear and communicate (visually and verbally)

My own brand strategy workshops are deliberately conversational. It’s less about filling in endless templates and more about discovering the truths that shape how a brand should behave and present itself. The more clarity you gain at this stage, the easier — and faster — the creative part becomes later on.

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Activity 2: Brand identity

Once the thinking is sorted, we get to the part most people associate with “branding”: the visuals and messaging. I define brand identity as this:

“Brand identity is what you look and sound like, and what everyone will see. It’s your brand strategy made visible"

This is where you design your logos and colour schemes, choose your fonts and decide on how you come across, while keeping your audience in mind at all times.

More specifically, your brand identity will include some or all of the following elements. Each one is designed to resonate with the audience you defined in your brand strategy.

• Logo files

• Colour palettes

• Typographic recommendations

• Additional illustrations and patterns

• Photographic tone-of-voice

• Social media page branding

• Brand guidelines

• Social media templates

• Tonal values

Think of brand identity as a toolkit. Depending on your budget, you might begin with the essentials, such as a logo, colour choices and some social assets, or you might build a fuller suite. Either way, the purpose remains the same: to make your brand distinctive in your market and memorable to the people you want to reach.

Check out some examples of my brand identity design work on my portfolio page.
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Designing your brand

Once you’ve gone through the thinking (strategy) and created the toolkit (identity), something new emerges. You start to build your brand.

I define brand as:

“The feeling other people have about your business, product or service when they compare you against your competitors".

This feeling is what you intentionally set out to influence when you undertook your brand strategy and brand identity design.

You can influence that feeling, but you don’t totally control it. A brand grows through:

• how customers speak about you

• how you communicate

• your tone of voice

• your reviews

• the way your team behaves

• your leadership, social presence and service experience

You now have three clear ideas that work together: branding is the act of shaping perception, brand strategy is the thinking that decides how you want to be understood, and brand identity is that thinking made visible. Once these steps are in place, the result becomes your brand, which is the feeling your audience holds about you when they compare you with other choices. Together, these definitions remind us that branding is not a rush to design things, and it is not about guessing what might look good. It is a considered process. First you think and plan, then you design with intention, and finally you earn the reputation you set out to build.

A strong brand starts in your head, takes shape on the page, and then lives in the minds of others. When you approach branding in this order, you do more than create a logo or a set of colours. You create a business that people remember, understand and choose.

If you'd like to have a chat about your branding project, why not book a Discovery Call with me here.

We can chat about things like:

How to develop your business's positioning statement.
Important questions to ask when formulating a brand strategy.
How to shortlist your business name ideas.
How and when to choose a domain name.
The Do's and Don'ts when designing a brand identity.No obligation.
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