By skyforbes 
What is Brand Identity?
Let’s talk specifically about how Brand Identity helps your brand as a whole. So, brand identity is the personality of your brand. It is that experience that you are creating.
It is the combination of values, your mission, how you want people to feel, that emotional side. It’s that entire experience and it’s one of my favorite things to talk about.
You’ve actually probably heard me just refer to it as branding because to me that’s truly what it is.
We have had such an evolution with what branding is and what’s important when it comes to branding. From just thinking it was a logo and your colors to understanding that it really is about the human connection, values, mission, and emotional connection you’re creating.
So, I will refer to just brand identity as branding. I interchange them all the time because that’s just the direction that we’re heading with branding overall.
So branding is really about that experience, creating that experience and putting a personality to your brand.
When you’re creating a personal brand it makes it a lot easier because you’re front and center, you’re sharing yourself, you’re sharing your stories. So, that personality just naturally happens which is why personal branding is so powerful.
So if you want to learn a little bit more about emotional branding and all those different things, after this video make sure you definitely check out my blog. I have tons of content over there on emotional branding and just the foundational pieces of branding. I’ve got some YouTube videos on it as well.
And if you go to my Facebook I’ve got an entire folder of videos on that as well.
So when you think of Brand Identity, I want you to think about the personality behind your brand and the experience you’re creating for your audience.
What is YOUR brand story?
The first thing that you’ve got to do is figure out what your brand story is. So this will look different for different types of businesses. There are different ways and structures to actually create your brand story based on your personal story and based on your individual business.
But really what I want you to focus on now is stripping away the, “How do I write this on my about me page?” And, “What does this look like on my bio, on my homepage?” Strip all that away and just focus solely on the story.
In fact, when you’re writing this out I want you to think about actually telling this story to someone.
Some of you might want to even record it and transcribe it. It might feel a little bit more natural to you.
Ultimately, what you want to do is highlight and share the journey that has happened that led you to the creation of your brand.
Your brand is not a product, your brand is not a service specifically, it’s the whole thing.
It’s that umbrella, it’s the work that you’re putting out into the world, it’s your mission, it’s who you ultimately want to impact all rolled into one. And you want to share the evolution of how that came to be.
So I want you to strip away, “How is this structured?” and “How does this flow?” and really just allow yourself to tell the story. That’s where all the goodness gets to go in. And then when we format, we can pull out the unnecessary pieces and clean it up a bit.
But I want you to just deeply understand what has led you to this moment and think of really telling that story to your audience.
For example, when I talk about my brand story, one piece of that is this underlying feeling of not living a life based on other people’s expectations or going against the status quo.
And I know that that’s important to my audience, that’s important to you, that’s something that you also believe in. I share that through my storytelling and I share that through my brand story to get that message across.
You’re probably already picking up on it, but your brand story is where that connection can really start for many of you. Because once we get to formatting it for an about me page, or we get to putting it out there in social media, it might be one of the first things that people see and you have an opportunity to build that connection with them right out of the gate.
Focus on taking your audience on this journey, write out your brand story and become really clear on what you ultimately want to share about your journey and what has led you to the brand that you are creating today.
how to Identify The Brand Emotions
Step two is to elevate the experience by focusing on the emotional connection.
And this is where we really take your story and spin it around to pull in your audience and build that trust.
I call these brand emotions and I encourage you to identify five brand emotions for your brand as a whole.
Don’t get too obsessed with the number. It could be three, it could be six, it could be seven. Don’t do 25 or something like that. I find five is the sweet spot.
But you really want to ask yourself, “How do I want my audience to feel?”
I mean, the reality is you’ve got eight seconds to make an impression.
That’s not a lot of time to read an entire message on a piece of content. It’s not a lot of time to read a bunch of stuff on your homepage.
You’ve got to make that first initial impression a good one and powerful, and that really comes down to that emotional connection. How do people feel when they land on your website, when they see a piece of your content?
In order to exude that, in order to allow people to feel that, you need to know what you want people to feel.
Take the time to identify those brand emotions.
I want to give you two examples, because I know sometimes you might be thinking, “What do I want people to feel, Michelle?”
I have a client who is in the mindset space, the spiritual mindset space specifically, and she supports women in moving through a very difficult period of their life. She does a lot of shadow work. Her clients are currently in a difficult time but they are moving towards the light. They want to understand how to get there, they want to feel supported through that process, and they want to do it in a way that feels good and not forced.
We know this about her audience and we also know from her brand story she’s really good at it. So when we were thinking of her brand emotions we wanted to show the light. We wanted to show what was possible, the desire, and what her audience was wanting to move towards.
Because her audience didn’t want to neglect where they were and that was really, really important to communicate, we played with sharing that through messaging, through story, through brand colors, showing both the dark and the light.
That’s just one example but again it comes back to how do I want people to feel and ultimately what are they looking for? What are they searching for?
With my brand, I decided very early on, well actually after eight months of having a brand that was not me at all, I redid the whole thing and now it’s great. But when I redid it, I got back to this core piece of storytelling and brand emotions and I asked myself, “How do I want people to feel?”
And it kept coming up for me that I wanted people to feel safe and comfortable and that they could be their authentic selves. That there was this connection between the two of us, between my brand and between them and their story. That it almost felt like we were sitting cozied up by a fire on a fall day just having a really deep conversation and chat.
I used that to motivate all of these different pieces that we’re going to talk about in just a second.
Again, take the time to understand who you are and the journey that you’ve gone on to get to where you are, to have the brand, the mission, the values, the core beliefs and the impact that you want to make in your ideal customer’s life. As well as understand how you want them to feel from the moment they come in contact with your brand, through all of those different pieces.
Now that brings us to, “Now how do we actually use this Michelle? How do we use this? This all sounds great, I love it, but how do we use it?”
Let’s talk about how we use that brand story and those brand emotions to enhance and communicate and have this wonderful experience also known as brand identity.