What's in a Brand? Your Mission Isn't Your Brand - But Here's How to Align Them!
Bees working hard at Whispering Wild Market Farm in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
What is a Brand?
A brand is made up of many pieces but is essentially the personality of your business. The purpose of creating a brand is to engage with the world around you and make connections with other people.
Just like a person, a brand is internally made up of morals, values, and opinions. It makes decisions based on a belief system and works to achieve its goals. And just like how we wear specific clothes and do our hair to express ourselves, a brand uses its logo, color palette, and brand fonts to outwardly express itself to potential customers.
Defining Your Mission
Your brand’s mission is often expressed in a mission statement and details what your business’ goal is and how you plan to achieve it.
Whether you’ve sat down to write one out or not, every brand has a mission! You wouldn’t be in business without one–starting a business is often driven by wanting to offer a solution to a problem or struggle.
But maybe you started your business simply because you love to cook for others, or you prefer to spend your time outdoors and farming seemed like a good fit. In that case, it will be beneficial to take the time to write out a mission statement, which will help you focus on your business operations and allow you to develop an effective brand.
Examples of Mission Statements
From Short’s Brewing: Leverage the Power of Smallness to help good humans lead awesome lives thru our products of passion, and leave the world better than we found it.
From Lakeview Hill Farm: To cultivate and provide the finest quality organic produce and cut flowers, elevating northern Michigan with local agriculture.
We love how both of these examples cover big-picture goals with more specific details outlining how they will achieve them. The statements are concise and provide a snapshot of what to expect from the business.
Want some tips on creating your brand? Watch our free webinar!
How to Get Your Mission & Brand in Alignment
Craft Perfect Branding
Branding is made up of several elements: a logo, a color palette, and fonts. To send the right message to your audience, it’s key that all of these elements work together to show off your brand’s personality.
Logo
Your logo is the face of your brand and should be memorable and recognizable to distinguish your business from others. The design should be reflective of the type of work you do and created in a style that supports your mission.
For example, let’s look at logos for a non-profit addressing food access and a cupcake shop whose mission is to make people smile.
Non-profit’s logo traits: Trustworthy, responsible, inclusive, community
Cupcake shop’s logo traits: Happiness, fun, lighthearted, silly
A good designer can take these elements and translate them into a logo that sends exactly the right message, helping you make connections with the right people.
Interested in having a professionally-designed logo? Let us know, we’re happy to help!
Colors
A defined color palette does a lot to display a cohesive brand. There should be a balance of contrast and cohesion to be practical in most design applications.
Continuing with our non-profit and cupcake shop example,
Non-Profit Colors
Soft primaries, such as light blues, greens, and brown are associated with environmental issues and are subtle enough to be taken seriously.
Cupcake Shop Colors
Yellows, pinks, and bright blues send a fun message and accentuate the light-heartedness of their mission.
Font
Using different fonts can be a fun way to add visual interest to your communications, but with more designer fonts becoming available, be sure to be picky when making your selections.
Back to our example:
The suggested fonts above are clean and simple, making sense for a non-profit with a serious mission.
The suggested fonts are fun and more stylistic, which align with the cupcake shop’s mission.
Consider how your brand fonts will appear to your audience: You don’t want your non-profit to come off as a luxury brand, and you don’t want your fun cupcake shop to appear dry and dull!
Find Your Photography Style
High-quality photography is especially important for farm and food businesses, as you need to make sure your food looks appealing. Here are some suggestions for aligning your photos with your brand:
Highlight What You’re Trying to Sell or Promote
Your key products or services are what should be the focus of your photos. Visually sell the lifestyle of what it’s like for people to enjoy your products or to work with your business.
For our food access non-profit example, photos should include both food and people since the mission is to provide food to more people. Other photography themes to consider include community events, people sharing meals, and food production.
Align Your Photography Colors or Filters With Your Brand Colors
Photo editing is easier than ever with built-in filters and tons of software options. However, just because they are there doesn’t mean they are appropriate for your brand.
Using our cupcake shop as an example, bright, deeply saturated colors could make their photos really stand out from their competitors and play into their fun vibe.
For our non-profit, more subdued, naturally-toned photos more accurately align with their mission of addressing food insecurity.
Want some photography support? Our downloadable Social Media Toolkit includes tons of tips and best practices for taking high-quality phone photos, and even includes some Lightroom presets to make editing a breeze.
Hone Your Voice
Your brand voice consists of both your tone and the words you use, and it should be reflective of your audience and your mission.
For example, our food access non-profit should not use crass or overly humorous language when speaking to their audience. There is a time and a place for humor, but with a mission as serious as food insecurity, it needs to be used very carefully.
Creating a Tone Guide
If you’re struggling to stay on brand with your writing, it can be helpful to create a tone guide for your business. A tone guide is a document you and your staff can reference to ensure your writing is consistent throughout all of your communications.
Tone guides typically include:
A bank of keywords and phrases that your target audience will relate to
Punctuation and capitalization guidelines
Do’s and don’ts
These are sentences often organized by “write like this, not like that” to provide tangible examples of on-brand writing.
Have a hard time writing about your brand? Use our Brand Writing Workbook to help you get started. It’s available to download for free here!
Assessing Your Branding & Mission Alignment
Take a moment to think critically about how your business presents itself to the world. What are you doing well? Where is there room for improvement?
As branding experts, we are always happy to take a look for you, provide our recommendations, and support you in implementing branding strategies. Send us a message to get support!