Grow the Core: How to Focus on your Core Business for Brand Success

Chapter 7

Workout 2: Create a distinctive identity

 Headlines

A distinctive and ownable ‘brand identity’ is essential to stand out in today's over-crowded world, whether this be on supermarket shelves or in the online space. Brand identity plays a key role in creating distinctive brand properties, such as symbols, shapes, colours and typefaces, that can build the memory structure needed to help your brand get chosen at the point of purchase. The most obvious use of identity is in packaging design, but it can also turbo-charge the rest of the marketing mix. As with core brand growth in general, the challenge with identity is to strike the right balance between consistency over time and freshness to keep the brand distinctive and up to date.

Brand identity is at the very heart of creating distinctiveness for the core brand. The most visible role that identity plays is in the design of packaging for the thousands of consumer goods we have to choose from during our shopping trips to the supermarket. But brand identity is much more than just the brand's logo. It's about creating distinctive brand properties that can turbo-charge the whole marketing mix, as we will see later on in the Felix story.

Identity crisis

The role of identity in general, and packaging design in particular, ...