What Is Branding? Definition, Strategy, and Examples

Branding creates a unique identity for your business in the minds of your target audience.

Good branding is a critical component of making sales. “Ultimately, product will only take you so far,” says Shingly Lee, vice president of marketing at energy drink company Guru, on Shopify Masters. “What we’re here to do as a brand right now is to sell the brand, then sell the can.”

Ahead, learn what branding is, why it’s important, and how to develop strong branding of your own, with insights from successful ecommerce merchants and branding agency experts.

What is branding?

Branding encompasses the elements that make your company unique in the eyes of consumers, including: 

• Company mission
• Founding story
• Company values
• Brand name
• Brand voice
• Logo
• Color palette
• Typography
• Photography or illustration style

Your branding sets the tone for customer touchpoints, including your website, social media presence, and even customer service. It influences both your visual aesthetic and the language you use when you communicate with customers.

“Branding is like the soul of a corporation,” says Jamil Bhuya, cofounder and head of growth at design firm Otherhalf Studio, on Shopify Masters. “It’s essentially a way to create something that’s very emotional and intimate that someone can understand.”

Why is branding important?

As soon as you start a business, you have a brand. Potential customers are already forming perceptions about your company when they visit your website or see your packaging. Being intentional about how you build your brand puts you in control of how customers think about your business while helping you stand out from competitors.

Also, your branding doesn’t need to appeal to everyone to be effective. 

“Some of the less-successful brands try to be everything for everyone, and that really dilutes the power of their message and their point of view,” says Ky Allport, creative director of Charleston, South Carolina–based branding agency Outline. 

“We always encourage our clients to really know who they’re talking to and be clear about that, because you’re going to have a lot more success from your true brand champions than if you’re trying to be everything for everyone.”

The benefits of building a brand

• Reduced marketing spend
• Community
• Better company culture

There are several benefits of building a strong brand:

Reduced marketing spend

Investing in your brand upfront can help you keep your marketing budget leaner in the long run. 

“If your brand is strong and it looks attractive and appealing to people and translates over social media, the marketing will come very, very cheaply, because people will be so excited about your product that the network effect will spring into action,” says tinned fish brand Fishwife Cofounder and CEO Becca Millstein on Shopify Masters.

Fishwife’s playful and colorful branding, with illustrations by Danny Miller, is instantly recognizable in user-generated content (UGC) featuring Fishwife products. 

When customers post videos with Fishwife tins on Instagram and TikTok, their content turns into free advertising for the company.

Even strategies like influencer marketing for small businesses can be launched for the cost of product samples and affiliate commissions.

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Community

Great branding makes customers feel like they’re part of a community. “You’re creating this trust, and you’re creating a recognizable environment so that your shopper is confident and feels like part of a community,” says Margaret Pilarski, strategy director of Outline.

Take Starface, a skincare company that sells colorful pimple patches. While other brands sell products aimed to conceal acne, Starface’s brand is built on embracing “imperfections.” 

“It’s unbelievable that we’re one of the first branded skincare items,” former Starface President Kara Brothers says on Shopify Masters. “If you see someone walking on a street with a star on their face, it’s instantly recognizable. You almost feel like you’re part of this tribe, part of this community.”

Better company culture

Branding isn’t just for the outside world. When your branding includes a solid mission statement and core value set, you can build a strong company culture. 

“It’s kind of like your brand’s dress code,” Margaret says. “It’s a symbol of care and intentionality.”

Just as branding helps customers feel part of a community, it can do the same for employees, attracting like-minded hires and strengthening existing team members’ connection to your company.

Your company’s reputation as a workplace is known as employer branding, and impacts how you attract and retain talent.

For Zero Waste Store, finding employees aligned with their mission and brand means job seekers who care about the health of the planet. Cofounder Sarah Cieslinski discusses how value alignment cultivates a positive work environment on Shopify Masters. 

“[Founders] need to find someone who has the same values as they do so that they believe in the mission and they want to come to work every day,” says Sarah. 

How to create a brand

1. Determine your mission and values
2. Craft your brand story
3. Come up with a unique, memorable business namee
4. Identify collaborators
5. Develop your visual brand identity
6. Create brand guidelines
7. Publish your brand assets
8. Let your brand evolve

Successful branding is consistent from the first time a customer sees your brand until after they’ve made a purchase. Here are eight steps to creating a cohesive brand strategy:

1. Determine your mission and values

Decide on your mission, brand values, and value proposition. These underpin your larger brand identity and help formulate your brand’s personality.

Take the canned goods company Heyday Canning Co. Cofounders Kat Kavner and Jaime Lynne Tulley decided that Heyday would provide shoppers with a laid-back customer brand experience without compromising on quality. They landed on this brand personality and value proposition before they started working on the aesthetic elements of Heyday’s brand development.

“We want Heyday to feel like your friend that happens to be really good at cooking, that loves to invite you over for dinner, and is kind of cooking alongside you in the kitchen,” Kat says on Shopify Masters. “Not like this cold, corporate vibe that you might get from some other canned foods.”

Kat and Jaime then worked with Outline to develop Heyday’s visual brand identity.

“We had this foundation of knowing who we are and what we stood for and what we wanted to convey. Then we were able to take it to our design partner and actually brief them on creating our brand identity, our logo and colors and fonts, and then eventually the packaging,” Kat says. “That upfront work really helped them understand what we were trying to do and what we wanted to create.”

2. Craft your brand story

Your brand story compiles your mission and values into a narrative that explains why your company does what it does. It can focus on your founder or explore the origins of your company. A good one humanizes your brand.

Look at Momofuku Goods, theconsumer packaged goods (CPG) arm of the restaurant group founded by celebrity chef and Founder David Chang. Momofuku Good’s brand story emphasizes the company’s food service origins.

The brand tells this store on product labels. Masking tape, which is used in restaurant kitchens to label prepped foods, and marketing terms like “chef approved” and “restaurant grade” allude to Momofuku Good’s beginnings in the restaurant industry.

“The beauty of that packaging with the blue tape is that, if you get it, you get it,” Momofuku’s CEO Marguerite Zabar Mariscal shares in an episode of Shopify Masters. “And I think that really trying to tie the products into the culture of our kitchens goes a long way with the authenticity and credibility of Momofuku as a brand.”

3. Come up with a unique, memorable business name

When evaluating business names, Sandro Roco, founder of CPG drink company Sanzo, recommends asking yourself, “Is it easy to say? Is it something people like to say? Does it match the product that you’re selling?”

“When I started the brand, I actually had half a dozen to a dozen other names that I was workshopping,” Sandro says on Shopify Masters. 

“Unfortunately, a lot of those were already trademarked or just for whatever reason didn’t feel exactly right. So I went through an exercise of writing down all the letters of my first, middle, and last name. It’s Alessandro Lorenzo Rocco. And one of the combinations ended up being Sanzo.” 

To jumpstart your brainstorming process, you can also use a tool like Shopify’s free business name generator. This tool also verifies if it’s available when choosing a domain name.

4. Identify collaborators

No entrepreneur is an island; at some point, you’ll need to invite collaborators to help. 

“When you’re creating a brand, there are several ways you can go to figure out how to create the visuals, the logo, the name, etc.,” says Becca of Fishwife. On one end of the spectrum, there’s “grassrootsing it,” which is how Fishwife was born: A friend came up with the name, and Becca hired a freelance illustrator to design the visuals.

On the other end is partnering with a branding agency to take your business from an idea to a fully fledged brand. “There are branding agencies to match a lot of budgets,” Becca says. “But if you—or your cofounder or maybe an early employee—have a propensity for branding, I would highly encourage people to build it in-house, just because that authenticity piece will be even more seamless.”

5. Develop your visual brand identity

Your visual brand identity includes the aesthetic attributes that define your company.

When Becca hired freelance illustrator Danny Miller to create visuals for Fishwife, she created an inspiration board with “a handful of brands that I really, really loved”—Topo Chico, Café Bustelo, Mikeller, and “the classic Spanish and Portuguese conservas” (the tinned seafood that inspired Fishwife). 

“It was a very narrow focus, very narrow inspiration, which I would encourage people to strive toward as well, just because it’ll make it so much easier for your designer or your illustrator to execute on your vision,” says Becca. Now, Fishwife applies its signature visual identity to their website, packaging, physical displays, and even their new cookbook and branded merch.

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6. Create brand guidelines

Brand guidelines dictate how to present your brand. “They house all of the documentation that we’ve established for the brand and put some rules in place for how and when to use different things,” says Ky. 

You’ll add logo variations, slogans, and examples of your brand voice, as well as more granular information. Ky points to brand typography, visual hierarchy, how to use headlines versus body copy, line spacing, letter spacing, color codes, and what to use in print versus digital formats.

“Basically, all of the specifications that you’re ever going to need to hand to secondary teams like social media teams, digital marketing teams, or if you’re having physical signage created for brick and mortar,” says Ky. “All of those things are really key to keeping the brand feeling consistent and clear no matter what the application is.” 

7. Publish your brand assets

Publish your brand elements across your sales channels, starting with your website.

One way to do this on Shopify is to customize your Theme Settings. This allows you to add your brand colors and upload your logo. You can also alter font types and sizes across your site and edit page layouts. 

Another method is to upload your brand assets and disseminate them across sales channels, themes, and apps using the Brand API. 

To do this, upload assets including brand logo variations, colors, and your slogan into the Brand settings area of your online store. This lets you quickly publish your brand assets across sales channels, themes, and apps you’ve integrated with the Brand API.

8. Let your brand evolve

Consistency doesn’t mean stagnation. “It makes it so much more interesting and fun to allow the brand to be the living, breathing creature that it really is,” Becca says of Fishwife. As long as the core elements of your brand stay consistent, you should feel free to play around. 

For example, Fishwife experimented with halftone illustration. “It was totally new for the brand. We’ve never done it before. And all of our branding, except for the actual boxes themselves, included halftone,” Becca says. The illustrations were drawn by the same person, just in a slightly different style. Subtle changes like this can help keep your brand feeling relevant.