Having a multifaceted business
As a female entrepreneur who’s running a multifaceted business you'll understand the importance of standing out in a crowded market. But running a versatile business can bring additional challenges to your life. On top of the usual challenges like the lack of role models as a female entrepreneur, imposter syndrome or juggling childcare, household chores and running your business, having a versatile business also adds the challenge of brand consistency, targeting different customers, telling your brand story including all the sides of your business whilst still communicating a clear message.
Your branding is the key to capturing attention, making a great impression and ultimately driving success. So ensuring that your brand identity is cohesive and clear about what you do is super important to tackle your additional challenges. You want there to be a balance between each sub-brand having its own unique identity while ensuring that all sub-brands are clearly associated with the overarching parent brand.
Nailing this means that potential clients can easily see all your different offers, find out that what you offer is what they need, and that your bold and colourful personality is who they want to work with. Instead of confusing your ideal clients, you’re sending out a clear message about what you do and how wonderfully versatile you are.
In this blog post, we’ll explore how to embrace your versatility and create a bold, colourful brand identity that reflects your unique personality and sets your business apart.
Embrace Your Complexity
Having a multifaceted business is something that should be celebrated. Too often we hear that we should niche down, only offer one thing and not be a “jack-of-all-trades” because you will seem scattered, not focused or a people pleaser.
But I believe that people who have a multifaceted business are fulfilling their passions and continuously exploring different opportunities. You’ve built a business that is adaptable and resilient. You can pivot and adjust different aspects of your business to respond to the ever changing world we live in. And - possibly the most important part - you are a role model. Showing other female entrepreneurs that it can be done, that you can follow your passions, make a difference and be an expert in all that you do, all whilst making money!
So before you read any further- give yourself a pat on the back, do a little dance or pour a nice glass of wine to celebrate how amazing you are!
Finding your Brand’s Essence
Before you grab a pen and paper and draw out your logo and other brand visuals it is important to think about your brand’s essence. This is a step in my brand identity process that I never skip. Have a long hard think about what your values are (personally and for your business), what does your business stand for and how do you want your clients to feel when they think about your brand.
Keeping this in mind when you create your brand visuals means that the message you are trying to convey isn’t lost when you start looking at all the shiny images.
By identifying your brand’s essence, your core characteristics- what you stand for and why you do what you do- will build brand awareness, a relationship, trust and loyalty with your potential clients. Here are some ways to do find your brand's essence:
Core Values
Start by thinking about your own values and beliefs. What is important toyou? What values do you want your business to uphold? Respect, Honesty, Fun, Commitment? Write down a list of words that resonate with you and seem relevant to your business. Also look at where you spend your money and time as this often gives a great insight to what is important to you!
As small business owners, our personal and business values are often very similar. My core values are honesty, trust in the process, being creative and being bold!
Mission
What is your mission or your purpose with your business? Why do you do what you do? Do you want to offer support? Spread joy? Connect female business owners? Create a community? Empower women? Why does your business exist?
Also think about what your audience would expect your business to provide or achieve for them?
My purpose is to help women grow their business. To make them feel empowered to shout about it, make them feel proud of their business and feel joy when they look at their branding.
Brainstorm emotions
If you still struggle to find your brand’s essence, simply think of how you want your clients to feel when they think of your brand, interact with you or receive your services/products.
Feelings are so important when it comes to your brand identity. One exercise I give my clients is to pick 4-6 words that sum up their business. Below is a short list of examples to describe the emotion you want your business to portray. See if you can find some that work for you or come up with your own.
Remember that defining your core values, mission, and vision is an ongoing process. It's essential to revisit and refine them as your multifaceted business evolves and grows.
Color Psychology and Strategy
Before I go into the different elements of creating your bold multifaceted branding I want to talk a bit about colour. It’s fair to say that I love colour and the use of colour in branding is a powerful and widely recognised psychological tool. Colours can evoke emotions, convey messages, and influence how people perceive a brand. Understanding the psychological impact of colour in branding is crucial for creating a brand identity that resonates with your target audience.
Colours have strong emotional associations that are deeply ingrained in human psychology. These associations can vary across cultures but often have universal elements. Make sure you understand what the colours stand for and if this lines up with your brand essence. If you want to learn more about colour psychology- make sure to sign up to my email: Brilliantly Bold Branding, where I explore the meaning of different colours.
There is a great opportunity to choose a bold and (multi)colourful palette if you have a very wide range of emotions and feelings within your brand’s essence due to the versatile nature of your business. A bit further on we’ll explore how you can use your colour palette to differentiate between all your offers.
If you find it hard to put together a good colour palette, try Pinterest for inspiration (here is my colour palette board) and Coolors.co or Adobe Color are some of my favourite places to play around with colours.
Creating a bold, colourful brand identity
A consistent visual identity is an essential aspect of successful branding, especially when you have a multifaceted business. You don’t want to use the exact same visuals, colours and illustrations for each aspect of your business, this will make everything blend into one and create overwhelm and confusion for your audience. On the other hand you don’t want each aspect to look like a completely different brand. What you want is that sweet spot in the middle- using your visuals and colours in a slightly different way so your offers stand out whilst still being part of the parent brand.
Your cohesive brand identity helps build recognition, trust, and credibility and it makes sure that your brand's message and values are communicated clearly throughout your offers/services/products.
But creating a visual identity for sub-brands while keeping that cohesive overall look is a strategic branding challenge. You want there to be a balance between each sub-brand having its own unique identity while ensuring that all sub-brands are clearly associated with the overarching parent brand. Here are some tips to achieve this:
Start with a Strong Parent Brand: Create a parent brand identity that is the overarching design for all your services. This should be in line with what we spoke about earlier; your values, your vision, the feelings you try to put across. Your parent brand serves as the foundation on which you can create the sub-brands. Make sure you create at least the basics of a brand identity: a main logo, submarks, colour palette and typography.
Understand Sub-Brand Distinctions: Now look at what defines each aspect of your business. What are the unique attributes, values, and positioning of each sub-brand? Understanding what sets them apart is crucial for creating distinct visual identities.
Logo Variations: Create logo variations or adaptations for each sub-brand. These variations should incorporate the core parent brand elements but have unique elements that reflect the individual sub-brand's identity.
Colour Palette: It is important to stick to the colour palette you choose for your parent brand. But you can easily make each sub-brand pop out by using a primary colour from the parent brand's palette and adding secondary colours that are unique to each sub-brand. This way you can choose the right emotions for each aspect of your business.
Typography: It would be easy to select a completely different font for each sub-brand to make it stand out, but that way you will lose the cohesive overall look. A much better way is to choose fonts that are consistent with the parent brand but allow for variations in font styles or weights to create distinct sub-brand typography.
Visual Elements: Utilise visual elements, illustrations or patterns that are consistent with the parent brand but can be changed to reflect the sub-brand's identity.
Outsource to a professional designer
There is no shame in saying: I need help! And if your brand structure is complicated, with lots of different sub-brands, targeting different audiences or offering specific products or services it can be challenging to find that balance between being cohesive and distinct.
Then there is also the issue of time. As a mum, CEO of your household and growing a business, finding time to work ON your business can be hard. And designing a brand identity can be time consuming. By outsourcing this task to a designer you will save yourself the time (and it will actually get done) but you’ll also get to collaborate with a professional who can translate your brand vision and strategy into a visually compelling and effective identity.
Even if you find that your brand structure isn’t that complicated, working with a designer can really push you from an ‘ok’ brand identity to a ‘wow-I-look-so-professional’ brand identity!
Designers have the skills and experience to create logos, colour palettes, typography, and other design elements that align with your brand's goals. Which in turn attracts the right customers for your business, bringing in more money.
Celebrate your Versatility and Be Fearlessly Colourful and Uniquely You
I hope that after reading this you feel confident and proud that you are a versatile and passionate business owner who wants to show the world all that they have to offer! Celebrate that! We need more people like you, that show us how it’s done.
Make sure that your brand identity is aligned to your vision and strategy, incorporating all the aspects of your business. Create a parent brand and work from there to create your sub-brands that are unique and speak to the right people. Creating a design that makes people feel what you want them to feel. Then use it consistently, in all your marketing materials!
If you struggle to get there, hire a professional brand designer. But make sure that you choose a designer who’s style and values align with yours. Being able to collaborate and have good communication between you and the designer are key to achieving a visual identity that aligns with your business goals and resonates with your target audience.
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