Crafting a Brand Identity That Resonates in the Modern World
Last Tuesday, a marketing executive spent forty-five minutes arguing about whether their logo's corner radius should be 4 pixels or 6 pixels. The same day, three potential customers abandoned their shopping carts because the checkout process felt confusing and impersonal.
Guess which one the executive will remember at next week's meeting?
We've got this backwards. While leadership teams dissect hex codes and debate serif versus sans-serif, real people are forming real opinions about brands based on entirely different things. The speed of your website. Whether your chatbot feels helpful or annoying. How your packaging opens. The tone of your out-of-office email.
Your customers aren't judging your brand by your logo. They're judging it by every small interaction that either makes their day slightly better or slightly worse.
Most companies are optimising the wrong things entirely.
Remember when brands lived in print ads and TV commercials? Those days are gone. They're never coming back.
Now your brand exists wherever people encounter it, which is everywhere.
A teenager discovers you through a TikTok comment. A busy parent first sees you in their email inbox at 6 AM. A professional encounters you during a LinkedIn scroll between meetings.
Each of these moments is your brand. Whether you planned it or not.
This shift caught most companies completely off guard. They're still thinking about brand identity like it's 1995—a logo slapped on some business cards and a website. But your actual brand identity is what someone experiences when your app crashes, when your customer service rep sounds bored, when your packaging arrives crushed, when your social media goes silent for three weeks.
The companies figuring this out aren't starting with visual design. They're starting with bigger questions.
What do we believe? How do we want people to feel after they interact with us? What would we do if money weren't the primary goal?
Take Patagonia. Yes, they sell outdoor gear. But that's not why people buy from them.
People buy from them because Patagonia genuinely seems to care more about the planet than about selling you another jacket. When they tell customers not to buy something unless they really need it, that's not a marketing trick. It's what they believe.
Or look at how Spotify works. Their logo is fine, whatever. But what makes Spotify feel like Spotify is how they seem to understand your music taste better than you do.
It's those weirdly specific playlist names. It's how "Discover Weekly" actually introduces you to songs you end up loving. It's how they make your listening habits feel like a story worth sharing.
These aren't marketing campaigns. They're expressions of what these companies are actually like.
How do you sound when you're talking to people?
Not your mission statement—how you actually sound. Glossier sounds like your friend who knows way too much about skincare. Wendy's sounds like the class clown who happens to make decent burgers.
Your brand voice isn't something you write down once and forget about. It's how you show up in every conversation.
What people hear and feel.
Netflix's opening sound makes you settle in for something good. Zoom's notification chime immediately puts you in work mode. These audio cues happen automatically now—you don't think about them, but they're programming your emotional response to these brands.
The physical experience of your stuff.
Opening an Apple product still feels like unwrapping something precious. Amazon's packaging is designed by people who understand you just want to get to your stuff quickly.
These aren't accidents. Someone made deliberate choices about materials, weight, and even the sound of tape peeling.
How do you handle problems?
This might be the most critical part of your brand identity. It's also the part most companies ignore entirely.
When something goes wrong—and it will—how do you respond? Do you hide behind policy language? Or do you act like a human dealing with another human?
All this talk about AI usually misses the point. The value isn't in making things more automated. It's about making things more personal without losing what makes you recognisable.
Spotify's year-end "Wrapped" campaign works because it feels personal to each user while still feeling distinctly like Spotify. They're not just showing you data. They're telling you the story of your year through music, in a way that only Spotify could tell it.
Innovative brands are figuring out how to use technology to have better conversations. Not faster ones. Not cheaper ones. Better ones.
The kind where people feel understood rather than processed.
The most interesting thing happening right now isn't brands talking to people. It's people talking to each other about brands they care about.
Look at what Glossier built. They didn't start with products and then find customers. They started conversations about beauty and skincare, created a place where people wanted to participate, and then made products that those people wanted.
Their customers don't just buy from Glossier. They help shape what Glossier becomes.
This isn't possible if you're thinking about brand identity as something you create and then push out into the world. It only works if you think about it as something you build together with the people who care about what you're doing.
Here's something most companies don't want to hear: your employees are going to represent your brand online, whether you give them guidelines or not.
They're going to talk about where they work. They're going to share opinions that people will associate with your company.
You can try to control this, or you can lean into it. The companies that are leaning into it are seeing something interesting happen—their employees become genuine advocates because they believe in what the company is doing.
This only works if there's something worth believing in.
You can't fake authenticity at scale.
Most brand measurement focuses on the wrong things. Yes, track mentions and sentiment. But also pay attention to behaviour.
Are people recommending you to their friends? Are they coming back? When they have a problem, do they give you a chance to fix it, or do they just disappear?
The best signal is probably this: do your employees talk about working there with pride or with resignation?
If your people aren't excited about what you're building, why would anyone else be?
Start small.
Pick one interaction that happens all the time—maybe your email autoresponders, or how your website handles errors, or what your hold music sounds like. Make that one thing feel more like the brand you want to be.
Then pick another one. And another one.
Not because you're following some master plan, but because you're building the habit of caring about how people experience your brand in small moments.
The goal isn't perfection. It's consistency. It's making sure that when someone encounters your brand anywhere, it feels like the same thoughtful organisation that cares about the details.
Brand identity used to be about standing out in a crowded marketplace. That's still true. But now it's also about something else: building relationships that last longer than a single transaction.
People have infinite options for almost everything now. The brands that survive aren't necessarily the ones with the best products or the lowest prices.
They're the ones people want to have a relationship with.
This isn't about manipulation or psychology tricks. It's about being the kind of organisation people are glad exists. The kind where your success genuinely makes other people's lives a little bit better.
If you can figure out how to be that, the visual identity part will follow naturally.
The hard part isn't designing a logo. The hard part is becoming something worth paying attention to.
Your brand identity is what you do, not what you design.
Everything else is just decoration.
