BRANDING YOUR BUSINESS IS BEYOND YOUR LOGO

Beyond just a nice logo, good branding increases how familiar customers are with your company and makes acquiring new customers easier. How a company brands itself reflects its values, intentions, and overall voice. Your brand is the perception the consumer has when they hear or think of your hair extension company’s name, service, and product. Want to know how to build a brand for your hair extension business? Look no further!

BRANDING CHECKLIST ANYONE?

When evaluating your brand, the question you should ask is, is your brand strong enough to give you the value you need in your marketing efforts for your hair extension hair business. If you are unsure, you should ask yourself these basic questions:

• Does your hair extension brand relate to your target audience?

• Will they instantly "get it" and know who you are?

• Does your hair extension brand share the uniqueness you feel your hair extension business has?

• Does it show why your brand is important?

• Does your brand reflect the promise made to your target audience and customers?

• Is your branding consistent amongst these areas?

Storefront/office

Print, signage, and packaging

Website and online presence

Content marketing and social media platforms

Sales and customer service

What Should Your Brand Do?

Your branding should be a problem solver. It's not only about getting your target market to choose your hair extension company over your competitors. The objective of good branding for your hair extension should include:

Confirming your credibility in the hair extension marketplace

Clearly delivering your hair businesses message

Connect to your target markets emotionally with your product and service

Motivate the buyer to make a purchase

Create loyalty to your business and brand

HOW TO BUILD YOUR HAIR EXTENSION BRAND?

Determining Your Brand’s Target Audience

Identifying your target audience is the foundation for building your hair business brand. Realizing you can not be all things to all customers will be beneficial in the long run. When building your brand, keep in mind who you are trying to reach. You will create a mission and message to meet their needs exactly. The key is getting specific. Try figuring out their behaviors and lifestyles of your hair extension consumer. Solidify the picture of your target audience, and center your brand identity in a way that they can understand and relate to your brand. You want the right consumer, consuming your content, clicking on your ads, opting into your email list, and purchasing from you.

Creating A Brand Mission Statement

Your mission statement is a clear expression of what your hair extension brand is most passionate about. Before you can build a reliable brand that your target audience trusts, you need to know what value your business provides. Your brand mission will inform other aspects of your brand's building strategy.

Research Brands Within The Hair Extension Industry

You should never imitate what other larger, popular brands are doing in your industry. However, being aware of what they are doing well and not so well is beneficial. The purpose of creating your unique brand is to differentiate your hair business from your competitors.

Research your main competitors, study how they have effectively and ineffectively. Choose a few competitors, between two and four. Then, answer these questions based on your research:

Is your competitor consistent with the message and visual identity across all social media channels?

What is the quality of your competitor’s products and services?

Where do your competitors market their business? Online and Offline

CREATE A BRAND LOGO AND TAGLINE

Your LOGO will appear on everything relating to your business. Your logo becomes your identity and visual recognition of your business’s promise. Develop brand guidelines, to ensure consistency for any future changes to the logo and associated color palette.

Your branding style guide will include the following:

Your logo size and placement requirements

Color palette

Typography and fonts

Iconography

photos/image styles

Web elements

CREATE YOUR HAIR EXTENSION BRAND VOICE

Your brand voice is dependent on your hair company's mission, industry, and audience. Your brand's voice communicates to your customers, and how they respond to you.

Your brand voice should be:

Professional

Friendly

Authoritative

Technical

Conversational

Informative

Finding the right brand voice will allow the most substantial chance in connecting with your consumers. Ultimately, you will want to choose a brand voice that makes sense and will resonate with what your target audience will want to hear.

YOUR BRAND MESSAGE

Your brand message should tell your customers who you are. Your brand message should convey in 1-2 sentences and to intricately associate your brand and hair business. Make it clean and straightforward. When creating your brand message, address why your This is the portion of your brand development that goes beyond your logo and tagline that defines:

Who you are

What your business offers and

Why people should care

Allow Your Brand Personality Shine Bright

Customers are not interested in another hair company who offers the same thing as every other hair extension business. Consumers are looking for experiences tailored to their needs, backed by real personal interaction. Make your brand stand out with your personality and aspect in everything of your brand building process.

You must be consistent with your branding personality across all points of contact.

For example:

A conversational voice in communication

Sharing behind the scenes content

Sharing stories about real experiences

Describing your products/services

INTEGRATE YOUR HAIR EXTENSION BRAND INTO EVERY ASPECT OF YOUR BUSINESS

Your brand should reflect on everything your prospective customer can see, read, touch, and hear. Branding should be on display in both environmental and personal interactions. All tangible items from advertisements to your business cards, packaging, and product need to have your logo on it. When you design your digital platforms, website, social media platforms, incorporate your voice, message, and personality.

PICK YOUR BRANDS COLORS AND FONTS

You will need to think about how you'll visually represent your brand with your colors and typography. This section will come in handy when you start to build your website.

Choosing The Perfect Colors

Colors not only define the look of your hair extension brand, but the colors also convey the feeling you want to communicate and help you make it consistent across the entire brand. Keep in mind the colors of your competitors to avoid confusing consumers.

Color Psychology

Color is non-verbal communication. Your brands comprised of some visual cues, such as shapes, symbols, numbers, and words. However, the number one optical component people remember most is color. Research shows color increases 80% of brand recognition. Each color has many aspects to it, but you can quickly learn the language of color by understanding a few simple concepts.

Red: Passion, Danger, Excitement

Tip: Red has a powerful meaning, use red with discretion.

Orange: Fresh, Youthful, Creative, and Adventurous

Tip: Orange is associated with fun and vibrancy, suited for youthful, energetic brands and best avoided for luxury, traditional or serious brands.

Yellow: Optimistic, Cheerful, Playful, and Happy

Tip: Be sure to use a good design if you want to avoid feeling any cheapness.

Green: Natural, Vitality, Prestige, and Wealth

Tip: Pick your shade of green carefully. Brighter greens indicate growth, vitality, and renewal. While darker, richer greens represent wealth, prestige, and abundance.

Blue: Communicative, Trustworthy, Calming, and Depressed

Tip: Choose your shade wisely because there's a wide range of shades and meanings associated.

Purple: Royalty, Majesty, Spiritual, and Mysterious

Tip: Purples' used when targeting the female audience, Darker shades represent luxury while lighter shades such as lavender are much more feminine and sentimental.

Brown: Organic, Wholesome, Simple and Honest

Tip: Brown reminds people of dirt so be careful when using it.

Pink: Feminine, Sentimental, Romantic, and exciting

Tip: Pinks' viewed as very girly. Although pink is very diverse pending on its intensity. Identify the mood and feeling you want to associate with your brand and choose accordingly.

Black: Sophisticate, Formal, Luxurious, and Sorrowful

Tip: Contrast black with a brighter color, like a gold foil for a touch of luxe; or white for a bold and simple statement. Think about texture, either matte or glossy can change the message of your brand.

White: Purity, Simplicity, Innocence, and Minimalism

Tip: It's quite challenging to inject personality into your brand when using white. So be sure your brand is simple, pure, and transparent.

Choosing Your Fonts

Choose two different fonts and keep them consistent. One for your headings and one for your body of text. (This does not include fonts in your logo).

The Right Font For You

A font family is a set of typefaces, like Times Roman or Helvetica.

• Serif Fonts: have a line at the end of each stroke. (traditional and professional).

• Sans Serif Fonts: Do not have the line at the end of each stroke. (Crisp and Modern).

• Script Font and Italics: Generally formal and decorative. (Sophisticated and Feminine).

• Handwriting Fonts: Tend to be personal and casual. (Friendly and approachable).

Display Fonts Varied in design and style. (Unique).

Combining Fonts

When using fonts together be sure they complement each other the same way colors do

Number Of Fonts

Fonts should be used sparingly in your logo. One or two paired choices will make your logo aesthetically pleasing and professional.

Letter Scaling

There is narrow, wide, and horizontal scaling used to define your design style.

Letter Spacing

Tracking is the overall letter spacing between a line and the letters.

Kerning is the space between a pair of letters.

Tight tracking with a bold font especially is very impactful.

Loose tracing can be a modern and sophisticated look, particularly with all caps.

Font Weight

A heavyweight font is bold and strong. A lightweight font is elegant and soft.

Capitalization

Uppercase can create a streamlined look.

Lowercase can be casual and friendly.

APPLY, EXTEND, AND EVOLVE YOUR HAIR BRAND AS YOU GROW

Building your brand does not stop with creating your logo or your hair extension slogan. Your hair brand needs to remain consistent wherever your customers interact and come into contact with you. From the theme of your website to the marketing, customer service, and the way you package and ship your hair extensions. Continue shaping and evolving your brand as you expose more customers to it and learn more about who they are and how you speak to them. Have any branding issues? Ask Black Show Hair!