A beauty brand’s essence is the overall feeling a customer experiences when encountering a business and product offering. Beauty Branding is what your company does to mold and shape consumers’ perceptions. When our beauty branding agency researches with consumers, they talk about the colors, shapes, symbols, and words a brand uses. At MSLK, we believe that these assets are the fundamental tools of a beauty branding agency. These tools influence consumer consciousness and build a cohesive story in the hearts and minds of your audience. The type of colors, shapes, symbols, and words used for beauty branding are as important as how you use them. Consistent beauty branding and a strong identity help to build trust and loyalty among your customers.

When beauty branding, how does a marketer determine what story to build around themselves?

The answer starts with brand positioning and ends with objectively evaluating the brand values and stories communicated visually versus verbally. Visuals can do a lot of heavy lifting, conveying properties faster than words. For example, if you must use words to convey that you are offering a “luxury” product, you are going about this process all wrong. The visuals in beauty branding can and should speak volumes. When it comes time to activate the words we use, our beauty branding agency relies on them to tell aspects of the brand that visuals alone cannot convey.

TARGET AUDIENCE PROFILES — When considering the audience you will be targeting with your beauty branding agency, it is important to document the core values, behaviors, and benefits your products will bring into your audience’s lives. Consumer values should be used to identify the visual and verbal storytelling, product offering, social and sales channels used in beauty branding. Consumers look to beauty brands to connect them with a community of like-minded peers. An effective beauty branding agency can unite diverse audiences around these shared values. 

STORYTELLING — Great beauty branding begins with stories. Consumers believe in people and shared values; storytelling that builds a narrative around those two components can create something that makes your brand stand for something special and worth supporting. The key to a great story is make sure that it captures your unique Brand Value Proposition, uses the language and vocabulary of your customers, and is ‘sticky’ — aka easy to remember and pass on by word-of-mouth. This last point is crucial as adoption of your beauty branding requires that your sales teams, retailers, stylists, artists, and consumers can recall your brand story and pass it on again and again. Without that traction, the words you use in your storytelling will never become the essence of your brand. Our beauty branding agency is renowned for crafting salient and sticky beauty branding stories that express exactly what your brand does, who you serve, and the value you bring.

NAMING AND BRAND VOICE — What’s in a name? All beauty branding user journeys online begin with words. Every Google search, Facebook group, Instagram feed, etc. is powered by words. On e-commerce shop landing pages, some brand and product names do a better job than others at compelling users to click and discover more. The beauty branding name and product name are critical and can be the difference between getting a click-through or not.

Brand Voice is often overlooked when it comes to the beauty branding process. However, the voice is the language behind your beauty brand which you use to communicate to consumers, even in the slightest of ways. Language across packaging and design can and should be so subtle that it goes mostly unnoticed but has the potential to make the strongest impression. The voice used in beauty branding is essential to establishing your identity, point of difference, value, and proposition.

LOGOS AND WORDMARKS —   When it comes to logo design, a logo, symbol, or icon should be a visual representation of your brand – elaborating on the essence of your beauty branding and what it cannot convey with words alone.  Though not all brands are required to have a logo or icon, these are best utilized as a shortcut representation of your brand that transcends words or language. These icons accrue meaning with every application until they can stand alone without words as the essence of your beauty brand. 

Building up equity in a logo takes time and repetition before it has meaning on its own. Until then dragging around a logo and a wordmark in marketing collateral takes up valuable real estate, especially on small beauty branding packages. Our beauty branding agency’s modern approach to beauty branding is to use a wordmark. Also called logotype, a wordmark is a distinctive typographic treatment associated with a brand. When selecting a typeface, your creative team should consider the feeling and voice you wish to invoke – whether that is formal, cheerful, timeless, etc.