Brand Identity for Heart Centered Entrepreneurs | Making Your Cake
If you want to bring your big vision into reality through creating a heart-centered business, you need to start with building a brand identity.
A brand influences every element of a business, from products and services offered to how you market them and even the business cards you hand out. Brand is the cohesive glue that builds your reputation and makes your biz feel like your biz.
But for many, “brand” can bring up different associations. Some will immediately think of their favorite clothing label or another commodity. Others skip right to logo, slogans and color palettes. And there’s folks that get a bad taste in their mouth, equating brand with selling out and shifting into a faceless, mainstream corporation. (It’s okay if that’s you lol).
In actuality brand identities are entirely foundational. Let me break it all down for you with my cake analogy… Why cake? Both have layers, a curated presentation, and when served to the right person, will taste fucking delicious.
The components of your brand identity cake are as follows:
Cake layers= foundational branding
Frosting= visual branding
Fruit filling= astrology (aka my secret ingredient but we’ll get to that another time)
Foundational branding encompasses four primary layers: vision, mission, values, and buyer persona. These four layers can be expanded upon to include other branding elements such as niche, brand voice/messaging, and offers. Foundational branding answers the key question of who do you help, how do you help them, and why do you do it.
Visual branding is the outward presence of a business, including logo and illustrations, color palettes, font choices, business cards, packaging and even Canva templates.
A mistake many entrepreneurs make is deciding their frosting (logo and colors) before figuring out what the cake layers are. Any baker worth their salt will tell you that frosting always has to complement the cake flavor. Because no one wants to bite into a slice that has a lemon curd topping and piped lemons for decoration, but have it be a carrot cake inside. That’s like, borderline diabolical.
The same is to be said for your business. If you’re a tarot reader who is known for their ‘call it like I see it advice’ but your branding is pink with lots of hearts and crystals, folks might think you’re a love witch or you heal with crystals, and can be taken aback by your blunt readings.
Or a real estate agent called O’Brien Properties who’s logo is a piece of sage and shades of green. At a glance this visual identity might lead someone to think they’re a landscaping company.
Once you know who you’re helping, what they need help with and why your offer is the solution (aka foundational branding), then you can pick a frosting that will entice them. And when you make and serve the same cake over and over, then you become known for it. This builds trust, familiarity, and reputation, all of which are essential for taking your big vision to the next level.
