Brand Identity Design Process

Decathlon chose to zoom in (literally) and take a different perspective. Their “Choose Your Way” campaign doesn’t push product features or promotions. Instead, it invites you in through close-up, tactile moments that make you feel something. These are memory triggers. Emotional cues. It’s simple, sensory and surprisingly powerful. A reminder that the most effective creative work doesn’t just show what something is. It makes you feel something about it. This shift didn’t come out of nowhere. Last year, Decathlon rebranded and it marked the beginning of a new chapter for a brand that had always been big, but rarely emotional. This campaign builds on that foundation. It shows what happens when you stop trying to say everything and focus instead on creating a feeling. You don't have to lead with product to make people care. You just need to show up in a way that resonates. Other brands are doing this too. British Airways rolled out its “A British Original” campaign with eye-catching out-of-home executions that use minimal branding and focus on expressions of wonder from people gazing out of plane windows. PepsiCo also nailed it with work that zoomed in on their logo hidden in plain sight on other brand packaging. A smart, subtle flex. It's all about shifting the perspective and zooming in to bring something visually interesting to life. What brand have you seen recently that made you feel something without saying too much?

Psychology behind building objects of DESIRE. Lets talk about LIFESTYLE beauty, a territory beyond functionality. Think on aspirations, symbology, luxury, identity, and status. In lifestyle, desire is cultivated not just through product performance, but through emotional branding, scarcity, and curated experiences. you are looking for deep understanding of what your customers truly value, and what frustrations your brand can solve. The global premium cosmetics market is experiencing growth, with a market value of USD 153.68 Billion in 2024, and is projected to reach USD 353.93 Billion by 2034, growing at a CAGR of 8.70% >> PSYCHOLOGY OF DESIRE << Desire-driven purchases tap deeply into the brain’s EMOTIONAL and reward systems. When we encounter luxury or exclusive products, our brains release dopamine in anticipation of the reward, sparking motivation and craving. +72% consumers make purchase based on emotional connection with a brand or product. This anticipation is often stronger than the actual satisfaction of owning the item. Scarcity and limited availability trigger the amygdala, activating fear of missing out (FOMO) and increasing the product’s perceived VALUE. +332% conversion rates by Limited-time offers or “only 2 left” messages. +48% of online shoppers have purchased something due to FOMO. At the same time, mirror neurons make us subconsciously IMITATE influencers or aspirational figures who use these products, reinforcing the desire to buy. +84% Gen Z and Millennials are influenced by social media before making purchases. >>DESIRE BUILDING<< →Emotional triggers ⇒ Emotional design drives deep connection & impulse. →Dopamine surge ⇒ Reward anticipation, not the reward, excites the brain. →Scarcity ⇒ Limited triggers urgency & fear of missing out. →Mirror neurons ⇒ Aspirational figures builds subconscious imitation. →Exclusivity ⇒ Luxury signals status, elevating perceived self-worth. →Desire ⇒ Controlled access makes products feel more valuable. →Impulse buy ⇒ Emotional + social triggers pull quick decisions. >>RATIONALIZE MEMORIES ⇒ LOYALTY<< Emotional connection also plays a major role. The prefrontal cortex helps us RATIONALIZE emotionally-driven decisions, while the hippocampus links products to MEMORIES, making them more meaningful. Oxytocin fosters trust and LOYALTY when a brand aligns with personal values or tells a compelling story. In essence, we don’t just buy products, we buy identity, emotion, and experience. Final thoughts. In lifestyle beauty, products are desired, not just bought. It's about sparking emotion, not just solving problems. Build aspiration, connection, and identity by tapping into what truly drives your audience. Here’s my curated search of examples, get inspired for your next HIT! Featured Brands: Carolina Herrera Chanel Beautycrop Benefit Bubble Glossier Glow to Go Gucci Miu miu Rhode Some by me Tocobo #beautybusiness #luxurbusiness #beautyprofessionals #luxuryprofessionals

This chart shows up in my feed every week. It's clean, it's confident, and it gives you the basic idea of what colors make us feel. Red means energy. Blue means trust. Pick the feeling, pick the color, done. But in branding, there's a lot more to it than that. Context, positioning, culture, history, audience perception, product category, and years of brand exposure matter more. Look at the chart's own examples. Red is supposed to mean romance. There is nothing romantic about Target, H&M, or a clearance sticker. The same red does completely different work depending on what sits around it. Color borrows its meaning. It borrows from the category, from the shapes next to it, and from whatever the competition already owns. Blue reads "trust" on a bank because banks spent decades training us to expect it, not because blue arrived with trust built in. Put that same blue on a fast food sign and it reads wrong. So when a client asks for a "trustworthy blue" or an "energetic red," the color is the easy part. The real work is figuring out what the color has to overcome, what it has to signal against the competition, and what the rest of the system is doing around it. Color is the part everyone sees. The thinking behind it is the part they don't. #Branding #ColorTheory #GraphicDesign #Marketing #ColorPsychology

Lacoste broke an 89-year tradition, For a reason a lot of brands avoid: To make a bold and purpose-driven statement using their product.  They replaced their iconic crocodile logo with 10 endangered species. Each shirt was limited to the number of animals left in the wild. - 30 shirts for the Vaquita porpoise   - 350 for the Sumatran tiger - 450 for the Anegada rock iguana The campaign sold out in hours and generated considerable brand lift. More so than any traditional product launch they've done. Here's why it worked (and what it means for brand building): As humans, we're wired to worry when something's running out. But most brands exploit that by saying "Only 3 left" or "Sale ends tonight." Lacoste turned the idea of scarcity on its head to make a statement. The 30 shirts doesn't just represent a limited edition run for the product. It symbolizes the 30 very real Vaquita porpoises that exist in the wild. By connecting that cause to their brand,  Lacoste created a collective purpose that people wanted to support. For large brands, this is a lesson in conscious marketing they can emulate. For smaller brands, this is something to aspire to later on. Lacoste could only pull this off because it already had the brand equity. So, if you're thinking about a purpose-driven campaign, ask yourself: Can we pull this off at our current level of brand equity? If you're not there yet, this type of campaign won't land the way you want. Here's the sequence if you are: ✅ Find a cause that aligns with your brand truth (not what's trending) ✅ Build the constraint into the product (make the limitation tell the story) ✅ Create a mechanism where the purchase is the message ✅ Measure brand perception over years, not campaign metrics over weeks If you're not in a position where a big campaign will make a real impact, start smaller and closer to home. Try local partnerships, transparent sourcing, and donation matching. Build the credibility first, then build the campaign. Purpose-driven work only works when people already believe in your brand. Ready to add $1m/month to your eComm business?  Join the waitlist: https://lnkd.in/e-Av-tdY What do you think of Lacoste’s campaign?  Share it in the comments below. ♻️ Repost to share this fundamental lesson with your network.  Follow Nehal Kazim for more advertising insights like this.

Here's what most businesses get wrong They focus on: → Random logo design → Generic color schemes → Template websites But real branding is deeper: 1. Brand Strategy Your foundation: → Purpose (Why you exist) → Vision (Where you're going) → Values (What you believe) 2. Brand Voice How you speak: → Personality → Tone → Language style 3. Visual Identity How you look: → Logo design → Color psychology → Typography → Image style 4. Brand Experience How you deliver: → Customer service → Product Quality → User experience → Marketing Message 5. Brand Consistency How you stay memorable: → Same voice everywhere → Cohesive visuals → Unified message Branding is the process of creating a unique identity for a business, product, or individual. It includes elements like a logo, colors, messaging, and the overall experience that shapes how people perceive a brand. More than just visuals, branding is about building trust, recognition, and emotional connections with an audience. "A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or organization." - Marty Neumeier #design

I’ve been the first marketer at two companies now worth over $2 billion. If I did it again, here’s 9 things I’d do differently: 1️⃣ Start with brand as a scalable system Build a modular design system early with components you can combine instead of create. A Figma system, Canva templates, Google Slide layouts. Pair that with a messaging doc, your "copy-paste" bank of positioning, beliefs, and product language. It becomes a foundation for consistency and a knowledge base for AI. 2️⃣ Prioritize the 95%, not just the 5% LinkedIn & search ads worked early, but only because we caught the 5% already in market. The "demand capture" pool dries up fast. Invest early in "demand creation." Reach the 95% who aren’t ready yet, but will be. 3️⃣ Build in public People trust people more than companies. Let internal voices share what they’re building and learning. In the AI era, content is easy. Opinion & stories are valuable. 4️⃣ Know your customer so well the strategy writes itself I used to sit on every sales call and write every piece of copy. That proximity helped me hear what customers cared about, what words they used, where they hung out. Be close enough to "hear the music," and messaging & growth channels become obvious. 5️⃣ Start community early Create spaces where early customers can connect: Slack, Reddit, meetups, certification. It fuels your roadmap and scales support when customers can help each other. Even better if it creates user-generated content that is indexable/shareable. 6️⃣ Create the problem Don’t build the whole funnel on day one. If you don’t have traffic, don’t worry about conversion. Solve the problem you actually have. Let the next one emerge or you'll be building and rebuilding as things inevitably change. 7️⃣ Look bigger than you are Design clean & consistent. Logo small (bigger companies don't oversize their logo). Feature your biggest customers, your compliance certifications. Use big company channels but use them small (buy one billboard, get one great PR story, speak on one well-known podcast). Make big company content but do it small (like a single high production video). 8️⃣ Build lightweight systems You don’t need full-blown infrastructure. A Notion board or copy-paste doc can carry you farther than you think. Build systems for speed, not scale. 9️⃣ Protect your focus Get used to working with an infinite backlog. I used to start each day with a sticky note on my laptop of my 3 to 5 most important tasks. You weren’t hired to do everything, you were hired to make impact. If you've done this - what would you add?

The Chobani Rebrand - By Leland Maschmeyer and Team: When Bold Revolution Creates Category Leadership Walking through supermarket aisles, I'm often drawn to brands that dare to break category conventions. As a design director at Ginger Storm, the Chobani rebrand stands out as a masterclass in revolutionary design thinking that transformed a category leader from forgettable to unforgettable. Why the Rebrand? The catalyst was a strategic necessity: By 2017, Chobani found itself in a market saturated with lookalikes. Competitors had adopted similar visual language—stark white backgrounds, hyper-realistic fruit photography, and clinical sans-serif typography. What was once distinctive had become a category convention. Rather than accept visual irrelevance, Chobani seized the opportunity to reclaim its distinctiveness and reposition itself as a wellness-focused food company beyond just yoghurt. Design Change What fascinates me about this rebrand is its courage to completely reimagine the brand's visual expression. The logo transformation introduced a custom Chobani Serif typeface with softer, rounded edges that beautifully evoke the creamy texture of yoghurt itself. The shift from clinical bright white to a warmer off-white backdrop immediately distinguishes the brand on shelf. I'm particularly impressed by the bold move away from glossy finishes to premium matte textures—not just visually pleasing but enhancing the tactile experience. The replacement of hyper-realistic fruit photography with hand-painted watercolour illustrations inspired by 19th-century folk art creates a human touch that feels refreshingly authentic in a category dominated by perfect imagery. Strong Revolution This rebrand represents nothing short of a complete revolution in packaging design—and for all the right reasons. The original packaging lacked any meaningful identity beyond the name itself, making a revolutionary approach not just justified but necessary. What makes this approach so brilliant is how it doesn't merely differentiate—it establishes a new visual territory that competitors cannot easily follow without appearing derivative. The result is significantly better on every level: more strategic, more personality-driven, and perfectly aligned with the target audience while maintaining name recognition where it matters. The Results The impact speaks volumes: a 12% sales increase between 2019-2020 while the overall yogurt category declined by 4.4%. Chobani maintained its position as America's #1 yoghurt brand, overtaking Yoplait. The rebrand didn't just refresh aesthetics—it reinforced market leadership. Chobani proves that when the original lacks meaningful identity, a bold revolution isn't just an option—it's a strategic imperative. Sometimes the bravest decision is to completely reimagine your visual language rather than merely refining what never truly worked in the first place.

I have spent hundreds of hours analyzing design systems. One of the things that confused me for many years is how to structure color scales and tokens. I have experimented with multiple structures at different sizes of design systems, and at a high-level recommend the following approach: 1. Primitive Colors Your design system foundations should always start with a full color scale that is based on your brand identity. We call these colors Primitives, and your variable/token collection should look like this: - purple-600 - purple-500 - purple-400 - And so on.. To create a Primitives palette you will want to start from your main brand colors and use a tool like UIColors, Supapalette, Colorbox to expand to the full scale. (links in comments) This is a great foundation to have, as it gives you a set of shades that can be used in different ways, and ensures all of them have consistent hues, saturation and brightness. However, Primitive colors are simply not effective when used directly in your designs: - They create ambiguity - Their names have no contextual meaning - They are often misused due to similarity If you have had the “why are there 20 different shades of gray?” conversation with an engineer, you know what I mean. So let’s see how we can improve that. 2. Semantic Colors This is my default recommendation to all product design teams that don’t have a highly complex design system. What you will want to do here is create a new variable collection named Semantic, which is what’s visible in your design files, and comprises of: - Brand / Action - Text - Link - Border - Icon - Surface / Background - Bias - Data / Charts Each color should point to a primitive value, e.g. - text-primary → gray-800 - text-secondary → gray-600 - text-tertiary → gray-400 This takes a bit of setting up, but creates immense long-term value. A great example of a simple, theme-level Semantic structure is Shopify’s Polaris (link in comments) 3. Component-level Semantic Lastly, if you are working on a design system with a lot of complexity and, ideally, a dedicated design systems team, you might want to add another level of hierarchy and specify colors at a component-level. In this structure, you would want to create color tokens based on how they are used in each component. - input-text-filled → text-primary - input-text-placeholder → text-secondary - input-text-disabled → text-tertiary This eliminates all guesswork, but also increases the complexity exponentially. It does serve a purpose though. As design systems scale, you may find that: - A theme-level semantic structure is too restrictive - There is still some guesswork - Decisions need to be documented. An example of this is Uber’s Base and Adobe’s Spectrum design system, linked in the comments. I’m curious to know, what structure are you using for your design system and what has worked well for you? — If you found this useful, consider reposting ♻️ #uidesign #designsystems #productdesign

When Design Becomes Democracy: The Branding That Helped Win NYC 🍎 Walk through Queens or Brooklyn, and you can't miss it: that bold blue-and-mustard palette plastered on lamp posts, storefronts, subway entrances. Not the safe corporate navy of typical political campaigns. Not another sterile template. Instead? Taxicab yellow. MetroCard colors. Hand-painted bodega awnings. Zohran Mamdani's campaign didn't just break the political branding mold, it rebuilt it from the streets up. Designer @AneeshBhoopathy (working with @Forgecooperative) created a visual identity that feels less like a campaign and more like your neighborhood. The hand-lettered wordmark carries an authenticity no focus-grouped logo could touch. This wasn't aesthetic for aesthetic's sake. Design is positioning. Design is strategy. Design is a promise. Here's why this matters: In a race against establishment figures like Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani's branding became differentiation as disruption. While opponents spoke in the visual language of power and polish, Mamdani spoke the language of the street corner, the subway platform, the corner store. Every color choice was a neighborhood. Every typographic flourish rejected corporate blandness. The saturated palette didn't whisper, it shouted: "We are not like them." Mamdani understood something his opponents didn't: In a city exhausted by politicians who all look and sound the same, being visually honest is revolutionary. Design isn't just what it looks like. Design is what it says about who you serve. When done with intention, design shapes perception before a single word is read. It builds trust before a single speech is heard. Mamdani's Democratic Socialist primary victory wasn't because of the branding. But the branding was the visual manifestation of everything that set him apart: authenticity, community rootedness, and a willingness to reject the playbook entirely. The lesson: Don't ask "What do campaigns usually look like?" Ask "What does our community look like? What colors live in their daily lives? What typography do they trust?" When your visual identity is truly of the people you serve, they don't just notice it. They recognize themselves in it. And that changes everything. Can design really shift political outcomes? Drop your thoughts below. 👇 #PoliticalDesign #BrandStrategy #CampaignDesign #NYC #DesignMatters #VisualIdentity #ZohranMamdani #Branding #IdentityDesign

I recently built an internal brand agent for Lovable and a lot of people asked how I did it, so here's the exact guide: 1/ Build a brand environment first: I asked Lovable to create a web app where you can view our logo, colors, typography, and all brand assets. This became the database, a single source of truth for everything brand-related. Prompt: "Build a minimal brand hub where team members can browse, search, and download logos, colors, typography, and marketing assets. Should feel like a premium internal tool. Think Linear or Notion. Use placeholder assets so we can replace them later." 2/ Add a home page with an AI agent: I then asked Lovable to build a home page with an AI agent that has access to all of those documents. Prompt: "Add a new page called Brand Agent - a ChatGPT-like chat interface where I can ask questions about our brand." 3/ Connect AI to the assets: The agent can now automatically browse those documents - answering questions, finding assets, and guiding anyone on how to use them correctly. Prompt: "Enable Lovable AI and give the agent access to our brand guidelines. The agent should let users upload a screenshot and tell them if it's on-brand or off-brand with clear reasoning. It should also help find the right assets when asked." The whole thing took less than an hour and it's saving us a lot of time. Hope this helps and now go build you own brand agent today!!