Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur ready to launch your dream to the world or a seasoned brand manager scaling an existing business, the strength of your brand plays a critical role in your success.
The branding choices you make when you launch can guide your business’s trajectory by influencing customer perceptions and shaping decisions for years to come. That’s why it’s important to take your time with this step.
Here, learn the basics of branding and the benefits of a strong brand, and get inspired by best-in-class branding examples. Plus, discover how to update your brand as you grow and scale.
What is branding?
Branding creates a distinct identity for a business in the minds of your target audience and the general population. Creating a brand means determining your company’s name, logo, visual identity, mission, vision, values, and brand voice. Product quality and innovation, customer service, and pricing strategy are also brand elements.
Your brand sets the tone for your marketing materials—including your website—and influences the words and phrases you use in everything from live chats with customers to social media posts.
Why you should take branding seriously
As soon as you start a business, you have a brand. When potential customers visit your website or see your packaging, they’re already forming perceptions about your company. Make a good impression by setting the tone upfront.
Ultimately, your brand is whatever your customers think and say it is, the culmination of their experiences with you, good or bad.
No one sets out to build an unreliable or “bad” brand, but without a strategic approach to brand management, your brand can take on a life of its own.
“Some of the less-successful brands try to be everything for everyone, and that really dilutes the power of their message and their point of view,” says Ky Allport, creative director of Charleston, South Carolina–based branding agency Outline, which counts Omsom and Heyday Canning Co. among its clients.
Effective branding requires a strategic plan, including brand guidelines led by clear values and goals. These guidelines will inform all your business decisions and customer touchpoints. “We always encourage our clients to really know who they’re talking to and be clear about that because you’re gonna have a lot more success from your true brand champions,” Ky says.
The benefits of building a brand
Branding is a foundational exercise that impacts future decisions across departments, from product development to email marketing to hiring and resource management. Solid brand guidelines scale with you, maintaining a consistent vision as you grow.
Other benefits of building a strong brand include:
Reduced marketing spend
Investing in your brand upfront can reduce your marketing budget in the long run. “If your brand is strong and it looks attractive and appealing to people and translates over social media, the marketing will come very, very cheaply because people will be so excited about your product that the network effect will spring into action,” says Fishwife Tinned Seafood Co. cofounder and CEO Becca Millstein on an episode of Shopify Masters.
Fishwife’s fun, colorful branding, featuring illustrations by Danny Miller, inspires user-generated content, which is essentially free advertising for the company.
Increased customer trust
Brand consistency is key to building brand trust and customer loyalty. “You’re creating this trust, and you’re creating a recognizable environment so that your shopper is confident and feels like part of a community,” says Margaret Pilarski, strategy director of Outline.
Better company culture
Branding isn’t just for the outside world. Good branding can foster a strong company culture. “It’s kind of like your brand’s dress code,” Margaret says. “It’s a symbol of care and intentionality.”
Just as branding helps customers feel part of a community, it can do the same for employees, attracting like-minded hires and strengthening existing team members’ connection to your company.
How to create a brand
- Determine your mission and values
- Craft your brand story
- Come up with a unique, memorable business name
- Identify collaborators
- Develop your brand identity
- Create brand guidelines
- Let your brand evolve
Successful branding is consistent from the first customer touchpoint to the last.
But how do you cover all the bases as you build your brand? Here are steps to cover:
1. Determine your mission and values
Your mission is the North Star for your business and should have a prominent place in your business plan and brand guidelines to keep all decisions on track. Your branding exercise should also narrow in on your brand values, which will be non-negotiables as you grow and scale. They ensure your brand remains strong, even as elements like your logo or products evolve.
Young consumers increasingly expect companies to stand up for their principles. Communicating your company’s mission and values will help Gen Z and Gen Alpha decide whether they support you. These demographics value brand transparency around ethics, sustainability, and manufacturing practices.
2. Craft your brand story
Storytelling is a vital element of branding strategy. Consumers, especially those who shop on social media, want authenticity.
Telling your brand story—whether focused on your company’s origins or your founder’s journey—humanizes your brand, puts a face to the business, and increases trust and brand affinity. Share your story across your website, social media accounts, and anywhere else you engage with customers.
3. Come up with a unique, memorable business name
If you’re struggling to choose a business name, try using Shopify’s free business name generator. When evaluating names, Sanzo founder Sandro Roco recommends asking yourself, “Is it easy to say? Is it something people like to say? Does it match the product that you’re selling?”
“When I started the brand, I actually had like half a dozen to a dozen other names that I was workshopping,” he says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “Unfortunately, a lot of those were already trademarked or just for whatever reason didn’t feel exactly right. So I went through an exercise of writing down all the letters of my first, middle, and last name, and it’s Alessandro Lorenzo Rocco. And one of the combinations ended up being Sanzo.”
4. Identify collaborators
No entrepreneur is an island; at some point, you’ll need to invite collaborators to help. “When you’re creating a brand, there are several ways you can go to figure out how to create the visuals, the logo, the name, etc.,” says Becca of Fishwife. On one end of the spectrum, there’s “grassrootsing it,” which is how Fishwife was born: A friend came up with the name, and Becca hired a freelance illustrator to design the visuals.
On the other end is partnering with a branding agency to take your business from an idea to a fully fledged brand. “There are branding agencies to match a lot of budgets,” Becca says. “But if you—or your cofounder or maybe an early employee—have a propensity for branding, I would highly encourage people to build it in-house, just because that authenticity piece will be even more seamless.”
5. Develop your brand identity
Brand identity refers to the visual aspects of your brand. Your visual branding exercise should start with a mood board or a word association exercise that helps you determine your brand’s vibe or mood. Ask yourself how you want people to feel when they interact with your company. Your answers will help you pinpoint colors, fonts, and other visual elements to represent your brand.
When Becca hired freelance illustrator Danny Miller to create visuals for Fishwife, she created an inspiration board with “a handful of brands that I really, really loved”—Topo Chico, Café Bustelo, Mikeller, and, of course, “the classic Spanish and Portuguese conservas” (the tinned seafood that inspired Fishwife). “It was a very narrow focus, very narrow inspiration, which I would encourage people to strive toward as well, just because it’ll make it so much easier for your designer or your illustrator to execute on your vision.”
6. Create brand guidelines
Brand guidelines govern how your brand presents itself, from colors and fonts to acceptable logo usage to brand voice and tone. As you create your brand guidelines, you’ll finalize decisions big and small about the way your brand looks and feels.
The finished document will help future employees and collaborators quickly understand your brand’s style and ensure consistency.
7. Let your brand evolve
Consistency doesn’t mean stagnation. “It makes it so much more interesting and fun to allow the brand to be the living, breathing creature that it really is,” Becca says of Fishwife. As long as the core elements of your brand stay consistent, you should feel free to play around.
For example, in 2023, Fishwife experimented with halftone illustration. “It was totally new for the brand. We’ve never done it before. And all of our branding, except for the actual boxes themselves, included halftone. And that was just a 2023 thing,” Becca says. The illustrations were drawn by the same person, just in a slightly different style. Subtle changes like this can help keep your brand relevant over the years.
3 examples of successful branding
Large corporations like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Nike are the best examples of successful branding. Consumers worldwide recognize these brands just by hearing a few notes of a jingle or spotting a tiny swoosh logo.
But you don’t need millions of dollars to craft a compelling brand. Here are some best-in-class examples of successful brand design and branding communication from beloved direct-to-consumer brands:
Momofuku Goods
When successful restaurant group Momofuku expanded into consumer packaged goods (CPG) with Momofuku Goods, it needed to leverage the company’s reputation (and that of celebrity chef and founder David Chang) without diluting its brand. Masking tape—along with marketing terms like “chef approved” and “restaurant grade—ended up being key to branding its packaged sauces, salts, and instant noodles.

Many Momofuku Goods products feature labels that resemble handwritten pieces of masking tape, a nod to a common practice in restaurant kitchens. Take the brand’s tamari: “The beauty of that packaging with the blue tape is that, if you get it, you get it,” Momofuku’s CEO Marguerite Zabar Mariscal shares in an episode of Shopify Masters. “And I think that really trying to tie the products into the culture of our kitchens goes a long way with the authenticity and credibility of Momofuku as a brand.”
The masking tape motif features in Momofuku’s packaging, website, and social channels.
Starface
While brands before it aimed to conceal acne, Starface’s brand is built on embracing “imperfections” with its star-shaped pimple patches. “It’s unbelievable that we’re one of the first branded skin care items. If you see someone walking on a street with a star on their face, it’s instantly recognizable. You almost feel like you’re part of this tribe, part of this community,” Starface president Kara Brothers told Shopify Masters.

“At Starface, we pride ourselves on being part of that cultural conversation, especially for our core demographic, the Gen Z audience,” Kara says. The brand’s colors, tone, and online store design speak to its young and bold target audience.
Heyday Canning Co.
“We want Heyday to feel like your friend that happens to be really good at cooking, that loves to invite you over for dinner, and is kind of cooking alongside you in the kitchen,” Heyday Canning Co. cofounder Kat Kavner shares in an episode of Shopify Masters. “Not like this cold, corporate vibe that you might get from some other canned foods.”
Kat and her cofounder, Jaime Tulley, spent much time considering Heyday’s mission and vision before working with Outline to develop its visual identity. “We had this foundation of knowing who we are and what we stood for and what we wanted to convey that we were then able to take to our design partner and actually brief them on creating our brand identity, our logo and colors and fonts, and then eventually the packaging,” Kat says. “That upfront work really helped them understand what we were trying to do and what we wanted to create.”
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Branding FAQ
What does branding mean in marketing?
Branding in marketing refers to the process of building a positive perception of your company, products, and services by using elements such as logos, colors, messaging, brand voice, and tone across marketing communications such as email, social media posts, print, advertising, and more.
What does branding mean in business?
Branding shapes public perception of your organization. Branding is a foundational exercise that directs decisions about a company’s look, feel, voice, mission, and values.
What is personal branding?
Personal branding focuses on marketing an individual’s unique skills, experiences, and personality to build their professional reputation and career opportunities. It’s different from business branding, which involves creating a distinct identity for a company to differentiate it from competitors in the same industry and build customer loyalty.
What is a brand promise?
A company’s brand promise tells customers what to expect when they engage with the brand or buy its products. Your brand promise intertwines with your values and mission, and keeping it—as in delivering what you promise—is essential for building and maintaining brand loyalty.
How do you build brand equity?
Brand equity is your business’s perceived value among customers and the public. Consistent use of your branding elements and positive customer experiences go a long way to building equity (or value) for your brand.