Say you run a small business that sells handmade kimchi and pickled vegetable blends. Your brand personality is cheerful, supportive, and knowledgeable, and your brand values embrace sustainability, physical health, and mental wellness.
Would you be surprised to learn that many of your competitors share these traits? Probably not. There’s often a lot of overlap between brand identities within any given market. True differentiation is difficult—but creative branding can help.
Here’s what creative branding is, how it works, and six creative branding ideas for business owners.
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What is creative branding?
Creative branding is the process of creating a distinct identity for your company through innovative branding tactics, like custom packaging or releasing co-branded products. However, there’s no clear consensus among marketing professionals about how creative branding differs from traditional branding in practice.
“All branding and marketing is trying to stand out and differentiate,” said Lars Lofgren, the co-founder and chief growth officer of the performance marketing agency Stone Press. “So saying one type is ’creative’ doesn’t really make sense. It’s all trying to be creative.”
Whether you call it creative branding or just plain good branding, the goal is the same: create a memorable brand identity for your company using visual elements (like logo, color palette, and typography) and non-visual components (like brand voice and brand personality) to establish the desired perception among consumers.
Marketing vs. branding: What’s the difference?
Branding and marketing work together to help attract and convert potential customers, but they’re typically considered distinct business activities:
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Branding. Branding establishes a company’s unique brand identity. It’s about honing in on your brand’s values and purpose to build a long-term foundation for your marketing activities.
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Marketing. Marketing communicates valuable information to a target audience to promote products and encourage buying. Marketing campaigns can be short term or long term in scope, but the goal is to make sales.
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5 creative branding ideas for ecommerce businesses
- Design custom packaging
- Embrace brand storytelling
- Launch a co-branded product
- Stand for something
- Break the rules—carefully
Here are five creative branding ideas to help your brand stand out:
1. Design custom packaging
Imagine receiving five packages in the mail: four generic cardboard mailers and one canary yellow rectangular box printed with a life-size rainbow trout. Where does your eye go first? Inventive packaging provides an opportunity to convey your brand identity to consumers up close.
“A lot of brands think of marketing purely in the digital sense these days,” says Britt Martin, head of partnerships at the custom sustainable packing company Arka. “But the box and the packaging is really an opportunity to do that offline.” Packaging lets you make an impression from the moment your customer picks up their new product. “It’s your first physical touchpoint with a customer,” Britt says. “A lot of people think about what’s in the box as the [customer] journey, but a huge part of that journey is what’s on the box.”
Using custom shippers and mailers helps you create a more complete brand experience and stand out from competitors. Depending on your brand, you might use unique eco-friendly materials (like air-popped popcorn instead of styrofoam packing peanuts), bold colors, unusual package shapes, interactive labels, reusable packaging, or misleading packaging (like a jewelry box that resembles a cake).
2. Embrace brand storytelling
Your brand story is essentially the origin story of your business. Ideally, it connects back to your brand’s values, motivations, and guiding principles—all part of your company’s overall brand identity. Trinity Mouzon Wofford, CEO and co-founder of the Brooklyn-based health food and skin care business Golde, used social media to share her brand story in the early days of her company, which launched in 2017. She shared that she started her company with her partner and high school sweetheart to make health and wellness fun and accessible.
Golde’s brand story encouraged the company’s audience to form an emotional connection with the brand. “A lot of our customers really call out loving to work with Golde, not only because the product is excellent, but because they love the story behind the brand,” Trinity said. “They love that we are family-owned. They love that my co-founder is also my husband and that we’re people of color.” Years later, they continue to build on that brand story, keeping consumers informed of big professional—and personal—life updates.
This ultimately helped the business not only convert new customers but retain existing customers. “That’s a big reason why our most loyal customers keep coming back,” she added. “They love interacting with this brand and knowing that they’re putting their dollars somewhere that is meaningful to them.”
3. Launch a co-branded product
Co-branding is the strategy of allying with another business to produce an original product that showcases both company’s unique brand identities. It also helps you tap into your partner’s audience.
Consider the partnership between the tinned fish company Fishwife and Sichuan pantry goods retailer Fly By Jing. Together, the two brands created Smoked Salmon with Chili Crisp and Smoked Salmon with Sweet and Spicy Zhong. Since Fishwife was newly on the market at the time of the partnership’s start in 2021, the company benefited from an association with the more established Fly By Jing. “We saw increased credibility from being associated with this brand that had solidified its reputation a couple of years before we did,” says Becca Millstein, co-founder and CEO of Fishwife. She added that the partnership also helped her brand capture people’s attention. “It marked us as being particularly innovative in this previously stagnant category,” she said.
Look for co-branding opportunities that allow you to flex your creative muscles and build new products or services you may not feel equipped to do on your own. For example, a sportswear brand could partner with a lingerie brand to create functional yet stylish intimates.
4. Stand for something
Showing your support for a cause is a great way to express your brand values and make a big difference in your efforts to convert customers. According to one survey, 61% of global consumers said it was important that a brand’s core values aligned with their personal values. Embracing ethical practices and highlighting your commitment to a social or environmental cause can help you build brand loyalty. You can conduct market research or use consumer surveys to identify the issues that matter to your target demographic and showcase alignment with your brand’s ethos.
Consider ecommerce apparel retailer Toad&Co. Across its website, the company’s brand voice backs sustainability. The brand also supports actionable causes, like 1% For the Planet and the work of The Conservation Alliance, which supports grassroots conservation projects.
Beware, however, of coming across as inauthentic. Brand transparency can boost customer engagement and help you build trust, but attempting to capture attention with a cause that doesn’t align with your company’s core value system can dilute your brand’s identity—or even cause a backlash.
5. Break the rules—carefully
Creative branding requires innovation and that often means bending (or breaking) the rules of traditional branding and marketing. However, successful brands are careful about which rules they break. You can push back against the idea that videos should be short or that social media posts require images, for example—but don’t do anything that diverges from your brand guidelines or threatens the integrity of your brand identity.
“The most important aspect of branding as a whole is consistency,” says Lars of Stone Press. “Color palette, vibe, feeling, your principles, your values, your logos, the position of the company, the value prop, all of it—the only way that has any chance to truly have an impact is if it’s consistent.”
Lars cautions against changing your brand identity unless you’re committed to applying those changes across every asset you own. From a creative branding perspective, this means resisting any shift that conflicts with your brand identity. “Even if you have a perfect approach to your branding, even if it’s the best thing that’s ever been created, if it’s not consistent across everything that you’re doing and you don’t also have the opportunity to hit your market with it over and over and over again, it’s not going to matter,” Lars says.
Creative branding FAQ
What is a creative branding strategy?
A creative branding strategy uses innovative tactics to shape the company’s brand identity. Like a traditional branding strategy, a creative branding strategy develops a brand identity, which consists of visual elements (like the company’s logo and color palette) and non-visual elements (like its mission, voice, and unique value proposition).
What are the 4 Ps of branding tactics?
The four Ps are product, price, place, and promotion—also referred to as a marketing mix. An effective marketing mix relies on a strong brand identity, so focus on branding first and then assemble a marketing mix to communicate that brand.
How do you choose which creative branding strategies to use?
The best branding ideas for your company fit your budget and available resources and resonate with your target audience. You can conduct competitor research to identify the strategies that other brands use and rely on audience research to identify the needs of your target market.
