Know your Audience - How your target audience effects your brand identity

Aug 23, 2024

4 min read

Identifying Your Ideal Audience

Let's think about your business, service, or product. You've established who you are and what you provide; now we need to look at who it's for. You may think, "whoever wants to buy it." As much as that is valid, shouting a point into the unknown and hoping someone might pick it up may have less chance of being successful than talking to a niche group directly and asking if they're interested. Figuratively, of course.

So, who will this be? Is there a certain age that your product works best for? Is your service only for businesses? Has your business been picked up by social media and gained interest from the up-and-coming generation of consumers?

Getting to know your audience

Let’s take an example: you’re a gingerbread bakery. You started your business by selling your traditionally baked biscuits at your local Sunday market, and it’s gained lots of buzz from your local market-goers. This is the audience you want to speak to, and therefore your visual identity would show that you pride yourself in traditional baked goods. Or maybe it’s not traditional bakes that you pride yourself in; maybe you want to attract the online craze of ginger stem being the next key component to clean gut health. Your visual identity would completely change to communicate to the existing online personas that value clean, green, and social media-friendly products. Or maybe you’ve decided you want your product to appeal to kids only, as the perfect lunch snack. Again, your identity would change to appeal to kids that are used to watching Peppa Pig and Paw Patrol, both vibrant and character-led TV shows.

When we know who we are talking to and where we are placing our new service, business, or product, we have a clearer idea of how we are going to communicate this visually. This would be your brand identity (Brand identity: your logo, colors, symbolism, and more that create a visual fingerprint of who you are and what you are providing).

Different Audience, Different Brand Identity: An Example

If you are anything like me, I learn visually (which makes sense, being a designer), so to help explain this, I’ve created an example.

We've discussed our gingerbread company, so let's look at how the audience can influence the appearance of this brand identity. We'll call it "Diane's Gingerbread."

Let's see how Diane's gingerbread would appear different for each audience niche. I've chosen 3 different audience types as examples.

The Little Ones - a snack-size biscuit treat that is made for kids.
The Chronic Onliners - a high fibre biscuit that is created with nutrition in mind.
The Traditionalists - a fresh baked gingerbread that takes pride in local bakes, just like how it used to be!

The Impact of Audience on Logo Design

Let's begin with a logo. Even the choice of font for the logo can vary depending on the audience.

The Little Ones: Kids are used to seeing fonts that feel similar to the way they write themselves, carefree and youthful. For example, the font from Peppa Pig is not uniform, it's creative and playful and is wildly popular with the tiny tots.

The Onliners: This crowd sees a lot of variety with products, but for this particular niche, we’re looking at health and nutrition. We can look at the recent ‘clean girl aesthetic’ as an example (a trend that values simplicity and minimalism regarding health and beauty). This trend uses simple sans-serif fonts that look as clean as the aesthetic they are going for.

The Traditionalists: What’s more traditional than anything that looks relatively like Times New Roman, the classic newspaper font, a timeless energy that feels reliable and retro. For example, Romney's Kendal Mint Cake, a brand that has kept in tradition because the recipe has never changed, so why would the brand. And it works!

Understanding Audience in Brand Color and Assets

Next would be pulling in colour and assets.

The Little Ones: What appeals to kids more than characters? Alongside bright colors, just like Haribo or Rowntrees, you can see how this looks like the standard style you see in your local supermarket.

The Onliners: By being online, this audience knows the latest trends. Pastels and gradients are swooping in right now, so the combination creates a brand new clean style that this particular audience would be drawn to.

The traditionalists: Older styles and patterns can communicate the traditional style we are trying to convey to this audience. Personally, when I think of traditional gingerbread, I envision blue and white stripes, which may be inspired by my own memories of local market gingerbread!

Different Results Tailored to Different Audiences

You can see how different these brand identities come out when we have different audience niches, and that’s why I believe knowing who you will be talking to is important. Obviously, you can have 'everyone' as your audience, but having a target can really bring a personal feel and an immediate connection when a brand style mirrors exactly what they are looking for.