Crafting a Purposeful Brand: Tips for Impact Driven Businesses

Emily Hill
September 11, 2023

Welcome to our series of themed blog posts where we unpick the often complex areas around starting or growing a business, and spotlight a few of the organisations and experts who offer guidance and support in these areas. This blog is focused on tips and strategies around building a purposeful brand, particularly if you’re just starting out in your business.

Special thanks to Yasha Estraikh, Associate Partner at Piper, for sharing his insight for the benefit of the Hatch community. You can access his on demand video sessions on branding at the end of this post.

"Very few brands are brand legends when they begin, but it's about putting in the fundamentals over a period of time that will create brands which consumers irrationally love."

Yasha

The Benefits of a Purposeful Brand

By cultivating a strong brand identity centred around your core mission and values, you can establish a meaningful connection with your target audience. This connection can foster trust and loyalty, setting you apart from competitors and attracting like-minded customers who align with your purpose.

A well-defined brand strategy also enables you to communicate your impact more effectively, magnifying your business’ social and environmental contributions.

We know that concepts like branding and brand strategy may be difficult to get your head around sometimes. To make these topics a little easier to address we have put together a quick outline to focus on specific areas to consider, especially if you’re DIY-ing your branding.

Step 1: Define your Why

“What is it that drives your brand across everything that you do? What is that emotional impact that you’re having in consumers lives?”

As Yasha explains, it’s important to clearly define your mission, values, and unique selling point (USP).

Define your why, and the reason your business exists. Understand the impact you want to create and how it aligns with the needs of your target audience. Identify what sets your business apart from competitors.

Your USP should communicate a clear and unique value proposition that addresses a specific problem or fulfills a particular need.

Yasha Estraikh, Branding Expert and Associate Partner at Piper

Step 2: Get to Know Your Audience

Conduct thorough research to understand your target audience’s needs, preferences, and pain points. This insight will help you tailor your brand messaging and offerings to resonate with them.

Step 3: Develop a Consistent Visual Identity

This visual identity should encompass your logo, brand colours, typography, and design elements. These visuals should align with your brand’s personality and convey your mission.

Step 4: Leverage Digital Platforms and Storytelling

“At the end of the day, storytelling is the way that we remember things.”

You can leverage these mediums to share your brand’s journey, connecting emotionally with your audience.

Develop a compelling narrative that communicates your journey, values, and the impact you’re striving to make. A well-told story can connect emotionally with your audience and will make your brand more relatable.

Lastly, utilise social media platforms to engage with your audience, share your brand story, and provide value through informative and relevant content.

Some brand examples that are doing this really well are: Who Gives a Crap, Lucy and Yak, Ocean Bottle, and Hatch grad Change Please.

Step 5: Collaborate

Partner with influencers, other businesses, or organisations that share your values. Collaborations can help expand your reach and introduce your brand to new audiences.

Consider engaging with brands in the same space as you via social media and collaborating on a blog post, a campaign, or an awareness day.

Step 6: Consider your Touchpoints

“Think about what is going to communicate your purpose, your story in the best possible way.”

There are so many different touchpoints your brand can have with your audience – some of these may not apply to your business and that’s ok. Equally, lots will without you realising it, so it’s worth brainstorming how you can infuse your brand voice in as many of these as possible, to build trust with your audience, and a strong brand.

Remember, building an impact-driven brand is a gradual process, but the value it brings in terms of recognition, customer loyalty, and positive change is well worth the effort.

Some Resources to Get Started

Perhaps you’re on a budget or you want to DIY some graphics for your social media? Whatever your reason, here is our list of free resources to get you going!

Free graphic resource

Remove.bg – Have you ever spent hours trying to cut out an image in photoshop? With this tool you will be able to cut an image out in under 5 minutes.

Remove.bg removes the background of an image for you, and it’s actually pretty good – we’ve tried on a whole host of images with most working great. You can download a png with a transparent background at a lower resolution for free – perfect for social media, or you can get a low cost subscription plan to download higher res images.

Free photo and video resources

Unsplash is our go-to free high resolution photo bank. All photos published on Unsplash are licensed under Creative Commons Zero which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash. How great is that?!

Pexels – Like Unsplash, Pexels is a free high resolution photo bank but with video too! All images are also licensed under Creative Commons Zero so you can do what you wish with them.

Coverr is a free resource for video content featuring a library of beautifully shot stock videos that are free to download for commercial and non-commercial use with no attribution required. It’s easy to browse and you can simply hover over the video to see a preview, now that’s easy browsing!

Nappy – We could all use a bit more diversity within our imagery and Nappy is helping close the gap on that. They provide beautiful, high-res photos of black and brown people to startups, brands, agencies, and everyone else. Nappy makes it easy for companies to be purposeful about representation in their designs, presentations, and advertisements.

Free font resources

Google Fonts – An open source directory of web fonts for businesses to use how they wish. All fonts are robust and created to the high standards you’d expect from Google. Top Tip: Aim to pick a font that has multiple styles (i.e, bold, italic, condensed etc) You can do this by filtering by ‘font styles’.

Font Squirrel – All fonts from Font Squirrel are free and licensed for commercial work. With hundreds of different typefaces from corporate to calligraphy you will find what you need. They also have a great tool on their website to match a font. If you find something you like and want a similar font you can upload an image and it will give you several fonts that are similar that you can download (some will cost money and some will be free).

DaFont – All fonts from DaFont are free ONLY for personal use (there is an option to pay for a license), however it’s a great resource to download free fonts to try before you buy. Browse by alphabetical listing, by style, by author or by popularity.

Free icon resources

The Noun Project brings together over two million curated icons, created by a global community and available for use for free.

Icon Monstr is a free icon library in which no attribution is required. You have the option to copy the embed code or you can download as an svg, eps, psd or png so no need to convert to the file type you want after download!