How do I decide on a brand for my business?

Developing a brand for your business involves two distinct areas: creating the physical attributes of your brand (the logo, company colours, a motto and tagline) and the values that your brand will represent.

Deciding on your brand attributes is as important as picking the right logo. Start by brainstorming some of the things you want your brand to stand for. Is it customer service, quality, innovation, price, or something else?

How do you want to deal with customers and suppliers? How do you want to be positioned in the market? Distilling this into a short list of core values should help you focus your business and market position, and should make developing your physical brand much easier.

As with choosing a name, deciding on a logo is not easy, but ensuring it is memorable and reflects the image you want to project is essential (for example, whether you want your brand to appear fun, serious or futuristic will have a big bearing on the text or design used in your logo).

It may be a good idea to bring a graphic designer in to help you turn your brand attributes into a logo; alternatively, crowdsourcing sites such as 99Designs and Design Crowd can help you tap into relatively low-cost design help in an online forum.