We like plants. Quite a lot. And if you've been to our office [or onto our Instagram feed], you'll have seen our growing obsession with greenery. The tricky part, though, is keeping the real ones alive. Just like our penchant for over-watering our orchids, we've recently been asked to help several businesses that are unintentionally self-sabotaging their marketing efforts by executing on the fly without giving too much thought to their brand roots.

Effective marketing is not just about having a good product, but a clear purpose, strong focus and a great brand identity. And if you don't define your brand's 'look and feel' from the get-go [and stick to it] you're running the risk of diluting your message, compromising the quality of your business and confusing your customers. Without brand consistency, there simply is no brand. And without overgrowing greenery, there is no Not Your Standard. Here are five things we think are testament to creating a strong, standout brand:

1. Brand Guidelines

Without brand guidelines, how do you ensure your marketing is 'on brand'? Having a style guide acts as your 'how-to' on all things related to your brand: from your logo and how to use it and what font or colour to use when [and with what] to your image style and supporting brand assets. When developing the Not Your Standard brand, we put together a comprehensive brand overview that gave our graphic designer a clear vision for the look and feel of our company from the outset. We did our homework and got clear on what we wanted to create and who we wanted to be before engaging a designer. We created mood boards that set out the tone of voice, style, feel and stance of our agency – and this 'brand bible' is still something we refer to for visual inspiration or realignment when we think we're veering away from our core position and purpose.

2. Composition

Whether your brand's style is full-bleed imagery, structural image boxes or organised chaos; your colour palette is loud or subtle; or your content is structured or free-flowing – the composition of your visual assets helps to deliver your brand message to your audience. Not Your Standard's visual identity is a playful and contemporary take on our company's locale – abstract images of turquoise blue water, white sandy beaches and the lush tropical vegetation of the Caribbean are mixed with sleek and styled layouts and sassy, sometimes witty, copy influenced by our time spent living and working in urban metropolises like New York and London. Rather than keeping things strictly business, we wanted to bring our brand to life by incorporating lifestyle elements, as well as touches of our personalities and interests, into our visual composite. Oh, and we're a sucker for white space too.

3. Imagery

By making conscious decisions about how your brand is visually represented, you'll have more control over how your customer thinks, feels and talks about you. Be consistent in your use of filters, tints, vibrancy, contrast, saturation etc. and create a visual style that makes your brand recognisable every single time. How you manipulate your images sets the mood for your brand and gives you your unique look and feel. As part of our brand ethos, we wanted [for the most part] to create original over curated content. And rather than looking to the obvious outlets for visual inspiration, we sought out interior design, architecture, fashion, beauty, food and wellness brands – all things that influence us in our every day – for stimulus and ideas. We then took our favourite elements from an image or infographic, and recreated it with our own brand twist and image style, as well as leveraging our tropical island base for the natural elements that form the roots of our identity.

4. Colour Palette and Typography

The power of colour and font is both emotional and practical. On an emotional level, it can affect how consumers feel when they look at your brand, while on a practical level it can help to increase brand recognition by up to 80%. Choose a colour palette that both matches your brand and how you want customers to feel about you. Consider a couple of different typefaces and use them consistently throughout all your materials. The font for headings should be the largest and expressive of your brand's persona while subtitle and body fonts should be easy to read. Helping to ensure Not Your Standard's branding remains consistent – our social media content, website, emails and documents all use the same colour tones and typefaces. We created Pinterest boards that showcased our core brand colours, then handed these over to an expert to help turn our dream colour wheel into pantone reality. We chose two typefaces and use them unfailingly – a larger bolder font that grabs attention in headings and infographics and a simple, modern font that is clean and easy to read in body text.

5. Brand Assets

Just like a brand can become synonymous with a particular colour, there are many other elements that can distinguish your business, including your logo, symbol, tagline, packaging etc. It's these distinctive brand elements that help to make your brand more recognisable while still allowing you to be flexible across campaigns and mediums. We wanted to ensure that we were creating unique brand elements. The broken square in our logo is incorporated into everything from infographic and business card designs to document templates and the type of brackets we use in written text [square brackets, if you hadn't noticed]. We developed long-form, short-form, horizontal and vertical versions of our logo so that we would have the flexibility to use the right logo, favicon or tagline for the right composition – and created five key branded hashtags that we use to categorise our social media and blog content.

How to Create a Consistent Look and Feel for Your Brand