Branding is a broad topic. It seems like it should be simple, but honestly…I have realized that there are so many moving parts to it. When I first started my business, I knew I needed a “brand.” “Brand,” to me, meant a beautiful color palette and a cool logo. While that is definitely part of it, a brand is so, so much more than that.

Where I wish I had started with my branding was who I wanted to be as a business owner. These are the questions I wish I had answered:

1. Who do I want to be as a business owner?
2. How do I want to conduct business?
3. What are my morals that I want to stick to when things get hard in business?
4. When people think of doing business with me, what do I want them to think? How do I want them to feel?
5. As a photographer, how do I want my clients to feel on their wedding day when I photograph their wedding?

A brand is as much a feeling as it is colors and logos. But the answers to those questions can guide the color and logo selection (the technical parts of your brand). Using those answers will make your brand more sustainable for the long run. Take me as an example–my dark purple script font logo did not convey the type of brand that I wanted. It went through a couple more iterations to get to where it is today because I didn’t answer those introspective questions until two years or so into my business.

Ultimately, my conclusion is this: If a brand stays the same from the conception of a business throughout all the growing stages, it becomes stale and unauthentic. But it’s much easier to tweak a brand than to completely re-brand down the line. Therefore, it’s worth taking the time to determine who you want to be as a business owner and how you want to make your clients feel!